Ewen’s inn

I think this year was good for my english insofar as i’ve learned a lot of things and i’ve worked my oral. And now, i do a stage and all the publication i’ve to read are in english, so i measure the importance of this language.

The poster session was a good souvenir because i succed in explicating my poster to people.

I hope you enjoyed this blog !

Here is all the vocabulary i had to search during english classes !

The last work in english of the year was a poster session :

We had to make a poster about a subject choosen by our group. Mine was about the causes and consequences of global warming. Even if we ever studied that in classes, i think it’s important to make researches about this because the phenomenon is increasing and it’s dangerous for the young generation who can be endangered by this (for exemple with the increasing of the sea level). And with our scientific knowledge we can understand how work the greenhouse effect for exemple.

Thanks to the work of my group i understand that if all the antartic ices melt, the will be 60m of water over the normal level of the sea !

And with the global warming, pimples developp too early in the winter, so they die in the winter and via phenomenon called food chain it’s all the ecosystem which is endangered.

So global warming is the main concern we have to consider.

I have asked questions about posters of other groups.

The first one was about renewable energy. It’s an energy generated from natural resources which are renewable on human life scale

There is  :

-Solar energy. it consist in using a solar panel to catch rays and to transform it into energy.

-Geothermal energy. it uses volcans in order to extract caloric fluid from the earth but it requires a special place.

-Wind. There is turbines which run with the wind and that create electricity.

-Water. This is like with the wind but in the water but this kill a lot of fish so they go away (no fish land !)

-Biomass. It uses biomass as fuel or to produce bio-fuels.

Hydroelectricity represent more than 50% of the total.

The second poster was : “How will be the future cars ?”

There will be an adaptive cruise control, so they use radar and lasers to repear objects in front of the car, and infrared vision system.

So how it works ? It’s a detector of infrared, when it detect he made a thermogram, and it’s translated into electric impulse which is send to a chip and finally transformed to video screen.

The cars will be more lighter, so that there is less fuel spent. The cars will be made of aluminium, plastics…

There will be some HUD (Head Of Display) to indicate some elements on the road for exemple.

With this posters i learned a lot a things, and i practice my oral, so it was a good experience !

In this last session before exam we studied a video, showing a scientist specialist of statistics, talking us about his work.

He started his presentation with jokes :

-he likes figures but he had not the skill to become accountant.

-he worked on genes, and when someone questioned his wife “what does he do” she said “he models genes” but it sounds as “he models jeans”.

Then he did an experience which consisted in tossing a coin, and the result wasn’t the one expected by the public.

He talk about connection between probability and genetics, and how some differences makes some people more sensitive to diseases. His work is to understand where there are differences between people.

Finally he explain an example of a mother who had lost her two children. There were genetics factors for death and 1/73 000 000 chances that she was not guilty. She was convicted even if she had recourse to the court of appeal.

This video was difficult to understant insofar as the speaker speaks very quickly, because he was speaking to an english speaking public. But it was a good work, it shows us how to anticipate what can the speaker could say.

We did the exam of IELTS in the first part, and then we finished the “study skill success” exercise.

It was about anticipating what the people we speak with could say.

The exercise was called ”isn’t the purpose obvious ?”

I’ve learned the following things : to study a text or a conversation, we should always be aware of the purpose and we should be ready to adapt our approach of the text.

We worked on a typical exercice from IELTS. It was composed of 3 parts.

The first one : we had to discuss about sentenses to say if we agreed or not, using arguments.

I think it’s a good exercice, because there were different meanings for the statements, and depending upon  meaning we choose, we used different arguments.

The second part consisted in linking title to paragraphs. It taught us to find what kind of text could tally with the different titles before reading paragraphs. This method makes the exercice easier to do.

We finished with filling in the gaps using words taken from the precedent paragraphs, so we analysed the sentences in order to know the exact opinion, then we searched the good word.

During this class we had to read a text, then to summarize the text in order to explain what it was about. The text was scientific, so we summed it up with graphs, or diagrams…

This exercise taught us how to explain the content of an article without this article, using our own words.

My text was about the discovery of a new species of fungus which can create diesel quickly. Before chemists had to do many step in organical synthesis in order to same thing, so if scientists succed in understanding this technology, the synthesis of biofuel might make huge progress.

The other groups worked on : 

• a new detection technique for iron an copper ions

• The carbon capture using rocks

Moreover, we learned how to take notes from an account.

We did a survey about foods habits, so we asked 5 questions to the class, which were :

-Do you eat something for breakfast ?

-How many times a week do you eat pasta ?

-How many times (a month) do you eat in a fastfood restaurant ?

-Do you eat 5 fruits and vegetables everyday ?

-Are you a fervent defender of biological agriculture ?

Then we classified the results in pie charts, bar charts or pictograms…

The results were balanced for the 3 of the questions (1,4,5), insofar as all the people gave the same answer. For the 2 other questions, the results were varied, for exemple, to the question 3, the answers were from 0 to 4.

We learned how to present the results of a study to the class, to speak in front of a group.

During our first class, we did a “study skill success” exercise in the laboratory. We did different exercices, like listen to a conversation and next fill in the gaps or answer questions about the conversation.

We learned how to be in the context, to think about what our interlocutor might say in order to understand the meaning of a sentence, even if we don’t know all the words used by the interlocutor.

Then we have worked on the different ways to do transition between two ideas.

Hello all !

Welcome to my inn !

This is my first post and my blog isn’t actually finished.

i hope you enjoy your visit here.