Sites and Dates

The exams are coming closer. The FCE is on the weekend of the 12th and 13th and the CAE the Wednesday after. Get studying...
An interesting aside. I recently tested two similarly levelled classes, one well schooled in the Cambridge exam and one not? The difference between the two classes? 25%! The students who were used to the exam were 25% better. That's huge!
Keep practising!


By the way, here's a new site that is as good as the great flo-joe.co.uk for exam prac.
http://www.examenglish.com/

It has excellent Use of English CAE Part 4 (of which I have very few examples)

Sunday Thoughts

I've just been examining this afternoon, the CAE exam. A few thoughts that may be handy. The listening part of the Cambridge had a few dodgy accents in it. Get some practice in with Australian and US accents, as well as UK regional and Irish. They vary a lot and it can be disconcerting to hear them for the first time in the exam itself.
The speaking: the less successful students were those with no ambition. FCE spoken English is not enough and will at best get you a C. Use the vocab and complex linking devices.
Good luck in June!

Old and New

I gave my Advanced class an old paper with the old format to see if they thought it harder/easier/just the same as regards level. My hunch was that it would be harder but it turned out to be fairly similar in terms of its level. The layout though was shocking and the retrospection gave me a chance to see how much better the exams are having been streamlined and standardised in terms of format and tied into the European framework (where they occupy the C1 position for English).

On another topic completely am bemused by the new UK coalition government. I hope it works - it seems to represent the wishes of the electorate - and perhaps that's what UK politics needs. It certainly needs to get away from the yah-boo politics of old, though PR (Proportional Representation) is a bridge too far for me.

The Old Tricks are the Best

My rotten CAE class pulled a classic trick on their teacher tonight. I take my watch off when I teach and the little dears advanced it by 15 minutes so they could get away... but I'll have the last laugh... an extra 5 mins to the classes until the end of the year... that'll teach 'em.
The UK election tonight... I'm up all night to watch it. Political theatre at its best.

Focus!

I've been going through my assessments as we have mid-term reports to write and go out for next week and looking at them globally allows me to see things in a slightly different light. The writing assessments have been poor, spelling and poor hand writing letting my guys down especially. I am thinking of my FCE guys, though my CAE guys are almost equally culpable. By now, my students at FCE level should not be spelling 'writting' instead of writing, or 'oppening', oh you get the idea. None of these errors are because of lack of knowledge but are for lack of attention. You know how to do this stuff. Just focus, get it right and you'll be fine. Remember, the writing is one fifth, that's 20%, of the exam grade.

Ambition will be rewarded

I was at a training session yesterday discussing the Cambridge exams and some interesting points came up. The emphasis of the meeting was the speaking exam and we had a look at some of Cambridge's most recent releases to try and judge the 'correct' score given. After some reflection I feel that I personally haven't been paying enough attention to cohesive markers and perhaps been playing it a little too safe with my KISS strategy (Keep It Simple, Stupid!). Sure, by keeping things simple and answering the question and having a few fixed phrases at the ready you can pass the speaking exam (attain a level 3 or so), but if you are (or have a student) expecting an 'A' grade then you're going to need to do more. At FCE we need to hear linking devices, such as 'Firstly', 'on the other hand', oh, you get the idea.
Also, we are going to need to hear more advanced grammar to get that 'A' grade. Let's have some decent conditional sentences, they are not so hard really, and so interesting adjectives (good, bad and nice are just not enough!).
So, get the basics right, then reach for the stars and have a bit of ambition.
Exams in May and June for my guys.... get studying.

Simple Stuff

A busy day examining yesterday - FCE and CAE students in a city near here. The students were good, and well prepared. But there were some simple errors which I really should not be hearing at this level. One girl, perhaps over-reacting to the Portuguese tendency to overuse articles, used none! Another student decided that there were only two prepositions in English (for and in)although might have been saved a fail by excellent vocabulary (which we suspected had been learned from computer games). The thought for today therefore is: cut out the simple mistakes. Much easier to say than do, but by focusing on the simple tasks, and with good exam technique, a really low level student can pass these exams.

Sign Up for the Exams

Calling all my June Cambridge exam students. This is a reminder that you have until 20th March to sign up. This also includes the exams we are also holding in May because of the national Portuguese exams. Get to the school and sign up. Cambridge requires these things early, so get to it..., miss it and you will have to wait until December!

Brrrrrrrrrrr. Cold!

