Luyện đọc Tiếng Anh-Improve your pronunciation in English-Part 3

When you start university, you'll probably find it's not all that easy to balance the time you spend on studying with the time you spend going out with your friends. In fact, one of the biggest problems you'll have is managing your time. Of course, it's perfectly understandable. I mean, in many cases, it's probably the first time you'll have lived away from home, so you'll have to do lots more things for yourself like buying your own food, washing your clothes and managing your own money. At the same time, there's no one there to tell you what time to come home at night or what time to get up in the morning. On top of that, at university, you won't have as many hours of class as you did at school, and your tutors will expect you to study on your own a lot more. So, you might feel you've got a lot of free time on your hands, so how do you deal with it? Well, to be honest, I don't think there's an easy answer, but I think it helps to go to all your classes, however tired you are. Print a copy of your timetable and put it on the wall in your bedroom. Actually, your university might even have a system for alerting you on your mobile when your lectures are. Apart from that, you could try not going out during the week and keeping your social life for the weekend. I'm not sure that's very easy though. One thing I will say though is that at the end of the year, after your exams, you can really relax. I started this new job a couple of weeks ago, and I'm having a lot of trouble with my work-life balance. In my last job, we had fixed hours. We had to be at the office at nine on the dot, and we always finished at exactly five. Any work we hadn't finished, we could just leave for the next day. But this new job's very different. I mean, in this job, we can come into the office any time between eight and ten in the morning. Then, we can choose whether to have a lunch break or not. Then, it gets a bit complicated. If we have a lunch break, we can leave between four and six. If we don't have a lunch break, we can go home between three and five. Okay, well at first this system sounded really good, especially for me because I have young children. But the problem is that if we haven't finished our work, we have to finish it off at home. So it's actually very difficult to draw the line between work and home. For example, on Mondays, I can leave the children at school, go to the gym and get into the office quite late. But I can't take a lunch break because I need to leave early to pick the children up from school. They come out of four. Then, I have to work from home in the evening to finish what I have to do. If you look at this chart, you can see how we plan our projects. This one is a survey we're working on this year about where people like to shop. Okay. Well, we always start by having a team meeting. That's in the first column called Tasks. So, in this team meeting, we decide what we need to do, who's going to do it and when it's got to be ready, right? So, you can see here in the second column, we've got the start date of the project. That's the 23rd of January. That's the same day we have the team meeting. If you look down the Tasks column, you can see that the first thing we have to do is write a draft questionnaire, you know, like an outline of the questions we want to ask. Then, we have to check the questionnaire to make sure the questions are right. If you look at the lines in column three, you can see the dates when we have to complete important tasks in the project. These are what we call milestones in the project. For example, when we've checked the questionnaire on the 25th of April, we'll have reached a milestone and when we've completed the survey on the 30th of June, we'll have reached another milestone. On the 15th of August, when we finish entering the data on the database, we'll have finished the first phase of the project. The second phase of the project involves writing the report. We'll be doing that between the 15th of August and the 15th of September and that's the deadline for the project to be handed to the client. In our company, we believe that our employees are more productive, you know, they work better if they're happy. Naturally, we have to make sure the company makes a profit, but at the same time, we need to think about the physical and mental health of our employees. We do understand that they aren't just working machines, so we have a policy of helping them find a fair balance between their work and their private lives, what we call a work-life balance. We do this in several ways. Firstly, we have a family-friendly policy, so parents can look after their children when they're very young. For example, sometimes they need to work flexible hours, you know, times that aren't fixed. Other times, parents have to work part-time and quite a lot work from home. Another example of our family-friendly policy is our generous maternity leave package. In our company, we allow women who've had a baby to take a whole year off work after the baby's born, and of course, while they're away, their jobs are protected. Because we want our employees to be happy, we carried out a survey recently to find out which working patterns are really most popular. In general, our staff prefer to work at the office. In fact, nearly half come in during regular office hours, you know, from nine to five. Anyway, we also asked about part-time work, working from home, and another option, job sharing. Job sharing is a kind of part-time work where two people share the responsibilities for one full-time job. Anyway, we found that only 5% of our staff wanted to share a job, so it's not very popular on the whole. But when it comes to working part-time, we were surprised to find that 27% of our employees would actually prefer it. That's a very high number really, over a quarter of the staff. And then it was interesting to see that quite a lot of our staff, 20% in fact, would like to work from home. I'd like to give you an example of the kind of person who benefits most from our family-friendly policy. Sally is one of our assistants in accounting, who has two small children. Sally's husband travels abroad a lot, so she has to look after the children on her own most