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Showing posts with label BBC POSTS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC POSTS. Show all posts

How to tell if you’re being ‘breadcrumbed’ at work, by Emily Torres (From BBC Worklife)

๐Ÿ‘‰By Emily Torres
๐Ÿ‘‰READ FULL ARTICLE: Are you being ‘breadcrumbed’ at work?

From: BBC Worklife / Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Stop breadcrumbing me!

๐ŸšฉIs your boss commitment-phobic?

Our modern dating vocabulary is making its way into our work lexicon, and it’s bringing more life and colour to the way we describe our experiences. Have you ever been ghosted by a potential employer? Or have you ghosted them? Now, thanks to the latest series of the reality TV show Love Island, we have a new word for an old practice: breadcrumbing.

Are you heading for BURNOUT?

Credit: GETTY IMAGES
Here are two excerpts from two reading articles and three videos on burnout: what it is, what its consequences are and how you can avoid it.

๐Ÿ‘‰How to tell if you’re close to burning out, by Zaria Gorvett (From BBC WORKLIFE) 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has redefined burnout as a syndrome linked to chronic work stress. There’s a difference between a busy workload and something more serious, writes Zaria Gorvett.

[…] Late last month [June 2019], the WHO announced that the trendy problem will be recognised in the latest International Classification of Diseases manual, where it is described as a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”.

The 101 people, ideas and things changing how we work today (From BBC Worklife)

๐Ÿ‘‰ GO TO BBC WORKLIFE 101
The world of work is in transition. Are you ready?
In Japan, companies are encouraging employees to go for lunchtime sleep, or hirune. It could contribute to a better working environment. (From BBC / Image credit: Piero Zagami and Michela Nicchiotti.)
The world of work is being struck by waves of change. Some are vast and visible – leaps in machine learning and artificial intelligence or the rise of ‘do anything from anywhere’ technologies. Other ideas are just beginning to emerge – like monitoring content to ensure proper gender balance, or rethinking office design to promote air quality. Behind it all are the people whose ideas and attitudes have the potential to shape the next chapter of our lives.

[In this reading article] are the 101 indispensable things that you need to know about our work-life future:

How to escape the ‘hyperactive hivemind’ of modern work, by William Park (From BBC Worklife)

๐Ÿ‘‰ By William Park
Should ‘deep focus’ become a central pillar of workplace culture?

The constant ping of messages that keep us plugged into work chatter might be doing more harm than good. We feel we must respond – it is about work, after all. But always being switched on means we never have the chance to think deeply. And that is a problem for companies that want to get the most out of their employees.
Copyright : Evgenii Naumov
The next great revolution in the office will need to correct this, according to one man who wants to reset the way we work. He believes that the value someone can bring to a company will be judged not by their skill, but by their ability to focus. But how do we find the time to shut off distractions and do our best work?

Why we should learn to love awful corporate buzzwords, by Meredith Turits (From BBC Capital)

๐Ÿ‘‰ By Meredith Turits
Why we all need to be a little more zen about grating corporate language.
Is vacuous corporate babble diminishing our capacity to think clearly at work? (Credit: Getty Images)
I just wanted to circle back on this. Have we digested the learnings from our fact-finding mission? I need to leverage these insights in the deliverables.

Perhaps you haven’t received this email verbatim, but if you glance back through jargon-littered emails from various jobs you’ll probably find something startlingly similar. Corporation, start-up, sole proprietorship or family company: bad business speak is endemic to many work environments – and, sometimes, infuriating.

In what can seem like universal condemnation, business jargon is considered bad form. There are dozens of overused words that some argue make smart people sound less intelligent. Movements have even sprung up to bin corporate speak.

Yet the backlash might not be worth the effort.

๐Ÿ‘‰ GO TO FULL ARTICLE: In defense of corporate buzzwords

WEEKLY PICKS - 27

This is a weekly selection of reading articles, free online exercises, YouTube videos, games, quizzes and resources for you to further improve your English language skills and have fun ENJOY!