Winter, winter, winter. I can't wait for the sun. Still, as we can't go outside because of all the rain we can stay in and study! On a previous blog I mentioned Ken Robinson's talk about education. I've been exploring the site a little more recently and it's a fantastic resource for students and teachers alike. There are lectures on every subject, often transcripts are available and it's interesting too. The talks are between 5 and 25 mins usually, and are nearly all very good to excellent. I particularly liked Jamie Oliver's talk on the Western Diet. So, great, interesting listening practice for free, which is good when it's too cold to go outside.
ted.com


ps. they are fanatastic for IELTS too, as well as CAE and CPE
TED talks are great!

Saturday Mocks

I spent my Saturday invigilating and correcting exams, our Mock-Cambridge exams which we use to see if students are ready for June. The results were pretty good, though I kept seeing the same errors again and again. Exam technique and attention to detail are worth between 5 and 10% in these exams to my mind. I have seen the usual mistakes... I'll list them here so you can shake your head in wonder that students still make them and nod sagely and think 'I would never do that' (but someone ALWAYS does).

1) Bad copying on to the answer sheet. One poor girl had the correct answers, just one exam question late. She got a couple of marks simply because there we a couple of times when there were two in a row with the same answer. Fail.

2) No name on the paper. I mean, really! Fail.

3) Simple spelling errors. Marks thrown away.

4) Poor hand-writing. Marks abandoned to the abyss.

5) A poor understanding of the question. Fail (well, banded 2.2 in the writing section) because he didn't read it properly.

Also, to those students who didn't bring pens or pencils... c'mon! You know better!
Still, that's why we do mocks.

Keep Talking

I'm booked in to be an Oral examiner for the FCE and CAE exams in a city near here in March - we can't examine in our own cities as we may be examining our own students as all examiners are teachers - and I'm looking forward to it. It gives me the chance to see a handful of students in another town and see if they are falling into the same traps as my own. Inevitably some do, both groups of students having the same mother tongue with very similar accents as is to be expected of cities close to each other. But occasionally their teacher shines through them. I've come across a whole group of students who all used a double comparative in their speech (more harder), which I think must have been a favourite error of their teacher... and I'll never forget the incongruity of seeing tiny Greek students speaking English in a thick, scouse (Liverpudlian) accent. You don't expect to hear a mini-Yosser Hughes in Karditsa.
But one thing my students don't stress about, and perhaps they should, is what they say (rather than how they say it). They forget they are examined only on those 12 or 13 minutes and that it is their opportunity to show themselves in their best light.
So, keep talking, use all that vocab you have to describe those pictures, to colour the discussion, keep expressing opinions, and keep talking. Don't worry about sounding an idiot. The examiner doesn't care. If you're a fluent idiot you'll still get an 'A'. Better that than a silent genius with a 'D'.
Keep talking, say what you see, and answer any questions like 'Do you agree?' with an 'It depends!' and then say why it depends. If your examiner thinks you're talking to much they will bring your partner in and let them have a go...
just...
keep...
talking

Slackers

I am so annoyed with my Monday/Wednesday CAE class. They are due to take the exam in March '11 and, good FCE results in hand, are sure of cruising their way through with minimal effort and boisterous behaviour in class. I've half a mind to scare them by sneaking a practice CPE test paper into the class and letting them have a bash at that. The CAE has recently introduced some aspects of the CPE into it so they should remain unawares, and the step up might scare them from complacency. They ARE good, but the chippy attitude irks, and they have so little ambition other than a 'C' grade. I can't blame them really. I was the same many moons ago when I was at school. And they are a smart bunch. What annoys me is that I know how much better they could do, how much faster they could improve, and this opportunity cost, while visible to me, is a myth to them. Who was it that said 'youth is wasted on the young'?

Burbling Cockneys

Back to school... and the classes progress at a slightly easier pace. I like this time of the school year. We have tests in the middle of Feb, the end of our semester, but I've covered most of the material and so it's revision time, which the students don't mind so much if it comes in the form of games.
I've been thinking about the Cambridge exams and how the assessment of the students works and consider it not to be a level playing field in some respects. The speaking part of the exam is examined my local teachers who are examiners and are accustomed to the accents and foibles of the local language and I think tend to be more forgiving accordingly. The listening part of the exams have phoney accents (put on by the actors) with some frankly odd intonation and seems hardest for those taught by my US and Canadian colleagues, whose laconic drawl differs most from the delivery on the CDs Cambridge use. I had one nice comment from a student yesterday which made my evening (CAE level). He spent some of his Christmas hols in London with his parents (both of whom have the FCE). He said 'Dave! I am pleased I have you as my teacher because you speak so fast!'. I asked him to clarify what he meant. He said that because he was used to my delivery he could cope with the burbling cockneys he encountered, and had to translate for his folks, and so could show off!

