Economics news & vocabulary

A Wordle I created from the text

As part of my university's business English curriculum, there is content related to economics and current economics news.

For a recent lesson with my robotics engineering students, I used a text from the opinion section of The New York Times, titled "China's Troubling Robot Revolution."

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/opinion/chinas-troubling-robot-revolution.html?_r=0

The text was not only useful for a discussion of the impact that robotic manufacturing is having on China's economy (in comparison to other countries), but also for the valuable vocabulary it had for business, describing statistics and numbers, and for presentations.

Here are the examples my students identified:

Vocabulary for describing statistics/numbers:

• accounted for about a quarter of ...
• a 54 percent increase over ...
• it will have more ... than ... by (date)
• replace 6,000 workers with ... by (time)
• about a fifth of the work force
• automate about 70 percent of ... within (time)
• at an even faster pace than ...
• has made up nearly half of ...
• represents only about a third of ...
• roughly have the level in (country)
• have too little income relative to the size of ...
• as much as 40 percent of ...
• Between 1995 and 2002 about 16 million factory jobs disappeared.
• roughly 15 percent of total ...
• only about half of ...
• while more than 20 percent of ...
• According to one analysis, fully 43 percent of ...

Business vocabulary (as chosen by students):

• low-wage workers
• work force
• automation
• a leading manufacturer
• domestic consumption
• economic growth
• fixed investment
• gross domestic product
• domestic consumer spending
• return on investments
• generating returns
• service sector
• wage increases
• capitalistic economy
• social safety net
• rebalance economic growth
• saving rate
• service economy
• generating jobs
• blue-collar workers
• white-collar jobs
• software automation
• artificial intelligence
• unemployment insurance

Useful vocabulary for presentations (my choices):

• But the reality is ... / The reality, however, is that ...
• X will have significant consequences for ...
• That may make it significantly more difficult to/for ...
• One problem is ... / Another problem is ...
• By some estimates ...
• The bottom line is ...
• The solution, then, would be to ...
• According to one analysis, ...
• However, it seems likely that ...

Those who have read my blog posts know that I particularly like calling students' attention to useful collocations. In the lists above, there are certainly collocations often used in writing and discussing business topics.

Since the article was from the opinion section of the newspaper, I had students identify those parts of the text that expressed opinion, and contrast those with information that was clearly factual. This, in turn, generated discussion about which aspects of the article students agreed and disagreed with, as well as ideas for further impact of increased robotic manufacturing on the global economy.

Solar-powered plane flight

The Solar Impulse 2

An interesting item of news related clean technologies and renewable resources (see my last few posts) is that of the plane Solar Impulse 2, which is powered by the sun.

Two Swiss pilots, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, are currently underway on a flight around the world using no fuel whatsoever. They started in March 2015 in Abu Dhabi, and plan to end the flight there before the end of 2016.

In June, they completed a record-breaking flight from Nagoya, Japan to Hawaii, USA in 4 days, 21 hours, and 52 minutes. The plane must now remain in Hawaii over the winter in order to repair the batteries, but the pilots hope to finish by summer 2016.

The Solar Impulse website: http://www.solarimpulse.com/

On the website, the progress of the flight is continually updated, and there are both news items and videos relating to various aspects of the flight and the plane itself. Students can not only find out the technological details of the plane, but can also keep track of the project's progress.

There are videos of each pilot relating information about the project. Both videos are less than 3 minutes and are narrated in English (with French accents).

Of particular interest to engineering students is the technical information about how the plane functions.

Diagram from solarimpulse.com

This information is useful for both presentations and written technical descriptions.

Since there are many news articles about the Solar Impulse Project, small groups of students could be assigned different articles to read, and then in class compare and consolidate the technical details, as well as chronological information about the flight path. This can be added to throughout the semester - until the end of the flight next year.

Some useful articles for this purpose:

Solar Impulse's Troubled Round-the-world Flight (from The Guardian)
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/27/solar-impulse-round-the-world-flight-raise-20-million-euros 

Meet the Men Flying a Solar-Powered Plane Around the World (from Time website):
http://time.com/4004573/solar-impulse-plane-no-fuel/?xid=newsletter-brief 

Everything You Need to Know About Solar Impulse (also from Time, before the flight started):
http://time.com/3903110/solar-impulse-plane 

Solar-Powered Plane Begins Its Journey Around the World (from Wired website)
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/solar-powered-plane-completes-first-leg-round-world-flight/

Solar roads

Artist's rendition of Solar Roadway from the website

In my last post (Electric highways) I focused on an article about a project in the U.K. to create roads that would charge electric vehicles. In the article, there is a reference to an idea that would include a "Solar Roadway."

From the article: "The system would use electric cables installed under roads to generate electromagnetic fields and sent power to a gadget under a car. While it could potentially run on renewable energy (and maybe even be combined with something like a Solar Roadway), the government is still working out the details."

