English Conversation

Leader: Mandi Ashmore

english@ iwc-lausanne. org

    We meet on Mondays at 14：30 at the IWC clubhouse. We chat for about an hour and discuss everything. Mandi asks “students” to contact her on Monday to confirm the class as sometimes she needs to cancel for various reasons or occasionally she may choose to hold the class at a different venue(举办地点) or at an earlier time for us to be able to have lunch together.

French Conversation, Advanced Beginner

Leader: Marielle Sulmoni

frenchconvo@ iwc-lausanne. org

    I'm French (born in Bordeaux) and Swiss by marriage. I hold an advanced beginners' French conversation class on Tuesday afternoons from 14：30 - 16：00. We meet weekly at the clubhouse in a friendly atmosphere. I hope to help you use your knowledge of French, allowing you to speak with no fear of making mistakes, which in time will become fewer and fewer.

French Language Lab, Beginner

Leader: Maija Remlinger

frenchlab@ iwc-lausanne. org

    The group meets on Thursday afternoons from 15：00－16：30 at the clubhouse. The first half of the class is devoted to reading out loud from the book “Easy French Reader”, working on pronunciation and phrasing. During the second half, we listen to audio recordings from “New French with Ease” and work on oral comprehension.

French Conversation, Advanced

Leader: Juliette Brull

french@ iwc-lausanne, org

    We meet every Tuesday at the IWC clubhouse from 9：30－11：00. Most of our time is devoted to very lively discussions about current events and various topics. We also read a book written by a French author and sometimes we see a French movie.

    Exciting screams of joy from two happy little girls rang across the beach. But I walked along, ignoring them. I'd come to this faraway beach on my sailboat, a place to escape. My marriage was in trouble. I worried about the harm to my two boys. But I didn't know how to make things better.

    “Help! Help!” The girls screamed. I saw one girl was at the edge of the surf, yelling. I charged into the waves, swam to her and seized her. “But where is the other girl?” I looked across the water and saw a small head after a big wave. I shifted the girl Td rescued to my back. She told me the other girl was her sister. For a moment I thought of my boys. How much they loved each other. How much I loved them.

    I quickened my swimming and held the second little girl. We were at least 50 yards from land. I couldn't swim that far with two girls hanging on to me. But there was no time to wait. I swam as hard as I could, but the weight of the girls grew heavier with every minute. My lungs burned. I opened my mouth to take a breath, but instead swallowed water. I couldn't breathe. From behind me I felt an unbelievable force, lifting.

    “Mommy!” The cry drew my attention. I looked up. An elderly man was trying to drag me out of the water. Two women were swimming toward shore. “Thank you,” one of the woman cried. “You saved my daughters.” My efforts and my struggles had paid off. I thought of that big wave, lifting me and pushing me. When my body had failed me, and when all hope was disappearing, I was given the strength I needed.

    I stoop up. My family were waiting for me. There were things I could do. I just needed to make an effort. The strength would be given to me.

    In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near the village of Istabl Antar uncovered a mass grave. The bodies weren't human. They were feline — ancient cats that had been mummified(木乃伊化的) and buried in holes in astonishing numbers. "Not one or two here and there", reported English Illustrated Magazine, "but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer of them, a layer thicker than most coal joints, ten to twenty cats deep. " Some of the linen-wrapped cats still looked presentable, and a few even had golden faces. Village children peddled the best ones to tourists for change; the rest were sold as fertilizer. One ship transported about 180,000, weighing some 38, 000 pounds, to Liverpool to be spread on the fields of England.

    Those were the days of generously funded explorations—that dragged through acres of desert in their quest for royal tombs, and for splendid gold and painted masks to decorate the estates and museums of Europe and America. The many thousands of mummified animals that turned up at religious sites throughout Egypt were just things to be cleared away to get at the good stuff. Few people studied them, and their importance was generally unrecognized.

    In the century since then, archaeology has become less of a treasure hunt and more of a science. Archaeologists now realize that much of their sites' wealth lies in the majority of details about ordinary folks—what they did, what they thought, how they prayed. And animal mummies are a big part of that.

    "They're really displays of daily life," says Egyptologist Salima Ikram. After peering beneath bandages with x-rays and cataloguing her findings, she created a gallery for the collection — a bridge between people today and those of long ago. "You look at these mummified animals, and suddenly you say, Oh, King So-and-So had a pet. I have a pet. And instead of being at a distance of 5,000-plus years, the ancient Egyptians become clearer and closer to us."