Blog Update

My computer's still broken but I have borrowed one as I can't really leave this blog idle while Acer try to unmelt my old laptop (I really should buy a new one, but am certainly waiting until after Christmas because they'll be cheaper and the shops won't be full). Some of my students are doing the mocks for their Cambridge exams today, and on Wednesday I'm doing some invigilation for the real things.
Thoughts on the exam I've had recently? Well, I am getting to like the addition to the CAE Use of English paper of the part where you have three sentences with the same word missing. CPE has had this for a while and I always thought it a bit harsh to drop it on students out of the blue like that.
Also, the CAE Reading paper, specifically the part which concentrates on matching paragraphs to spaces; this has to be over-taught as students really, really find this hard.
I'm finding it quite hard to type right now on an unfamiliar keyboard and with my two year old daughter trying to press the keys at the same time. She's getting excited with Christmas coming up, or at least because of the flashing lights and colour everywhere.
We're all of to Italy for Crimbo to see the in-laws...
I do hope I get my beast (read 'laptop') back soon!

Darwinism 'Why we are, as we are"

My Monday/Wednesday CAE guys wanted the rest of this article from the Economist magazine so here it is.

Darwinism
Why we are, as we are
Dec 18th 2008
From The Economist print edition
As the 150th anniversary of the publication of “On The Origin of Species” approaches, the moment has come to ask how Darwin’s insights can be used profitably by policymakers


WEALTH, according to H.L. Mencken, an American satirist of the last century, “is any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.” Adjusted for inflation since 1949, that is not a bad definition. But why do those who are already well-off feel the need to out-earn other people? And why, contrariwise, is it so hard to abolish poverty?
America, Mencken’s homeland, executes around 40 people a year for murder. Yet it still has a high murder rate. Why do people murder each other when they are almost always caught and may, in America at least, be killed themselves as a result?
Why, after 80 years of votes for women, and 40 years of the feminist revolution, do men still earn larger incomes? And why do so many people hate others merely for having different coloured skin?
Traditionally, the answers to such questions, and many others about modern life, have been sought in philosophy, sociology, even religion. But the answers that have come back are generally unsatisfying. They describe, rather than explain. They do not get to the nitty-gritty of what it truly is to be human. Policy based on them does not work. This is because they ignore the forces that made people what they are: the forces of evolution.
The reasons for that ignorance are complex. Philosophers have preached that there exists between man and beast an unbridgeable distinction. Sociologists have been seduced by Marxist ideas about the perfectibility of mankind. Theologians have feared that the very thought of evolution threatens divine explanations of the world. Even fully paid-up members of the Enlightenment, people who would not for a moment deny humanity’s simian ancestry, are often sceptical. They seem to believe, as Anne Campbell, a psychologist at Durham University, in England, elegantly puts it, that evolution stops at the neck: that human anatomy evolved, but human behaviour is culturally determined.

