Riassunto esame Lingua inglese 3, Prof. Rossi Enrica, libro consigliato Business Partner C1, Bob Dignen

ACCERTAMENTO LINGUISTICO LINGUA INGLESE III

Reading unit 1- Science start-ups struggle to bridge the gender gap

This article discusses/talks about the current topic of the gender gap, in fact several science

start-ups are trying to fight against the lack of female entrepreneurs compared to men.

In order to do this, a course called "EnterpriseWISE" run by Cambridge Judge Business

School has been created, attended by women from all over the world working in fluid

mechanics, bioengineering and neuroscience. The course is designed to encourage female

scientists to start their own business.

The study program’s creator, Shima Barakat, says that about 30 percent of Cambridge

graduates in STEM subjects are women, but only 7 to 9 percent have started a business.

In the UK, men are still twice as likely as women to be entrepreneurs; in fact, the

percentage of self-employed women in STEM is only 14 percent. Innovative UK, a British

government agency that has looked into the role of women in science, established that

Britain’s economy loses out on £2bn a year through a dearth of female entrepreneurs. In

fact, it is more difficult for female scientists to access both workplace promotions and

funding opportunities as entrepreneurs than men, and as a result of these difficulties many

female entrepreneurs decide to drop out/quite/leave.

Chiraz Ennaceur, a mechanical engineer who attended EnterpriseWISE last year, left her

job as a programme manager and started her first business. She says that being a

mechanical engineer in the oil and gas industry, she has been in a male-dominated settings

for most of her life, although she has never experienced discrimination because of her

gender. But spending time in female-only setting made her view her day-to-day experience

in a different light.

In the end, the dearth of women in her field was one of the reasons why she left to start her

own business.

Reading Unit 2- Ikea furniture does not need to fall apart

This article talks about Ikea, the Swedish furniture retailer that adopt the ‘circular

economy’: the reuse and repurposing of products in different ways. Ikea discloses that it

wants to recycle more furniture, but it also plans a trial in Switzerland this year to lease

desks, chairs and perhaps kitchens, that are only manufacturing strong, long-lasting

products. So the customers might/can rent it for a while and then upgrade and the old

pieces are being refurbished for other users, instead of acquiring furniture cheaply and

later throwing it away. In fact, Ikea furniture, like fast fashion clothing made in China, has

been cheap enough to treat as a disposable rather than an heirloom.

Over the past few years, the velocity of consumption has steadily increased, because

companies such as Ikea make buying stuff easy (ex: sofas and televisions were once

household investments but can be bought cheap now).

This causes a lot of damage: according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, each person

takes/draws about 10 tonnes of raw materials from metals to biomass annually into the

economy to support consumption and production. So much of it will end up as waste, in

fact only 14% of plastic packaging is taken for recycling. Companies can do more to limit

consumption, in addition young consumers like to buy things but many of them pay

attention to sustainability, to the environment and want to avoid waste. For example,

companies should limit packaging that are made from complex plastic that ends up in

landfill or oceans and also containers should be refillable/reusable. These are things that

bought and disposed of rapidly and many are also used sparingly/moderately while the

owners have them.

Customers should learn to pay by usage rather than for objects themselves. Internet and

technology make it easier to rent things by individuals, for example to share occupancy of

cars and apartments through Uber and Airbnb. It also gives companies an incentive to

make things with better materials that would require fewer repairs.

The circular economy has also disadvantages like the “rebound effect”, in fact the easier it

is to use products, the more intensively this will happen, so some products will be over-

consumed. For example sharing cars can exacerbate congestion and pollution rather than

curbing/limiting it. But the reuse of goods has huge benefits compared with things sold

once, used for a time and then dumped.

At best, recycling involves breaking things into raw materials, so all the

investments/money and labour/work that went into their making and marketing are lost.

Reading Unit 3- The ‘Fire’ movement and the trouble with penny-pinching

This article talks about the so called ‘Fire’ movement, originated in the USA and its

followers are devoted to extreme forms of money saving to achieve ‘financial

independence’ and ‘retire early’. They budget like crazy and target savings of up to 70% of

their annual income, which they invest for the long term. Once their savings pot has hit the

desire level (like 30 years), they keep it invested in low-cost tracker funds,

withdrawing/picking up no more than 4% every year. They spent years subsisting/living on

next to nothing, so keeping a lid on day-to-day living costs is second nature.