of the time. Both the children go to a nursery early in the morning, so we've agreed that Sally can come in at eight o'clock after she leaves the children. At lunchtime, Sally's sister picks the children up from the nursery, but she has to go to work herself at three o'clock, so Sally leaves the office at two to collect the children from her sisters. And she makes up the extra time by finishing her work at home. I'm going to start this lecture by describing the structure of an offshore oil rig. Well, to be accurate, we should call it an oil platform. If you look at the diagram, you can see the top part of the platform floating on the surface of the water. The tall tower in the centre of the platform is called a derrick. That's D-E-R-R-I-C-K. The derrick is where the drilling machinery and lifting equipment is installed. OK? Now, if you look about halfway down the diagram on the right, you can see a helicopter. It's parked on the helicopter pad. Helicopters are used mostly to transport employees to and from the platform when they have free time. Now, if you look underneath that, at the very bottom of the platform, you can see one of the four support towers. These support the rest of the platform. These metal structures are usually attached to the seabed by long cables. Right, now the last part of the platform I'm going to describe is on the other side, just above the level of the water. It's a crane. That's spelt C-R-A-N-E. Cranes are used everywhere in construction, but this one is specialist equipment for lifting heavy spare parts at sea. In fact, apart from the derrick, you can see three cranes in the diagram. Some experts believe that if we knew how to control the power of the sea, we could generate enough electricity for the whole world. But, in this talk, I'm going to focus on the UK and our capacity for generating electricity from wave and tidal energy. I'm going to look at how many megawatts we generated before 2008 and how many we expect to produce in 2014. So, if you'd like to look at the chart, you'll see that before 2008, our capacity was only one megawatt. But in 2008, when oil prices rose, there was an increased interest in marine power, and our capacity grew quite dramatically to four megawatts. Ah, now, you might have expected this figure to rise consistently over the years, but, in fact, it dropped again in 2009 to only two megawatts. This was because oil prices fell again, so there was less interest in developing alternative power sources. But, nowadays, the cost of oil production is going up again, and there's been a renewed interest in marine power. As a consequence, capacity has increased steadily since 2009, reaching 18 megawatts in 2012. This trend is expected to continue in the near future, reaching a total capacity of 50 megawatts in 2013 and 60 megawatts in 2014. Good evening. My talk this evening will cover three main themes. First, I'll outline a timeline of how deep-sea exploration vessels developed. Secondly, I'll describe the most recent of these, the Deep Sea Challenger. And, finally, I'll look at some of the benefits of this deep-sea research. OK, to start with, let's look at how underwater exploration vehicles have developed over the years. The first manned deep-sea exploration vessel was invented in the 1920s. It was called a bathysphere, better known as a diving bell. It was basically a round metal structure with windows with just enough room for two men to sit in, and it was lowered into the ocean on a cable. The first descent in the diving bell took place in 1930, and in 1934 it went down to a depth of nearly 1,000 metres, which was impressive for the time. The problem with the diving bell was that it had no power of its own, and there wasn't much room for the researchers to move around. So, the next development after the diving bell was the bathyscaphe, a small manned submarine invented in the 1940s. The difference between the two was that the bathyscaphe had its own power source, which allowed the scientists to investigate in the depths of the ocean more freely. A bathyscaphe called the Trieste reached a record depth of 10,000 metres in 1960. Since then, a new record has been set by James Cameron, who descended to a depth of 11,000 metres for the first time in 2012. So, let's move on now to look at the submarine that took James Cameron so far down into the ocean. If you look at the drawing of the Challenger, you can see the pilot's chamber at the very bottom of the submarine. It's a very small section where the pilot sits and controls the sub and all the equipment on it. Now let's have a look at how the submarine is powered. Going up from the pilot's chamber in the middle of the sub, on the right-hand side of the drawing, you can see a whole section covered in batteries. They provide the power source that takes the sub all the way to the bottom of the ocean and back up to the surface again. Next to that, there's another important part of the sub. You probably realise that there's no light at the bottom of the ocean, so the sub needs to take its own. If you look at the back of the sub, in the middle, just next to the batteries, you can see the panel of lights. They provide the light for filming and taking samples from the seabed. And one more part of the sub, which is important for navigation and to stop it spinning out of control, is the large fin at the back. You can see it at the back of the sub, at the top of the drawing. Okay, to conclude my talk, I'm going to ask a couple of questions. First, what is the purpose of this deep-sea exploration? And second, is it worth the expense? I think one of the justifications for spending so much money on this kind of research is that it allows scientists to understand more about the surface of the earth. For example, how it was formed and how it behaves. This could have important consequences for predicting earthquakes and saving lives through early warning systems. Another reason this type of research is considered valuable is that by exploring unknown parts of the ocean, we increase our knowledge of the availability of minerals for industry. And obviously, this could lead to huge commercial advantages. So, the answer is yes. In the long run, this kind of exploration can benefit both the ordinary population and industry.