The corollary to this is the idea that with appropriate education, indoctrination, social conditioning or what have you, people can be made to behave in almost any way imaginable. The evidence, however, is that they cannot. The room for shaping their behaviour is actually quite limited. Unless that is realised, and the underlying biology of the behaviour to be shaped is properly understood, attempts to manipulate it are likely to fail. Unfortunately, even as the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s masterwork, “On The Origin of Species”, approaches (it was published in 1859) that fact has not been properly accepted. Time, then, to see what a Darwinian analysis has to offer the hard-pressed policymaker, and whether it can make a practical difference to outcomes.
Mencken’s observation neatly explains two aspects of modern life. One is the open-endedness of economic growth. The other is that no matter how rich your country becomes, the poor you will always have with you. But what explains Mencken’s observation?
For a Darwinian, life is about two things: survival and reproduction. Of the two, the second is the more significant. To put it crudely, the only Darwinian point of survival is reproduction. As a consequence, much of daily existence is about showing off, subtly or starkly, in ways that attract members of the opposite sex and intimidate those of the same sex. In humans—unlike, say, peafowl, where only the cocks have the flashy tails, or deer, where only the stags have the chunky antlers—both sexes engage in this. Men do it more than women, but you need look no further than Ascot race course on Gold Cup day to see that women do it too. Status and hierarchy matter. And in modern society, status is mediated by money.
Girls have always liked a rich man, of course. Darwinians used to think this was due to his ability to provide materially for their children. No doubt that is part of it. But the thinking among evolutionary biologists these days is that what is mainly going on is a competition for genes, not goods. High-status individuals are more likely to have genes that promote health and intelligence, and members of the opposite sex have been honed by evolution to respond accordingly. A high-status man will get more opportunities to mate. A high-status woman can be more choosy about whom she mates with.
Life is about survival and reproduction
For men, at least, this is demonstrably true. Evolutionary biologists are fond of quoting extreme examples to make the point, the most famous being Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, a Moroccan ruler who fathered over 1,000 children. But kings have powers of coercion. Some better examples are provided by Joe Studwell, in his book “Asian Godfathers”, which dissects the lives of businessmen. Stanley Ho, a veteran operator in Hong Kong and Macau, has 17 children by several women. Oei Tiong Ham, a tycoon who died in 1924, had 18 concubines and 42 children. The relationship holds good further down the social ladder. Danile Nettle and Thomas Pollet, of Newcastle University, recently showed that in Britain the number of children a man has fathered is, on average, related to his income, the spread of modern contraception notwithstanding.
Status, though, is always relative: it is linked to money because it drives the desire to make more of the stuff in order to outdo the competition. This is the ultimate engine of economic growth. Since status is a moving target, there is no such thing as enough money.
The relative nature of status explains the paradox observed in 1974 by an economist called Richard Easterlin that, while rich people are happier than poor people within a country, average happiness does not increase as that country gets richer. This has been disputed recently. But if it withstands scrutiny it means the free-market argument—that because economic growth makes everybody better off, it does not matter that some are more better off than others—does not stand up, at least if “better off” is measured in terms of happiness. What actually matters, Darwinism suggests, is that a free society allows people to rise through the hierarchy by their own efforts: the American dream, if you like.
Conversely, the Darwinian explanation of continued support for socialism—in the teeth of evidence that it results in low economic growth—is that even though making the rich poorer would not make the poor richer in financial terms, it would change the hierarchy in ways that people at the bottom would like. When researchers ask people whether they would rather be relatively richer than their peers even if that means they are absolutely worse off, the answer is yes. (Would you rather earn $100,000 when all your friends earn $50,000, or $150,000 when everybody else earns $300,000?) The reason socialism does not work in practice is that this is not a question that most people ask themselves. What they ask is how to earn $300,000 when all around them people are earning $50,000.
A Darwinian analysis does, however, support one argument frequently made by the left and pooh-poohed by the right. This is that poverty is relative. The starkest demonstration of this, discovered by Richard Wilkinson of Nottingham University, in England, is that once economic growth has lifted a country out of penury, its inhabitants are likely to live longer, healthier lives if there are not huge differences between their incomes. This means that poorer countries with low income-variation can outscore richer ones with high variation. It is also true, as was first demonstrated by Michael Marmot, of University College, London, that those at the bottom of social hierarchies have worse health than those at the top—even when all other variables are statistically eliminated, including the fact that those who are healthier are more likely to rise to the top in the first place.
In the 1970s, when Dr Marmot made this observation, expert opinion predicted the opposite. Executives were expected to suffer worse stress than groundlings, and this was expected to show up as heart attacks, strokes and so forth. In fact, the opposite is true. It is the Darwinian failure of being at the bottom of the heap that is truly stressful and bad for the health. That, writ large, probably explains the mortality patterns of entire countries.
In this case, therefore, the Darwinian conclusion is that there is no right answer—or at least no Utopian one. Of course, it does not take a Darwinist to work out that any competition has losers. The illuminating point is that losing has a real cost, not just the absence of gain. With the stakes this high—early death for the failures and genetic continuity for the successes—it is hardly surprising that those at the bottom of the heap sometimes seek status, or at least “respect”, in other ways. This is a point that should be taken seriously by policymakers. For those “other ways” are also explicable by Darwinism.
That crime is selfish is hardly news. But the idea that criminal behaviour is an evolved response to circumstances sounds shocking. It calls into question the moral explanation that crime is done by “bad people”. Yet that explanation is itself susceptible to Darwinian analysis: evolution probably explains why certain behaviours are deemed worthy of punishment.
The study of the evolutionary roots of crime began with the work of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, a married couple who work at McMaster University in Canada. They looked at what is usually regarded as the most serious crime of all, murder.