Since I like my students to follow up references to related information in articles, I looked at the link to an article on the website fastcoexist titled, "These solar roads could power the entire country."

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3029874/fund-this/these-solar-roads-could-power-the-entire-country 

This innovation would also power roads so that electric vehicles could be charged while driving on them, but would use solar energy gathered on "custom, glass-covered solar panels that are strong enough to drive on while generating enough power to light the road, melt ice and snow, and send extra energy to cities." 

The article is short (537 words), but has useful language material as well as interesting information about a innovative topic.

The article gives short, clear technical descriptions of how parts of the innovation work, and includes ways of explaining these things to a non-technical audience. I always have my students notice this feature so that they can include these ideas in their own presentations and writing.

Some examples that focus on audience:

• There are nearly 18,000 square miles of roads in the U.S., an area that's bigger than the entire states of New Hampshire and Massachusetts combined.
• Glass, it turns out, is stronger than you might think. "You first mention glass, people think of your kitchen window," Brusaw says. "But think of bulletproof glass or bomb resistant glass..."
• The textured surface means it isn't slippery.
• It also powers small LED lights inside that can light up dividing lines and spell out warning messages - if motion sensors detect a deer crossing the road, the lights can automatically tell drivers to slow down.
• Since the whole road is wired, it's also easy to maintain: If one panel stops working, all of the other panels around it call a local repair shop with the exact location. "A guy can come out and repair it in five minutes," Brusaw says. "Compare that to pothole repair."

Since it highlights the advantages of this type of road, there are many features of contrast and comparison:

• bigger than
• as many as
• tough enough to (twice)
• is stronger than
• safer than
• strong enough to
• more power than

And there are many uses of adverbs - including collocations with both adjectives and verbs. For example:

• nearly 18,000 square miles
• eventually (twice)
• basically
• easily withstand
• fully loaded truck
• supposedly safer than
• automatically tells drivers
• charge the cars directly
• continuously report their location
• an insanely big challenge

When I combine a focus on language features with an article on a topic that my students find interesting, they are more motivated to do the language work.

There's more information about this project on the Solar Roadways project website:
http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml

Electric highways

Visual from Highways England (in article)

Sustainability is a concern of most of my engineering students, and in each engineering field there are different innovations being developed. Since I teach groups whose specific focus is on sustainable transportation, I am particularly interested in new developments in this area.

A recent article on the fastcoexist website presents information about electric highways being developed in the United Kingdom that would charge the electric cars that drive on them.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3049836/the-uk-is-testing-electric-highways-that-would-charge-your-ev-as-you-drive

The beginning of the article refers to the "charging problem that has been slowing electric car adoption for years" as a chicken-and-egg problem in this way:

"Some consumers don't want to buy an electric car without a full infrastructure for charging in place. But the business case for building that infrastructure is weak without more EV drivers on roads."

It would be interesting for students to brainstorm other types of "chicken-and-egg problems" in their area of technology and engineering. These problems often underlie the failure of a particular innovation to be fully developed or to be fully accepted by society.

The article has a sentence that explains how this technology would work, which would be useful for showing students how to explain something briefly:

"The system would use electric cables installed under roads to generate electromagnetic fields and send power to a gadget under a car."

The article is fairly short (463 words), and yet almost every sentence uses phrases indicating change (increase, expansion, etc.). Examples are:

• Brits are getting into electric cars more and more.
• Sales jumped up 366% in the first quarter of 2015.
• But the business case for building that infrastructure is weak without more EV drivers on roads.
•  The U.K. plans to add plug-in chargers ...
• But now they're testing out something new to make driving an EV even easier.
• If the tests go well, the new highways would add to the existing network of plug-in chargers, and make it even simpler to fuel up a Tesla ...
• "This has the benefit of saving time and improving the distance that electric vehicles can travel"
• ... could help to create a comprehensive ecosystem for electric vehicles.
• In a feasibility study, the government found that people would be more likely to drive ...
• ... especially if the charging networks spread off highways onto regular roads.
• "An important part of managing the road network over the next thirty years will be preparing the infrastructure for a shift to new types of vehicles and technology."
• "We need to plan intelligently for the future. Innovative technologies offer important opportunities to make the best use of road capacity and to improve the road user experience."
• "We're at a very early stage of researching and developing a system that could potentially transfer power to vehicles."
• After 18 months of testing, they'll decide whether to scale it up.

Students could identify this language, and then categorize them according to the type of language used (eg., comparatives, tenses, specific phrases, etc.). Then they could add to this by discussing other ways that this technology will cause changes.

The article mentions that this type of roadway "might even be combined with something like a Solar Roadway," and provides a link to an article on the same website about the Solar Roadway innovation. I will be writing about that topic, and comparing it to this one, in my next post.