Riassunto esame inglese, libro consigliato "Cambridge Academic English B2"

Why should we prioritize?

Even if great progress has been made in our lifetime, there are still many problems to tackle. People who were born in developed countries have food, piped water, and education, but face issues such as drugs, conflicts, and corruption. In developing countries, there are still many serious problems to be solved.

International agencies have a huge list of spending possibilities and a limited pot of money. They have the problem of how to prioritize problems because it is difficult to compare costs and benefits of global welfare projects. Each organization operates independently and is not motivated to compare the effectiveness of their work. We live in a world with limited resources and limited attention for our biggest problems.

All global welfare projects should be worked on at the same time. Therefore, we need to face the problem of how to prioritize problems.

Tropical cyclones

Tropical cyclones are intense cyclonic storms that originate over tropical seas. In North America, they are called ‘hurricanes’. In Japan and Southeast Asia, the cyclones are called ‘typhoons’.

The dangers of tropical cyclones are: storm surge, wind, and rain effects. Storm surge is when water is piled up along the coastline. This provokes loss of life, crop destruction, and strong wind can create fire in urban areas and forests. Rainfall is responsible for loss of life, flood, and crop destruction, as well as landslides or mud. The destruction of crops and saline intrusion can also result in famine. This happens especially in the Indian subcontinent.

Earthquakes are often a consequence of cyclones. Pressure can vary dramatically in a few hours and can create an earthquake in areas where the Earth’s crust is already under strain. This happened in 1923 in the Tokyo area, when 143,000 people died because of a typhoon followed by an earthquake.

There is also evidence that tropical cyclones have caused earthquakes in other places along the western margin of the Pacific plate and in the Caribbean Sea.

Pictogram and ideogram

Cave drawings are not usually considered as a specific linguistic message. They are considered as pictorial art. When some pictures represent particular images, they can be considered as a form of pictograms. The picture may develop into a more symbolic form and can be used for something visible, but also invisible and it is called an ideogram.

The difference between a pictogram and an ideogram is that a pictogram has a picture-like form and an ideogram represents something more abstract. A characteristic of both pictograms and ideograms is that they do not represent words or sounds in a particular language and they can be understood in different places.

Originally there were a large number of symbols. We can note that either the Egyptian or the Chinese written symbols are more abstract. When symbols are used to represent words in a language, they are described as logograms.

International business

Culture at two levels

There are traditionally two different approaches to looking at culture:

• The psychic or psychological level which focuses on the attitudes, and behavior of individuals from a particular culture.
• The institutional level which looks at national culture, that is at institutions.