Tapescript
Section I
Man: Hello ‘Para glider’s Paradise. How can I help you?
Maria: Oh hi. I’m interested in doing a course in paragliding.
Man: Which course are you interested in?
Maria: Well, I’m not sure. What’s available?
Man: Well…we’ve got the introductory course which lasts for two days.
Maria: OK.
Man: Or there’s the 4-day beginners’ course which is what most people do first. I’d tend to recommend that one. And there’s also the elementary pilot course in which takes five to six days depending on conditions.
Maria: We might try the beginner’s course. What sort of prices are we looking at?
Man: The introductory is $190, the beginner’s course, which is what you’d probably be looking at, is $320 – no, sorry 330 – it’s just gone up – and the pilot course is $430.
Maria: Right.
Man: And you also have to become a member of our club so that you’re insured. That’ll cost you $12 a day. Everyone has to take out insurance, you see.
Maria: Does that cover me if I break a leg?
Man: No, I’m afraid not – it’s only 3rd party and covers you against damage to other people or their belongings, but not theft or injury. You would need to take out your own personal accident insurance.
Maria: I see! And what’s the best way to get to your place? By public transport or could we come by bike? We’re pretty keen cyclists.
Man: It’s difficult by public transport although there is a bus from Newcastle; most people get here by car, though, ‘cos we’re a little off the beaten track. But you could ride here OK. I’ll send you a map. Just let me take down a few details. What’s your name?
Maria: Maria Gentle.
Man: And your address, Maria?
Maria: Well, I’m a student staying with a family in Newcastle.
Man: So it’s care of…
Maria: Care of Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald.
Man: Like the hamburgers!
Maria: Yes, exactly.
Man: McDonald…
Maria: The post office box address is probably best. It’s PO Box 676, Newcastle.
Man: Is there a fax number there, because I could fax you the information?
Maria: Yes, actually, there is. It’s 0249 that’s for Newcastle and then double seven five four three one.
Man: OK, now if you decide to do one of our courses, you’ll need to book in advance and to pay when you book. How would you be paying?
Maria: By credit card, if that’s OK. Do you take Visa?
Man: Yes, fine. We take all major cards, including Visa.
Maria: OK then. Thanks very much.
Maria: Hi, Pauline.
Pauline: Hi, Maria! What’s that you’re reading?
Maria: Just some information from a paragliding school it looks really good fun. Do you fancy a go at paragliding?
Pauline: Sure! Do you have to buy lots of equipment and stuff?
Maria: Not really. The school provides the equipment but we’d have to take a few things along.
Pauline: Such as?
Maria: Well it says here. Clothes: wear stout boots, so no sneakers or sandals I suppose, and clothes suitable for an active day in the hills, preferably a long-sleeved t-shirt. That’s probably in case you land in the stinging nettles! It also says we should bring a packed lunch. We do not recommend soft drinks or flasks of coffee. Water is really the best thing to drink. We’d also need to bring suntan lotion and something to protect your head from the sun!
Pauline: OK that sounds reasonable. And where would we stay?
Maria: Well look! They seem to operate a campsite too, because it says here that it’s only $10 a day to pitch a tent. That’d be fine, wouldn’t it? And that way we’d save quite a bit because even a cheap hotel would cost money.
Pauline: Um … or perhaps we could stay in a bed-and-breakfast nearby. It gives a couple of names here we could ring. I think I might prefer that. Hotels and youth hostels would all be miles away from the farm and I don’t fancy a caravan.
Maria: No, I agree. But let’s take a tent and pray for good weather.
Pauline: OK – let’s do it. What about next weekend?
Maria: No, I can’t – I’m going on a geography field trip.
Pauline: … and then it’s the weekend before the exams and I really need to study.
Maria: OK, then. Let’s make it the one after the exams.
Pauline: Fine – we’ll need a break by then. Can you ring and…
Announcer: The Goodwood Museum is currently celebrating some of the most extravagant types of car design in its festival of speed. Here’s our reporter Vincent Freed, who’s on site, to tell us about some of the cars on display.
