Riassunto esame inglese, docente Carlini, libro consigliato Food for thought, James Rock

Food for thought: Unit 1 – Fashion, design & art

Would you rather go naked? Not any longer

In London, a few hundred protesters took to the streets with homemade banners and loudspeakers. The crowd marched towards several top clothing stores (Armani, Fendi, Gucci). These people were members of the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade.

When they reached Harrods, which stocks real fur, they started to chant and jeer; a woman, who carried a banner that read “The Devil Wears Fur”, best expressed their feelings.

Six months before this protest, the catwalks of New York, London, and Milan fashion weeks were filled with animal skins; Naomi Campbell, who in 1994 appeared in an advertisement for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) claiming “she would rather go naked than wear fur”, now fronts a campaign for the luxury furrier Dennis Basso.

The look of fur has become increasingly sought after; fur has never been more popular. There has been year-on-year growth in global sales for fur and part of that has its core in the rise of hip-hop culture and in the fact that young designers are featuring fur in their collections.

Britain seems to have gone from a nation that equates fur with animal cruelty to one that views it merely as an occasional fashion statement. Once celebrities were wary of walking out dressed in fur for fear of being covered in red paint by animal rights activists, now there seems to be no such stigma.

All supermodels have chosen to promote or wear real fur, despite their precedent declarations against it. The fur trade invites designers on paid trips providing them with free samples of fur; they insist that it is natural, renewable, biodegradable, and energy efficient in comparison to the synthetic versions.

The president of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, insists that the fight will go on.

When is a chair not a chair?

Salone del Mobile, the Milan Furniture Fair, is the biggest event in the design calendar, which sees hundreds of thousands of visitors descend on the city to buy and sell furniture. The fair is the busiest week in Milan’s year, when hotels can charge triple rates and still be turning people away.

One development in 2010 was the emergence of a new design district in Lambrate, where there were shows by venerable design schools; the work was all by designer-makers.

People sometimes ask if we really need any more chairs, we did not need any more chairs when Gio Ponti created the featherweight Superleggera in 1955. However, a chair is a cultural artefact, a constantly evolving shape of our collective mind and technical art. In the vast exhibition halls in Rho, you can see thousands upon thousands of new chairs and sofas jostle for attention.

Maybe the Chilean architect Aravena had this in mind when he designed his new chair, Chairless. It is as the irreducible limit of what a chair can be, the moment when the noun “chair” becomes the verb “to sit”.

Unit 2 – Science and technology

Is Stephen Hawking right about aliens?

Stephen Hawking thinks that making contact with aliens would not be a good idea. He says that humans would be better off doing everything they can to avoid interstellar contact. Hawking believes that we are not the only life in the universe; however, he advises against contact.

Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, an organization which searches for alien signals, says that what Hawking said was the result of fear. He adds that if aliens are interested in our planet, they could find us even without our broadcasts; they could have found us years ago.

Shostak says that if we were worried about aliens, we would shut down the BBC, NBC, and the radars at all airports. Those broadcasts have been streaming into space for years, so it is already too late to stop it.

Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, argues that alien brains would interpret information very differently from ours. Aliens are alien; if they exist at all, we cannot assume they are like us.

Mobile phones have transformed the way we communicate

On New Year's Day of 1985, Michael Harrison made the first-ever mobile phone call in the UK. Mobile phones were hardly portable, weighing almost a kilogram, costing several thousand pounds, and provided little more than 20 minutes of talk time. Vodafone had just a dozen masts covering the London area, Cellnet launched with a single one.

No one company had any idea of the huge potential of wireless communication and the dramatic impact mobile phones would have on society over the next quarter century. In the first year, Vodafone sold a million phones and captured about 35% of the market; the hand-portable Motorola was about £3,000, but most of the phones they sold were for cars (Panasonic and Nokia).

Hardly anyone believed there would come a day when mobile phones were so popular that there would be more phones in the UK than there are people.

The boom was a consequence of increased competition, which pushed lower prices and created innovations in the way that mobiles were sold, which helped to put them within the reach of the mass market and the move to digital technology.

In 1986, Vodafone was annoyed, and the way mobile phones were sold in the UK was changed; in fact, financing of handsets started, bringing down prices of mobiles, hoping to recoup its cost over the lifetime of a customer's contract. Rates based on the actual cost of the call were also changed, and local rates were introduced. When the government introduced more competition, companies started cutting prices to attract more customers.

Also, the way that handsets were marketed was changing, and it was Nokia, which had been fighting hard with Motorola and Ericsson for market dominance, that made the leap from phones as technology to phones as fashion items with the Nokia 3210 device.

In the late 1990s, Nokia realized that the mobile phone was a fashion item: so it introduced covers allowing you to customize and personalize your handset. The mobile industry has spent the later part of the past decade trying to persuade users to do more with their phones than just call and text, culminating in the fight between the iPhones and a succession of touchscreen rivals.

Unit 3 - Some cultural insights

Amish love stories are bestsellers in America

The Amish have been called bonnet-rippers and the sex is generally left to the reader's imagination. However, a new brand of romantic fiction set in America's Amish communities is proving one of the most surprising success stories in publishing. A group of authors have been quietly ranking up sales exploring the romantic relations of the Amish. At first, the Amish seem an unlikely inspiration for novels of lust and forbidden love.

Concentrated in Pennsylvania, the Amish live quiet lives in small farming communities. They avoid modern technology, often speak an old-fashioned form of German, have strong religious faith, and usually drive horse-drawn buggies. The Amish are holding on to a way of life that other Americans have let go of; with no televisions or computers, most Amish families have always kept alive a tradition of oral storytelling.

Drama revolves around comings and goings at church dances, teenagers testing the limits of Amish dress code, behavior, or flirting with outsiders. Many Americans see the Amish as sort of idealized group, living a life free from the stresses of the modern world. The portrayals of sex and violence and the emphasis on faith and traditional family values are all strong selling points for many religious Americans.

Another attraction is the otherness of the Amish, who remain fundamentally apart from mainstream America. Their interactions with the outside world are often guarded, and there is a conscious refusal.

Ireland

Ireland is a European country situated to the west of Great Britain. On the island, there is another country, Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, while the Republic of Ireland has been independent since the 1920s. The population is 4.3 million; the main religion is Catholicism and the main language is English. However, there is another language, Gaelic, which used to be spoken before English arrived but is still spoken in some areas of Ireland.

Many aspects of Irish culture are well known around the world, mainly due to the poverty that led many Irish people to emigrate during the 19th and 20th centuries. There has been a change in the economic situation in the last 30 years: now the country is one of the richest in Europe and for the first time in its history, there are many immigrants arriving in search of work.

The colour green is a national symbol: the Irish countryside is known for being very green due to the wet weather and green is also present on the national flag. The most popular sports are football, rugby, and golf, and two very traditional sports: hurling (a sort of hockey) and Gaelic football (a mixture of football and rugby).

Irish people are sociable and talkative; Irish pubs are loud and friendly and the dark beer Guinness is always served there. Ireland's national day, Saint Patrick's Day, is on March 17th and it has become an international event. Perhaps the most colourful Saint Patrick's Day celebration takes place in Chicago (USA).

Unit 4 – Business news

CNBC

CNBC, the Consumer News and Business Channel is... Content truncated for brevity.