That murderers are usually young men is well known, but Dr Daly and Dr Wilson dug a bit deeper. They discovered that although the murder rate varies from place to place, the pattern does not. Plot the rate against the age of the perpetrator and the peak is the same (see chart). Moreover, the pattern of the victims is similar. They, too, are mostly young men. In the original study, 86% of the victims of male killers aged between 15 and 19 were also male. This is the clue as to what is going on. Most violence (and thus most murder, which is simply violence’s most extreme expression) is a consequence of competition between young, unemployed, unmarried men. In the view of Darwinists, these men are either competing for women directly (“You looking at my girl, Jimmy?”) or competing for status (“You dissing me, man?”).
This is not to deny that crimes of violence are often crimes of poverty (for which read low status). But that is precisely what Darwinism would predict. There is no need to invoke the idea that people are “born criminal”. All that is required is the evolution of enough behavioural flexibility to respond appropriately when violence is (or would have been, in the evolutionary past) an appropriate response.
Crime…
An evolutionary analysis explains many things about crime (and not just murder)—particularly why most criminals are males of low status. A woman will rarely have difficulty finding a mate, even if he does not measure up to all her lofty ideals. In the world of Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, however, a low-status man may be cast on the reproductive scrap heap because there are no women available to him at all. Though the world in which humanity evolved was nowhere near as polygamous as Moulay Ismail’s, neither did it resemble the modern one of monogamous marriage, which distributes women widely. In those circumstances, if the alternative was reproductive failure, risking the consequences of violence may have been are worth the gamble—and instincts will have evolved accordingly.
For similar reasons, it is no surprise to Darwinists that those who rape strangers are also men of low status. Oddly, considering it is an act that might result in a child, the idea that rape is an evolved behaviour is even more controversial than the Darwinian explanation of murder. Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico, who proposed it on the basis of criminal data and by comparing people with other species, was excoriated by feminists who felt he was somehow excusing the crime. On the other hand, it has become a mantra among some feminists that all men are rapists, which sounds a lot like the opposite point of view: biological determinism. Insert the word “potential”, however, and this claim is probably true. To a Darwinist, the most common form of forced mating, so-called date rape, which occurs in an already charged sexual environment, looks a lot like an adaptive response. Men who engage in it are likely to have more offspring than those who do not. If a genetic disposition for men to force their attentions on women in this way does exist, it would inevitably spread.
Sexual success, by contrast, tends to dampen criminal behaviour down. Getting married and having children—in other words, achieving at least part of his Darwinian ambition—often terminates a criminal’s career. Again, that is a commonplace observation. However, it tends to be explained as “the calming influence of marriage”, which is not really an explanation at all. “Ambition fulfilled” is a better one.
Illustration by Noma Bar
The murder of children, too, can be explained evolutionarily. On the face of things it makes no sense to kill the vessels carrying your genes into the next generation. And, indeed, that is not what usually happens. But sociologists failed to notice this. It was not until Dr Daly and Dr Wilson began researching the field that it was discovered that a child under five is many times more likely to die an unnatural death in a household with a stepfather present (whether or not that relationship has been formalised by law) than if only biological parents are there.
In this, humans follow a pattern that is widespread in mammals: male hostility to a female’s offspring from previous matings. In some species, such as lions and langurs, this results in deliberate infanticide. In humans things not are always as brutal and explicit. But neglect and a low threshold of irritation at the demands of a dependent non-relative can have the same effect.
Intriguingly, though, if a genetic parent is the killer it is often the mother. Infanticidal mothers are usually young. A young mother has many years of potential reproduction ahead of her. If circumstances do not favour her at the time (perhaps the father has deserted her) the cost to her total reproductive output of bringing up a child may exceed the risk of killing it. Not surprisingly, maternal infanticide is mainly a crime of poor, single women.
Many people might sympathise with those driven to commit this particular form of homicide. But in general crimes such as murder and rape provoke a desire to punish the perpetrators, not to forgive them. That, too, is probably an evolved response—and it may well be a uniquely human one. No court sits in judgment over a drake who has raped a duck. A lioness may try to defend her cubs against infanticide, but if she fails she does not plan vengeance against the male who did it. Instead, she usually has sex with him. Yet ideas of revenge and punishment lie deep in the human psyche.
…and punishment
Economists were long puzzled, for example, by the routine outcome of a game in which one player divides a sum of money between himself and a competitor, who then decides whether the shares are fair. If the second player decides the shares are not fair, neither player gets anything.
What is curious about this game is that, in order to punish the first player for his selfishness, the second player has deliberately made himself worse off by not accepting the offer. Many evolutionary biologists feel that the sense of justice this illustrates, and the willingness of one player to punish the other, even at a cost to himself, are among the things that have allowed humans to become such a successful, collaborative species. In the small social world in which humans evolved, people dealt with the same neighbours over and over again. Punishing a cheat has desirable long-term consequences for the person doing the punishing, as well as for the wider group. In future, the cheat will either not deal with him or will do so more honestly. Evolution will favour the development of emotions that make such reactions automatic.
What goes for cheating goes for other bad behaviour, up to and including the murder of relatives and friends. Moreover, if publicly observed, punishment sends the same message to those who might be considering a similar course of action.