Reporter: Well, here I am, standing in front of one of the most prestigious cars ever built, the Duesenberg, a fantastically expensive, luxurious car built in the early part of the 20th century and bearing all the glamorous qualities of the jazz age. How many were there? Well, only 473 Duesenberg J-types were ever built and the model here is one of the rarest. Each had a short 125-inch chassis or framework and the body was always in the form of an open two-seater. The technology behind the car’s 6.9-litre engine was extraordinary. It featured capsules of mercury in the engines to absorb vibration and provide an incredibly smooth ride. In fact, these cars offered unparalleled performance… in an age when 160 kilometres per hour was considered very fast, the Duesenberg promised a top speed of 180 kilometres per hour and could do 140 kilometres per hour in second gear.
Duesenberg, who designed the car, sold it as a frame and engine… this was typical of the age again and many prestige manufacturers such as Rolls-Royce did exactly the same. Owners able to afford the hefty $9,000 price tag for the basic car would then commission a coachwork company to build a body tailored to their own individual requirements.
The Duesenberg’s great attraction for the driver, was its instrument panel which offered all the usual features but also several others including a stop-watch. It was the Duesenberg’s technology that lay behind its success as a racing car and they dominated the American racing scene in the 1920s winning the Indianapolis Grand Prix in 1924, ’25 and ’27.
On to another celebrity, the 1922 Leyat Helica. Only 30 of these French propellor cars were built and the model here at Goodwood, which was the fourth to be made, is thought to be the only surviving example still capable of running. The brains behind this car was Marcel Leyat who was an aviation pioneer first and foremost, and the influence of flying is quite apparent in the car. The Leyat very strongly resembles a light aircraft with its front propeller but in this case it’s minus any wings of course! It’s quite odd to think that this car was shirring through France, just as the Duesenberg was blasting down roads at 160 kilometres per hour across the Atlantic. The Leyats were used regularly in France in the 1920s and were even produced in saloon and van form, as well as two-seater. The Leyat matched its propeller drive with its equally bizarre steering which used the rear rather than the front wheels! But despite looking rather frail, it was a tough machine. In fact, when troops tried to steal it during the Second World War, the car’s baffling design was clearly beyond the would-be thieves and it ended up being driven into a tree, breaking the propellor. And now for the Firebird…
Interviewer: Alison Sharp has spent much of her life researching bears and in particular bears in danger of extinction. She is the author of a recent book on bears and we welcome her to the studio today.
Alison: Thank you. Delighted to be here
Interviewer: First of all, can you give us a quick overview of the history of the bear family?
Alison: Well, the bears we know today actually have as their ancestors bears which have been evolving for some 40 million years. We have fossils of the earliest ‘true bear’ and it’s important to emphasise this because some creatures are called bears bat are not…
Interviewer: …suck as koalas for instance.
Alison: yes exactly… fossils of the true bear show a small dog – size animal with characteristics that show a blending of dog and bear traits.
Interviewer: So the general belief is that dogs and bears were of the same family?
Alison: Yes, that’s the theory. And then we see the arrival of the early Cave Bear. We know from cave drawings that Neanderthal man used to worship this bear and at the same time fear it.
Interviewer: Understandable perhaps …
Alison: Yes, but they need not have worried because the Cave Bear only ate plants. In fact the Cave Bear survived two Ice Ages but then became extinct.
Interviewer: So how many bears can we find today and are any of them in danger of extinction?
Alison: Well I’ll answer your first question first. There are eight pieces of bear in all; among them the American Black Bear and the Brown Bear – from which evolved the newest species of bear – the Polar Bear.
Interviewer: So how old is the Polar Bear?
Alison: Oh, he’s a relative newcomer – just 20,000 years old.
Interviewer: And could you tell us a little about them? Which is the largest bear, for instance?
Alison: Well, the largest bear exiting today is either the Polar Bear or the Brown Bear
Interviewer: Right … Don’t we know?
Alison: Well, it depends which criteria you use. The Polar Bear is the heaviest, the male weighs up to 1,500 pounds but his narrow body actually makes him look smaller than the much more robust Brown Bear
Interviewer: So the Brown Bear appears the biggest.
Alison: Yes.
Interviewer: And the smallest?
Alison: Well, the Sun Bear is the smallest of the eight species. They only weight 60 and 145 pounds
Interviewer: That makes him a comparative junior!
Alison: Yes. And then next we have the so–called Giant Panda … but that’s a small bear too, comparatively speaking.
Interviewer: And are all bears meat eaters?
