(Higher level-Advanced) The World's Fastest Talking Woman

Fran Capo is the fastest talking woman in the world. She can speak at 11 words per second.

Watch:

The World's Fastest Talking Woman

Guiding questions:

What is a lexicon compressor? What does it do that a tape recorder can’t?

What makes a record attempt “null and void”?

What are Fran’s different jobs?

How does she look at life?

Where is Fran from?

What did she do on the bottom of the ocean?

Why is she in NZ?

Listen again and complete the gaps:

The _________ season

A __________ business

Do a d_______________

Once upon a time _____ ______ _______ ________ pigs. One ____ ____ ______ _____ ______. The _____  little pig ______ _______ _______. _____ _______ ________ pig liked to _____ ______ _______.

Enunciated p___________

Up to ____

Go _________ life

The _________ of the titanic

An ordained ________

___________ talking proof

Maungakiekie

Maungakiekie was the largest and most important Māori pā in pre-European times. The cone and its surroundings are estimated to have been home to a population of up to 5,000. At this time, the Nga Marama chief Kiwi Tamaki held the pa and used its strategic placement to exact tribute from travellers passing from Northland to the rest of the North Island through the rich isthmus. Its position between the Waitemata Harbour to the east (opening upon the Pacific Ocean) and the Manukau Harbour to the west (opening onto the Tasman Sea) offered a wide variety of seafood from the two harbours. The volcanic soil of the slopes of the mountain was highly fertile and easy to defend from raiding parties from other tribes due to its steep sides and imposing palisades. The inhabitants terraced the hill extensively, and it is considered to be the largest prehistoric earthwork fortification worldwide. It is also the largest and most complex volcanic cone/earth fortress known in the Southern Hemisphere.

Watch ethnologist David Simmons talk about the mountain's rich history:

(there's a mihi in Māori first, but the rest is in English)

Maungakiekie

Kuirau Park, Rotorua

The Kuirau Park Flea Market could quite possibly be the only market surrounded by bubbling mud and hot steam, and is one feature that makes Kuirau Park a Rotorua essential.

Read more:

Kuirau Park

Advanced Speaking & Pronunciation

English is an unusually rhythmic language where the individual sounds of the language vary greatly in duration according to the meaning intended. This video series moves beyond the idea of individual sounds ("segmentals") and syllable stress ("suprasegmentals") to look at how we group these sounds together into longer speech units and sentences ("prosody"), where rhythm, stress, intonation, focus and thought groups come fully into play.

I can't promise you that this is an exciting video course, but I can promise that you will learn a lot.

Watch, listen and learn:

Advanced Speaking and Pronunciation

(Advanced) White Pride In My Classroom

Ben Warner lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. He teaches college writing. Here he writes about an encounter he had with a White Supremacist student. An interesting account of the paradoxes of teaching young adults.

Read more:

White Pride in my Classroom

(Higher Level to Advanced) A surprising solution to Climate Change

"Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert," begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes -- and his work so far shows -- that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.

Watch:

Allan Savory

(Higher Level to Advanced) 19-year-old's Ocean Cleaner

19-year-young Boyan Slat has ingeniously created the Ocean Array Plan, a project that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic from the world’s oceans in just five years.

Read About it here:

The Ocean Array Plan