It is therefore one of the marvels of civilisation that punishment and revenge have, for the most part, been institutionalised. But to be successful, the institutionalised punishment has to be seen as a proper outcome by the individuals who were harmed. Otherwise, they might mete out their own revenge. That may worry those who believe that reforming the criminal should be the main goal of sentencing policy. If people no longer believe that the punishment fits the crime, a Darwinian would predict that they will stop supporting the criminal-justice system.
Even deterrence, however, does not always work. On the face of things, capital punishment ought to be the ultimate deterrent. But it does not seem to be. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggests that this is further evidence of the reproduction-related nature of murder. Since failure to reproduce is a Darwinian dead-end anyway, risking death to avoid that fate—or, rather, being impelled to do so in the heat of the moment by an evolved instinct—is not as stupid as it looks. Some sorts of murder might be discouraged by the threat of the noose or the needle. But not the most common sort: young man on young man over status and sex.
A woman’s place
Crime, then, is one field in which women are unequal with men. That does not bother feminists, but perhaps it should. For it might reflect a wider truth which those who believe that the sexes should not merely have equal rights but enjoy equal outcomes will find uncomfortable.
When outcomes are unequal in socially acceptable areas of behaviour, such as employment, it is often interpreted as a sign of discrimination. But people who draw this conclusion rarely consider that the discrimination in question might actually be being exercised by the supposedly disadvantaged women themselves.
A classic example is income. Women earn less than men. Or do they? In fact, younger women do not, or not much. A recent report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a British think-tank, found that British women aged between 22 and 29 who were in full-time employment earned only 1% less than their male counterparts. This age group corresponds for many women to the period when they are single. Once they have found the best available mate, the calculation changes: a woman no longer needs to show off.
In that context, it is less of a surprise that older women are out-earned by their male contemporaries. One reason is that they now care less about the size of their earnings. Of the top 25 ideal employers, as chosen by women, the IEA found that 12 were in the public or voluntary sectors—areas where salaries for equivalent work tend to be lower than in the private sector, though job security is higher and job satisfaction is often believed to be greater. For men, only four employers were in this category. The other reason, of course, is that women usually look after the children. Indeed, the study by Dr Nettle and Dr Pollet which found that reproductive success correlates with men’s income, also points out that with women the correlation is inverted. But the IEA study also found that it is women themselves who are taking the decisions about child care. It reports that two-thirds of the women who had not already had a “career break”, as it is euphemistically known, planned to take one at some point in the future. Less than an eighth of men had similar aspirations. That, too, would be predicted by a Darwinist.
Although there is a strong argument for making working conditions more sympathetic to the needs of parents of both sexes, the underlying point is that many women—and certainly many women with children—do not care as much about striving ahead in their careers as men do. Men, the report found, are more motivated by pay and less by job satisfaction than women are. If managers, they are more likely to work long hours. They also take more risks—or, at least, are more frequently injured at work.
The consequence, as Len Shackleton, the IEA report’s main author, puts it, is that: “The widespread belief that the gender pay gap is a reflection of deep-rooted discrimination by employers is ill-informed and an unhelpful contribution to the debate. The pay gap is falling but is also a reflection of individuals’ lifestyle preferences. Government can’t regulate or legislate these away, and shouldn’t try to.” He failed to add, however, that these preferences are often the result of biological differences between the sexes.
What goes for pay probably goes for career choice as well. At one extreme, it is foolish, as Kingsley Browne of Wayne State University, in Michigan, suggests, to expect equal outcomes in organisations like the armed forces. Not only are men stronger and more aggressive but, Mr Browne suggests, the psychology of both sexes has evolved to trust men (and not trust women) in combat, precisely because of this aggression and strength. At the other end of the scale, it is probably an opposite mixture of evolved aptitudes and attitudes that causes the domination by females of professions such as nursing.
This is not to say there can be no good female soldiers or male nurses. Patently, there can. But it is not clear evidence of discrimination that they are rarer than their counterparts of the opposite sex. A Darwinian analysis of the matter cannot say where the equilibrium would lie in a world free from discrimination. But it can say with reasonable confidence that this equilibrium will often not be 50/50.
Many may harrumph at such a Darwinian interpretation of feminism, and say that it is a circuitous route to a traditional destination. It isn’t: not expecting an equal distribution of the sexes within every profession is not the same as saying that a woman’s place is in the home. And having dared to question the assumptions of both feminists and their opponents, some evolutionary biologists are now hoping to turn conventional wisdom upside down in another area where civil rights meet long-standing prejudice. This is the vexed question of race.
Race to the finish
Racial difference is an area where modern Darwinists have feared, until recently, to tread. This is hardly surprising, given the topic’s history. Many early evolutionary biologists (though not Darwin himself) thought that just as man was a risen ape, so white, European man was the zenith of humanity, and that people from other parts of the world were necessarily inferior.
The consequences of that have been terrible. It gave a veneer of intellectual respectability to the eugenic horrors which culminated in the Nazi death camps. Indeed, it is probably one of the roots of the “evolution stops at the neck” point of view. But evolutionary biology is now making amends. By overturning understanding of what race actually is, it may yet provide the tools that allow people of different backgrounds to live in reasonable harmony.