๐Ÿ“œREADING PICKS – Articles, blog posts, quizzes and more:

From BBC TRAVEL: How France created the metric system, by Madhvi Ramani. It is one of the most important developments in human history, affecting everything from engineering to international trade to political systems. (Continue reading)

From BBC CAPITAL: Can you make money selling your data? By Sam Harrison. Tech giants make billions from our data, but what if there was a way to claw some of that control back – and make some money in the process? (Continue reading)

๐ŸŽฌ VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS:
Why is yawning contagious? - Claudia Aguirre (4:28 minutes)
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
Body Language in an Interview - 3 Tips (9:05 minutes)
The Silk Road and Ancient Trade: Crash Course World History #9 (10:30 minutes)
๐Ÿ’ฌ VOCABULARY PICKS:
Learners' Questions: Assure, ensure, insure (3:22 minutes)
๐Ÿ’ก GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:
Learners' Questions: 'When', 'if' and 'in case' (3:06 minutes)
MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

WEEKLY PICKS - 26

This is a weekly selection of reading articles, free online exercises, YouTube videos, games, quizzes and resources for you to further improve your English language skills and have fun ENJOY!

๐Ÿ“œ READING PICKS – Articles, blog posts, quizzes and more:

From BBC TRAVEL: Italy’s ‘practically perfect’ food, by Amanda Ruggeri.
Pound for pound, Parmigiano-Reggiano can compete with almost any food for calcium, amino acids, protein and vitamin A – and is prescribed by doctors to cure ailments. It’s also a dairy product… that can be eaten by the lactose-intolerant. (Continue reading)

From BBC CAPITAL: The cost of free public transport, by Marc Auxenfants. 
From March next year, commuters in Luxembourg will not be charged for trips on its trains, trams and buses. What’s the cost of such a move? (Continue reading)

BBC Reel: The amazing houses that build themselves At the touch of a button, these incredible homes of the future can self-deploy and build themselves in less than 10 minutes. (Go to videos + full article)

๐ŸŽฌ VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS:
What Is the Sunday Evening Feeling? (4:58 minutes)
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
How parasites change their host's behavior - Jaap de Roode (5:13 minutes)
A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!
Inside The Lives Of North Korean School Children (12:31 minutes)
๐Ÿ’ฌ VOCABULARY PICKS:
Learners' Questions: Assure, ensure, insure (3:22 minutes)
๐Ÿ’ก GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:
Intermediate English grammar - Verb patterns, (verb + ing, verb + to) gerunds and infinitives (8:56 minutes)
MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

When taking probiotics could backfire, by Martha Henriques (From BBC FUTURE)

๐Ÿ‘‰ GO TO FULL ARTICLE: When taking probiotics could backfire
๐Ÿ‘‰ By Martha Henriques

Taking a course of antibiotics could harm the beneficial bacteria living inside us. So should we be taking probiotics after we finish them? The answer may not be so simple.
Taking probiotics when your gut health is weak may not be a good idea (Credit: Getty Images)
Probiotics have been touted as a treatment for a huge range of conditions, from obesity to mental health problems. One of their popular uses is to replenish the gut microbiome after a course of antibiotics. The logic is – antibiotics wipe out your gut bacteria along with the harmful bacteria that might be causing your infection, so a probiotic can help to restore order to your intestines.

But while it might sound like sense, there is scant solid evidence suggesting probiotics actually work if taken this way. Researchers have found that taking probiotics after antibiotics in fact delays gut health recovery.

Part of the problem when trying to figure out whether or not probiotics work is because different people can mean a variety of things with the term ‘probiotic’. To a scientist, it might be seen as a living culture of microorganisms that typically live in the healthy human gut. But the powdery substance blister packs on supermarket shelves can bear little resemblance to that definition.

Even when researchers use viable, living bacterial strains in their research, the cocktail varies from one lab to another making it tricky to compare.

“That’s the problem – there aren’t enough studies of any one particular probiotic to say this one works and this one doesn’t,” says Sydne Newberry of Rand Corporation, who carried out a large meta-analysis on the use of probiotics to treat antibiotic-induced diarrhoea in 2012.

[…] A particular concern is a lack of research on the safety of taking probiotics. While they are generally assumed to be safe in healthy people, there have been worrying case reports of probiotics causing problems – such as fungus spreading into the blood – among more vulnerable patients.

A recent study by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel found that even among healthy people, taking probiotics after antibiotics was not harmless. In fact, they hampered the very recovery processes that they are commonly thought to improve.

The researchers, led by Eran Elinav, gave 21 people a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics for one week. After this, they had a colonoscopy and an upper-gastrointestinal endoscopy to investigate the state of their microbiome throughout the gut.

[…] The volunteers were divided into three groups. The first was a wait-and-see group, with no intervention after the antibiotics. The second group was given a common probiotic for a month. The third was given perhaps the least savoury option: a faecal transplant. This group had a small sample of their own stool – taken before the antibiotic treatment – returned to their colon once the treatment was over.