Alison: No, not at all. In fact the Giant Panda is almost entirely herbivorous living on a diet of 30 types of bamboo.
Interviewer: Oh, yes of course. Panda’s are famous for that.
Alison: And another interesting bear is the Sloth Bear which eats insects, particularly termites. He can turn his month into a tube and suck the insects out of their nests.
Interviewer: So going back to my second question … Are bears really danger of extinction?
Alison: Yes indeed … they are … the Sun Bear in particular as they’ve been hunted almost out of existence. And the habitat of the Panda it also being reduced on a daily basis.
Interviewer: Can anything be done to reduce the threat to these the endangered species? I know for instance that it’s very hard to breed bears in captivity.
Alison: Yes, well … I think that by raising people’s awareness generally we can reduce conflict between humans and animals … to stop the slaughter in parts of the world where bears are still hunted – supposedly in self-defense or to protect livestock, but … often quite unnecessarily. And we can also encourage governments to preserve the natural environment of the bear rather than allow the areas where they live to be systematically destroyed in the name of progress.
Interviewer: Yes, of course.
Alison: And in addition to these global efforts, all profits from the sale of my book will go towards the United Nations Bear Protection program.
Interviewer: That’s wonderful … and with the news coming up, thank you for your time, Alison, and best of luck with the book
Alison: Thanks you very much.
Lecturer: In the last lecture, we looked at the adverse effects of
desert dust on global climate. Today we’re going to examine more closely what
causes dust storms and what other effects they can have. As you know, dust
storms have always been a feature of desert climates, but what we want to focus
on today is the extent to which human activity is causing them. And it
is this trend that I want to look at, because it has wide-raging implications.
So – what are these human
activities? Well, there are two main types that affect the wind erosion
process, and thus the frequency of dust storms. There are activities that break
up naturally wind-resistant surfaces such as off-road vehicle use and
construction and there are those that remove protective vegetation cover from
soils, for example, mainly farming and drainage. In many cases the two
effects occur simultaneously which adds to the problem.
Let’s look at some real examples
and see what I’m talking about. Perhaps the best-known example of agricultural
impact on desert dust is the creation of the USA’s ‘dust bowl’ in the 1930s.
The dramatic rise in the number of dust storms during the latter part of that
decade was the result of farmers mismanaging their land. In fact, choking dust
storms became so commonplace that the decade became known as the ‘Dirty
Thirties’.
Researchers observed a similar,
but more prolonged, increase in dustiness in West Africa between the 1960s and
the 1980s when the frequency of the storms rose to 80 a year and the dust was
so thick that visibility was reduced to 1,000 meters. This was a hazard to
pilots and road users. In places like Arizona, the most dangerous dust
clouds are those generated by dry thunderstorms. Here, this type of storm
is so common that the problem inspired officials to develop an alert system to
warn people of oncoming thunderstorms. When this dust is deposited it causes
all sorts of problems for machine operators. It can penetrate the smallest
nooks and crannies and play havoc with the way things operate because most of
the dust is made up of quartz which is very hard.
Another example – the
concentration of dust originating from the Sahara has risen steadily since the
mid-1960s. This increase in wind erosion has coincided with a prolonged
drought, which has gripped the Sahara’s southern fringe. Drought is
commonly associated with an increase in dust-raising activity but it’s actually
caused by low rainfall which results in vegetation dying off.
One of the foremost examples of
modern human-induced environmental degradation is the drying up of the Aral Sea
in Central Asia. Its ecological demise dates from the 1950s when intensive
irrigation began in the then Central Asian republics of the USSR. This
produced a dramatic decline in the volume of water entering the sea from its
two major tributaries. In 1960, the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest lake in the
world, but since that time it has lost two-thirds of its volume, its
surface area has halved and its water level has dropped by more than 216
metres. A knock-on effect of this ecological disaster has been the release of
significant new sources of wind-blown material, as the water level has dropped.
And the problems don’t stop there.
The salinity of the lake has increased so that it is now virtually the same
as sea water. This means that the material that is blown from the dry bed
of the Aral Sea is highly saline. Scientists believe it is adversely affecting
crops around the sea because salts are toxic to plants.
This shows that dust storms have numerous consequences beyond their effects on climate, both for the workings of environmental systems and for people living in dry lands…