Revenge and punishment lie deep in the human psyche
Its first observation is a bleak one. This is that racism, or at least xenophobia, is a deeply ingrained human characteristic. But its second observation is that, so far as can be determined, the traditional definition of race—the tendency of people living in different parts of the world to have different skin colour, hair colour and physiognomy—has no wider ramifications in areas such as intelligence. Racial prejudice, then, is just that: prejudice.
What is being proposed instead, by another husband and wife team of Darwinists, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby of the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a theory of ethnicity that explains the mishmash of categories anthropologists have tried to shoehorn into the general class of “race”. Are Jews and Sikhs, who are defined by religious exclusivity, races? Are Serbs and Croats, who share their religions with others, but not with each other, and whom no geneticist could tell apart? These examples, and similar ones, argue that race has no biological meaning. But it does. It is just not the traditional meaning.
Social psychologists have long observed that, on first meeting, people automatically classify each other in three ways: by sex, by age and by race. But Dr Cosmides and Dr Tooby pointed out that before long-distance transport existed, only two of those would have been relevant. People of different ages and sexes would meet; people of different races would not.
The two researchers argue that modern racial discrimination is an overstimulated response to what might be called an “alliance” detector in the human brain. In a world where the largest social unit is the tribe, clan or what-you-will of a few hundred people, your neighbours and your other allies will normally look a lot like you, and act similarly. However, it is known from the study of modern hunter-gatherers, and inferred from archaeological evidence about ancient ones, that neighbouring tribes are often hostile.
Though an individual might reasonably be expected to know many members of his tribe personally, he would probably not know them all. There would thus be a biological advantage in tribal branding, as it were. Potential allies would quickly identify what marked them out from others, and what marked others out from them—and, because those differences would probably be small, the detector would need to be very sensitive.
In the past, such markers would often have been cultural, since local physical differences would have been minimal. A telling instance is recorded in the Bible:
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him.
The questioners were the Gileadites. The slain, an Ephraimite. But no physical difference could distinguish the tribes, so the Gileadite ethnic-cleansers had to rely on linguistic tics.
In a world where a syllable can get you killed, having differently coloured skin is a pretty strong brand of identity. However, it is not a unique signal. Experiments that Dr Cosmides, Dr Tooby and their students have conducted in both America and Brazil (another racially mixed country) suggest it is surprisingly easy to rebrand even people of different skin colour by making other badges of allegiance more significant—as happens when sportsmen clothe themselves in coloured team shirts. Moreover, Andrew Penner of the University of California, Irvine, and Aliya Saperstein of the University of Oregon have shown that perception of a person’s race can actually change in the real world. Many people shift from being “white” to “black”, in both their own eyes and the eyes of others, in response to unemployment, impoverishment or imprisonment.
That is an uncomfortable reminder of the way group solidarity works in America. The hope this analysis brings, though, is that there is nothing particularly special about biologically based brands such as skin colour. If other brands of group membership can be strengthened, the traditional ones may diminish, even if they do not disappear completely. If this theory of race is correct (and more research is certainly needed), it indicates a strong prescription: policies that encourage groups to retain their identity within a society will cause trouble, but those that encourage cultural integration will smooth things over.
In practice, the history of that most racially mixed country of all, the United States, supports this idea. When integration has been encouraged, as with the descendants of the great flood of European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ethnic distinctions have vanished. When integration has been discouraged, as with the descendants of slaves liberated shortly before those European immigrants arrived, differences have been sharpened. Even in Britain, official policy seems to be shifting from “multiculturalism”, which celebrated diversity and thus encouraged distinction, to a deliberate attempt to forge a cultural consensus.
What the brand theory of ethnicity does not require, however, is that minorities submit to the majority’s definition of what the brands should be. All that is needed is for each generation to be encouraged to form its own identity from the widest range of materials possible.
Illustration by Noma Bar
A Darwinian analysis thus sheds light on a number of pressing questions. There are others. The rise of metabolic syndrome (obesity plus high blood-pressure equals diabetes plus heart disease) seems to Darwinists the consequence of people trying to sate appetites for sugar and fat that evolution put no brakes on because they were so rare in the natural world.
Pretending young adults are children so that they can be educated en masse in schools is another area ripe for investigation. And the refusal of people to adhere to the patterns of behaviour prescribed for them by classical economics has already spun off a field called behavioural economics that often has Darwinian thinking at its roots.
No one is suggesting Darwinism has all the answers to social questions. Indeed, with some, such as the role of hierarchies, it suggests there is no definitive answer at all—itself an important conclusion. What is extraordinary, though, is how rarely an evolutionary analysis is part of the process of policymaking. To draw an analogy, it is like trying to fix a car without properly understanding how it works: not impossible, but as likely as not to result in a breakdown or a crash. Perhaps, after a century and a half, it is time not just to recognise but also to understand that human beings are evolved creatures. To know thyself is, after all, the beginning of wisdom.