The ‘fire’ movement is essentially rebranding retirement saving as an empowering lifestyle

choice. There are some problems: the first one is property. Most of the young people

struggle/try to save even 20% of their annual income because they spend more than 50%

of it on rent. Instead, those who still live with their parents prefer to use their pot as a

property deposit, rather than a retirement fund.

The second problem is having children because it involves a lot of spending/expenses, and

the longer-term worry is the maths. There are some catchy and optimistic concepts like the

‘4% rule’ but the global growth stutters and bold yield turn negative.

According to the writer’s opinion, everyone needs to get ‘fired up’ about spending less and

saving more to give themselves more options in the future, but saving 70% and retiring in

your 40s might not be achievable, while saving a bit harder and retiring in your 60s still

could.

Another issue is frugality; some of the ‘young retired’ stars of Fire videos on YouTube don’t

have a full-time job because they don’t have time to manage this lifestyle. The money-

saving tactics are often extremely time-consuming: walking everywhere, making/sewing

their own clothes and they are boiling up pots of low-cost pulses.

The perfect thing to do is to save money as you can, but examining your own spending data

that shows exactly where you sacrifice money saving to buy greater convenience (ex.

paying someone to clean your flat, having online groceries delivered, etc). So the time that

this saves you makes it worth the money.

Consumer habits are increasingly influenced by the cost of our planet, in fact today thrifty

is considered fashionable.

Another related YouTube tribe are the minimalists, to whom clutter in anathema; there are

also videos about great money and planet-saving by vlogger Biesalski. Fast fashion is

number 1 on the ‘no shopping list’ and then there are physical gift because she prefers to

gift shared experiences.

Policymakers and financial providers could learn from the Fire environment’s appeal to

make saving into pensions and Isas attractive by keeping simple rules, speed up initiatives

(ex: pensions dashboard) that will better enable savers to plan for the fu and think of

fast/snappier ways to spread the savings message.

Reading Unit 4- Walkmans and world firsts: Japan’s gadget hall of fame

This article talks about a list of Japan’s Essential Historical Materials for Science and

Technology, it consists of a roster of the best Japanese gadgets (hall of fame/for the

contraptions that really count). The coveted places are assigned/awarded at the rate of

about 20 per year, by experts at Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science. There

are several categories of qualification and to make it on the list, a Japanese gadget (or

medicine or industrial advance) must have played a notable role in improving people’s way

of life or creating new ways of life. It must represent a pivotal/crucial moment in Japanese

scientific or technological development from an international perspective and also in the

relationship between society and tech.

There are 285 positions since the hall of fame opened in 2008, that are inventions from the

start of Japan’s great modernisation. The Casio G-Shock watch entered this year, and it

qualifies for a place in the history books for its ‘astounding shock resistance’.

Some inventions are the cement-grinding mill that transformed an era when ‘tech’ was

something measured in tonnes, and the PCM processor that made home video possible.

The Sony Walkman belongs as a ‘changing the way we live’ contender and inspired the

song ‘Wired for Sound’.

The list is worthy of perusal, you can read it as a defined history of the past 150 years of

Japanese technology and a reminder of how Japanese technology prizes hardware over

software.

There are numerous world firsts separated by decades and each of these have inspired to

ask questions about what was being used before the discovery of a specific innovation.

Furthermore, the list raises a question, which is whether it is ever possible to precisely

measure and compare the impact of two completely different technologies. In fact, it

appears to be compiled using scientific standards but remains a subjective, impressionistic

painting of progress. So, in the future the list will provide a means to quantify the effect of

technology on humanity.

Reading Unit 5- Asian investors begin to bet on bugs as the future of food

This article talks about an emerging group of Asian venture capitalist that are exploring

whether insects and lab-grown meat can help meet Asia’s growing appetite for food.

Shanghai-based accelerator Bits x Bites has extended the search for sustainable food to

silkworms and last year it invested in a local start-up that is developing insect-based

snacks (Bugsolutely). Bugsolutely noted that the waste of worms was rich in protein,

vitamins and minerals, so the company decided to infuse snacks with silkworms powder in

popular flavour like vinegar and salt. The managing director of the company says that

younger generation doesn’t want to see insect pieces but since no one can taste the insect

flavours it’s easy for people to adapt to it.

Bits x Bites was launched in 2016 as China’s first accelerator specialising in the food

technology sector and it normally provides no more than $500,000 in seed funding to

promising ventures in exchange for minority stakes.

Asia’s population continues to expand, so there is the challenge in meeting its dietary

requirements. China has already overtaken the USA in the number of obese people, and it

has als