    The Ig Nobel Prizes praise research that makes you laugh and then think. The winners are allowed to make a one-minute speech with time kept by an eight-year-old! Every year, in Harvard's Sanders Theatre, people watch the winners step forward to accept their prizes. These are physically handed out by real Nobel laureates (获得者). Let's have a look at some of them.

    The Empty Bladder (膀胱) Experiment

    Four researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology found that animals above 3 kg empty their bladders in about 21 seconds. What is the purpose of this study? The researchers hope this will help solve urinary (泌尿的) problems in animals.

    The Science of Eggs

    A team of Australian scientists managed to get hard-boiled egg whites to become raw again. While it sounds silly, this research could have a serious influence on cancer (癌症) research.

    The Fascination with Animals

    Charles Foster and Thomas Thwaites from the UK shared the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology. Thomas chose to live like a goat and wrote about his experience in "GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human". Charles, on the other hand, spent some time in the wild, trying out the lives of many animals. He felt it gave him a chance to explore the world around us with more of our senses.

    Colors & Horseflies

    A team from Hungary, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland won the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics. They studied why horseflies have less interest in white-haired horses. The team used handmade horses covered in glue. They found that dark colors attracted more flies because of how sunlight reflected (反射) off them. To the food searchers, it was a sign of food. This finding could explain the white coats of zebras too.

    It is a live celebration of the lasting power of letter writing!

    Letters Live, which started in December 2013, was held at the Freemasons' Hall in London from March 10 to 15. The show invited various great performers who read remarkable letters that had been written around the world over the centuries.

    "Bringing letters alive through outstanding performances is one of the most powerful ways in which the joy and pain and humor and tragedy of being human can be shared," Jamie Byng, managing director of Canongate Books publishing firm, told the Nowness video channel.

    British actor Benedict Cumberbatch agreed. "Letters are windows into the love, beauty, pain and humor of their creators and receivers," he told The Guardian. "Letters Live makes us stop and imagine the lives behind the letters read and where they came from. It's a great honor to read this most ancient of communications live to an audience."

    This year, the movie Sherlock star treated the audience by playing the part of a 17-year Tom Hanks. He put on the young actor's voice when he read his letter to the Hollywood director George Roy Hill, a letter that urged Hill to "discover" him. The letter showed that two-time Oscar winner Hanks' teenage dream was not to "be a big-time Hollywood superstar" but to one day own a Porsche car and call his favorite US actor Robert Redford his nickname "Bob".

    Other famous faces at the event included Carey Mulligan, who played a fictional laundry worker, a female activist fighting for women's rights in the 2015 movie Suffragette. The British actress once again played the role of a suffragette (女权主义者), when she read a very enthusiastic letter demanding the vote for women. The suffragette sent a precious 1913 note to The Daily Telegraph newspaper.

    “Everyone seems to agree upon the necessity of putting a stop to Suffragist anger, but no one seems certain how to do so, " Mulligan read out. "There are two, and only two, ways in which this can be done. Both will be effectual. One, kill every woman in the UK. Two, give women the vote."

    On my first day of high school, I asked an eleventh-grader where my class was. And he told me it was "on the fourth floor, next to the pool." I found out five minutes later that we don't even have a fourth floor and there's no pool either! Besides that, I didn't have any trouble with the older kid.

    I think the biggest difference between middle and high school is the homework load (工作量) and size of the school. I went from maybe fifteen minutes of homework a night to several hours, so I had to learn how to make full use of time! Our class size is around 550, but joining in clubs, sports, music, and other activities at school makes it easier to get to know people in every grade.

    The best advice I can give about the years you spend in high school is to learn things for yourself, not just to get a good grade. There have been so many tests that I've prepared for the night before. I have gotten an A, and not remembered anything later. I've changed that this year, and I enjoy school so much more. Don't take easy classes just to have a simple year. If you have a choice between chemistry and sports, the first will prove to be a lot more useful!

    While drinking and smoking might be present in some middle schools, they're also around in high schools. I have a lot of friends who promised they'd never drink or smoke, but are now partying every weekend. If you have "fun" and spend your nights wasted instead of studying, you will regret it when you're applying for (申请) college. The "friends" who say you're a loser for not partying are really not your friends at all. It's hard to see your closest friends grow apart and go in different directions, but don't follow their footsteps. Create your own path in life and make your own decisions.