The surprising finding was that the group who received the probiotic had the poorest response in terms of their microbiome. They were the slowest group to return to a healthy gut. Even at the end of the study – after five months of monitoring – this group had not yet reached their pre-antibiotic gut health.

“We have found a potentially alarming adverse effect of probiotics,” says Elinav.

The good news, incidentally, is that the group who received a faecal transplant did very well indeed. Within days, this group completely reconstituted their original microbiome.

“So many people are taking antibiotics all over the world,” says Elinav. “We can aim to better understand this potentially very important adverse effect that we didn’t realise existed.”

And the evidence is mounting that taking probiotics when gut health is weak is not such a good idea. Another recent study has found that probiotics don’t do any good for young children admitted to hospital for gastroenteritis. In a randomised controlled trial in the US, 886 children with gastroenteritis aged three months to four years were given either a five-day course of probiotics or a placebo.

The rate of continued moderate to severe gastroenteritis within two weeks was slightly higher (26.1%) in the probiotic group than in the placebo group (24.7%). And there was no difference between the two groups in terms of the duration of diarrhoea or vomiting.

Despite evidence such as this, the demand for probiotics is large and growing. In 2017, the market for probiotics was more than $1.8bn, and it is predicted to reach $66bn by 2024.

“Given the very heavy involvement of the industry, clear conclusions as to whether probiotics are truly helpful to humans remain to be proven,” says Elinav. “This is the reason why regulatory authorities such as the US’s Food and Drug Administration and European regulators have yet to approve a probiotic for clinical use.”

But that is not to write off probiotics completely. The problem with them may not be with the probiotics themselves, but the way we are using them. Often probiotics are bought off the shelf – consumers may not know exactly what they are getting, or even whether the culture they are buying is still alive. […]

๐Ÿ‘‰ GO TO FULL ARTICLE: When taking probiotics could backfire
๐Ÿ’ก MORE FROM BBC FUTURE:

What the earliest fragments of English reveal, by Cameron Laux (From BBC CULTURE)

๐Ÿ‘‰ GO TO FULL ARTICLE: What the earliest fragments of English reveal
๐Ÿ‘‰ By Cameron Laux
The earliest fragments of English reveal how interconnected Europe has been for centuries. As an exhibition in London brings together treasures from Anglo-Saxon England, Cameron Laux traces a history of the language through 10 objects and manuscripts – including a burial urn, a buckle with bling, and the first letter in English.

The interconnectedness of Europe has a long history, as we’re reminded when we explore the roots of the English language – roots that stretch back to the 5th Century. Anglo-Saxon England “was connected to the world beyond its shores through a lively exchange of books, goods, ideas,” argues the Medieval historian Mary Wellesley, describing a new exhibition at the British Library in London – Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War – that charts the genesis of England.

Something like 80% of all surviving Old English verse survives in four physical books… for the first time in recorded history they are all together [in this exhibition],” she tells BBC Culture. “The period that is represented by Old English is about 600 years, which is like between us and back to Chaucer… imagine if there were only four physical books that survived from that period, what would that say about our literature?”

What we understand as English has its roots in 5th-Century Germany and Denmark, from where the Anglian, Saxon and Jute tribes came. As the Roman legions withdrew around 410 AD, so the Saxon war bands (what Rome called ‘the barbarians’) landed and an era of migration from the Continent and the formation of Anglo-Saxon England began. The word “English” derives from the homeland of the Angles, the Anglian peninsula in Germany. Early English was written in runes, combinations of vertical and diagonal lines that lent themselves to being carved into wood and were used by other closely related Germanic languages, such as Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German.

“The earliest fragments of the English language are likely to be a group of runic inscriptions on three 5th-Century cremation urns from Spong Hill in Norfolk,” Wellesley has written. “The inscriptions simply read alu, which probably means ‘ale’. Perhaps the early speakers of Old English longed for ale in death as well as life.”

The exhibition gathers together an array of documents, books and archaeological evidence to form a dense picture of the Anglo-Saxon period, including a burial urn with runic inscriptions in early English from Loveden Hill, Lincolnshire, England.

Anglo-Saxons cremated their dead and interred their remains in earthenware vessels. About 20 objects with runic inscriptions from before 650 AD are known from England, making this vessel – which seems to feature a woman’s name and the word for tomb – one of the earliest examples of English. (Continue reading)

Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern (4:53 minutes)

How did English evolve? - Kate Gardoqui (5:04 minutes)

WEEKLY PICKS - 25

This is a weekly selection of reading articles, free online exercises, YouTube videos, games, quizzes and resources for you to further improve your English language skills and have fun – ENJOY!

