...:
You will hear two students called Rosie and Colin discussing their Human Geography assignment.
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First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 25.
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Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 25.
ROSIE:
Colin, I'm really struggling to think of a topic for our Human Geography assignment.
COLIN:
I'll tell you what, let's think about the different aspects of Human Geography and see if we can narrow the topic down a bit to help us decide.
ROSIE:
So one aspect is population.
ROSIE:
That would be all about population density and migration and so on.
ROSIE:
Lots of facts and statistics.
ROSIE:
Maybe a bit boring?
COLIN:
Yeah, but quite straightforward to find on the internet.
ROSIE:
I'd never thought about the links between that and geography until Professor Lee gave us that lecture on cholera.
ROSIE:
How in the 19th century, a physician used street plans and plans of water supplies to find the source of a cholera epidemic.
COLIN:
Yes, fascinating, wasn't it?
COLIN:
Or we could do something more general, like economies.
ROSIE:
So how financial and commercial factors are linked to the physical environment?
ROSIE:
I thought that had been taken off the syllabus for this year.
ROSIE:
I'm not sure, but it might be best to avoid it.
COLIN:
Maybe we could do something on culture.
COLIN:
We had that lecture about culture and geography last week.
ROSIE:
I didn't get much out of that.
ROSIE:
It was all so general and the lecturer didn't give any useful examples.
COLIN:
Yeah, I hardly took any notes.
COLIN:
It didn't seem worth it.
COLIN:
We could focus on poverty.
COLIN:
That's something that's a global problem.
ROSIE:
The trouble is, Dr Lee was saying, that you have to be careful with some of the figures relating to poverty.
ROSIE:
They're sometimes deliberately manipulated.
COLIN:
You mean the information gets changed for political reasons?
ROSIE:
That sort of thing, yes.
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Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 26 to 30.
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Now listen and answer questions 26 to 30.
ROSIE:
So what are we going to do our assignment on?
ROSIE:
I'll tell you what.
ROSIE:
One of the possibilities we haven't discussed is urbanisation.
ROSIE:
And now over half the world's population lives in cities.
ROSIE:
That's really important.
ROSIE:
I love living in a big city, but of course there are problems.
COLIN:
Things like theft and robbery?
ROSIE:
Yes, but where I come from, that's linked to another more serious issue, which is that a lot of people don't have jobs.
ROSIE:
That's getting worse and worse.
ROSIE:
And we also still have quite a lot of people who are homeless, though that's not quite so bad as it was.
COLIN:
It'd be nice to talk about some positive developments, like some of the new developments on the outskirts of cities.
ROSIE:
They've opened some massive new shopping centres outside my city.
COLIN:
Yeah, the same with mine, but it's meant a lot of the shops in the city centre are closing down.
COLIN:
But the outskirts are ideal for buildings that need a lot of space, like for conferences.
COLIN:
They've opened a couple of big ones.
ROSIE:
Yes, we've got some too.
ROSIE:
It'd be nicer to have more facilities for things like football too, but that's not happening where I live.
ROSIE:
We could include something about developing disused industrial sites.
ROSIE:
It seems like a good idea because you're not doing any harm to the natural environment.
COLIN:
Yeah, but aren't the buildings architecturally significant?
ROSIE:
And what people forget is that they often used quite dangerous materials, chemicals and things, which haven't been properly cleared away.
ROSIE:
So the whole site has to be made safe.
COLIN:
That can't be cheap.
COLIN:
And I bet it's often not budgeted for.
COLIN:
Have you read about Masdar City?
ROSIE:
Yes, it was designed to be a green city, wasn't it?
ROSIE:
That might be a good example of a city which set out to depend entirely on renewable energy.
COLIN:
Yes, we should say something about that.
COLIN:
It was designed to be totally pedestrianised too, wasn't it?
COLIN:
With the transport underground.
ROSIE:
Yes, and they had big plans for recycling to reduce waste to the lowest possible level.
ROSIE:
But let's stick to talking about power sources.
COLIN:
Then there's that ecotown in England, Greenhill Abbotts.
COLIN:
It set out to conform to the usual principles, sustainability and so on.
COLIN:
A lot of people were against it at first.
COLIN:
They said the plans were unrealistic.
COLIN:
I'm not sure how far they've got with it.
ROSIE:
So it looks as if we have a sort of plan.
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That is the end of Part 3.
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You now have 30 seconds to check your answers to Part 3.