๐Ÿ“œREADING PICKS – Articles, blog posts, quizzes and more:

From BBC FUTURE: Pork fat is rated as healthier than kale
In a list of the top 100 nutritious foods, pork fat came in eighth place – higher than peas, cabbage and kale. Apparently, pork fat is a good source of B vitamins and minerals.
The world’s most nutritious foods – After analysing more than 1,000 raw foods, researchers ranked the ingredients that provide the best balance of your daily nutritional requirements – and they found a few surprises. (Continue reading)

From BBC FUTURE: January is the best time of year to apply for a job, by Amanda Ruggeri and Miriam Quick. Google searches for "jobs" peak in January, but few people actually apply. Companies usually get their new hiring budgets for the year, and annual bonuses often pay out in December, so a lot of people wait until then to change jobs.
When it comes to life events like applying for a job, buying a house or even getting married, certain months are more advantageous than others. Want to ‘hack your year’? Here’s how. (Continue reading)


BBC Reel: A hairdresser created a substance that could withstand 75 nuclear blasts. Reported by Lee Johnson, produced, filmed and directed by Adam Proctor.
Maurice Ward invented a world-changing fire-resistant plastic called Starlite, refused to sell it or have it patented in fear of someone stealing the recipe, and died in 2011, taking the material’s secrets to his grave. 
(Continue reading)

๐ŸŽง LISTEN & READ the TRANSCRIPTS:

  • Budgeting Liz Waid and Ryan Geertsma look at budgeting. They look at how to make a money plan, and how to know where your money goes.
  • The History of Money How did modern money develop? What are the earliest kinds of money? Christy Van Arragon and Katy Blake look at money.
๐ŸŽฌ VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:
LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS:
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
How to... be vague (6:00 minutes)
A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!
Silent Letters: When NOT to pronounce B, D, and L in English (13:06 minutes)
๐Ÿ’ฌ VOCABULARY PICKS:
Learners' questions: 'How are you' and 'how do you do'? (2:28 minutes)
๐Ÿ’ก GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:
MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

WEEKLY PICKS - 24 - CHRISTMAS SPECIAL!

๐ŸŽ„๐ŸŽ…CHRISTMAS SPECIAL!๐ŸŽ…๐ŸŽ„Below is a selection of reading articles, free online exercises, YouTube videos, games, quizzes and resources for you to further improve your English language skills and have fun – ENJOY!

๐Ÿ“œREADING PICKS – Articles, blog posts, quizzes and more:

From BBC CULTURE: Where Christmas is a way of life, by Megan Snedden 
What it’s really like to live in North Pole, Alaska and Santa Claus, Indiana. 
Every morning, Paul Brown waves to Santa Claus, who occupies an office downstairs from his own, conveniently located on Saint Nicholas Drive in North Pole, Alaska. (Continue reading)

๐ŸŽงLISTEN & READ the TRANSCRIPTS:
  • Fireworks: A Global Celebration  Joshua Leo and Liz Waid look at one way that people celebrate - with beautiful, bright, exploding fireworks!
  • The Christmas Story ⇨ In today’s Spotlight, we tell one of the most famous stories in the world: the story of Christmas, and the birth of Jesus Christ.
  • Babushka’s Christmas Legend ⇨ Colin Lowther and Liz Waid share a story from Russia. It tells about an old woman who gives up the chance of a lifetime.
  • Christmas Cracker of Christmas Traditions ⇨ Anne Muir and Adam Navis share a Christmas cracker of stories and customs from Christmas around the world.
  • Christmas Food Around the World ⇨ Spotlight looks at traditional Christmas food from places all around the world. These foods have special meaning.
  • A Christmas Carol ⇨ Nick Page and Marina Santee present "A Christmas Carol". Spotlight retells this famous Christmas story by Charles Dickens.
  • Saint Nicholas, The Christmas Saint ⇨ Santa Claus? Father Christmas? Bruce Gulland and Liz Waid look at the stories about Saint Nicholas. Who was this man and why do we remember him?
  • Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ⇨ Spotlight tells the famous Children’s Christmas story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
  • The Joy of Christmas Music ⇨ Colin Lowther and Christy Van Arragon look English Christmas songs. They look at their history, and why they are so popular.
๐ŸŽฌ VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS:
This Is Why The Holidays Can Suck! (2:50 minutes)
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
Learn to talk about the perfect Santa in 6 minutes (6:33 minutes)
A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!
American Christmas Traditions for a very American Christmas (10:14 minutes)
๐Ÿ’ฌ VOCABULARY PICKS:

MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

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