Sunday, Blustery Sunday!

The Atlantic wind is battering us today from the west, sending my daughter slightly loopy. I've discussed a phenomena with my friends and colleagues and was wondering if anyone out there had had similar experiences. It's about wind. Kids, younger kids especially, seem to go absolutely bananas when it's windy. Full of energy, slightly aggressive and manic. I've not only seen this in my 2 year old, but also in kids up to their mid-teens. Is it an inner-ear thing? Is their balance shot by changes in the ambient pressure? What's going on?

Changing the subject.... I was thinking yesterday of the FCE exam in particular, and the exams in general, and wondering why the paragraph matching exercise is so badly done by students. Then understanding came to me. It's done so badly because it's bloody hard! Teachers often avoid it as it's not easy to teach and students avoid it as it's easier to avoid something that's hard than confront it... but confront it you will in the exam, and it may become the section that lets you down, causing you to slip up and fail the exam.
The solution? As ever, PRACTICE! There are some good links on the side of my homepage to places where you can do these exercises, or get hold of the exam books Cambridge sells. Pay attention to the cohesive linking devices (words like additionally, on the other hand etc) and those phrases that seem incomplete and perhaps need more information.
And remember... this is a Cambridge exam and that means that there will always be one extra paragraph so that you always have to make a choice. You can't just think...'oh, there's one left, that must go in the last space'.
Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist who writes fairly good pop-science books, reckons it takes 10,000 hours to become truly expert in something. I think that might be an over-estimation regarding these exams but does underline the point that 'practice makes perfect'!

If.... my thoughts on Conditional Sentences

Lots of students at all three exam levels are still making very sill mistakes with the conditional tenses. They are very straight forward but are generally badly taught, so I thought I'd run through them here briefly, but advise students that if they have any grammar worries to acquire a text such as English Grammar in Use (Murphy, Cambridge University Press) and run through the assessment test at the back.
So, in a nutshell (an idiom that means a brief summary):

0 (zero) conditional.

We use this for talking about states, laws and constants and so it's very useful even if it it's not strictly a conditional.

Eg.

If I heat water to 100 degrees Celsius it boils.

You can of course reverse the sentence.

Water boils if you heat it to 100 degrees Celsius.

Please note that the verb tenses are present simple and present simple.

1st Conditional

We use this to give warnings, make predictions etc.

eg. If you swing on your chair you will fall

We use the present simple in the half of the sentence with 'if' and the future in the other half.

we can also of course use a negative.

If Ronaldo doesn't play Portugal won't win.

2nd Conditional

We use this to talk about an event with a very small/impossible chance of outcome in the real world.

eg. If I won the lotto I would buy a Ferrari.

Note that we use the PAST simple in the half with 'if' and would + infinitive of the verb (without 'to') in the other.

3rd Conditional

We use this for hypotheticals in the past. Think about alternative outcomes/opportunity cost etc

eg. Consider that the lotto was played on Saturday and I didn't win, of course.

If I had won the lotto, I would have bought a Ferrari.

There is such a thing as mixed conditionals, but unless you are very confident in your English don't worry about them too much as regards the Cambridge exams.

Here's an unrealted poem that I like, called 'If', by Rudyard Kipling.


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Hope this was helpful.

Lucky Article

My Monday/Wednesday CAE guys were asking about this article. Here it is. Originally printed in the Daily Telegraph newspaper (UK). 9 Jan 2003


Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn
Those who think they're unlucky should change their outlook and discover how to generate good fortune, says Richard Wiseman

A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.

To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.

Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."

In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.

Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.

The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.

And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I created a "luck school" - a simple experiment that examined whether people's luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from "luck school", she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:

* Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason to consider a decision carefully.

* Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

* Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire

Books in the Gym

I get bored very easily when I exercise. I find exercise boring. I have some very good friends who seem to love lifting those weights at the gym, doing those martial arts or pounding the pavements and get the rush off the second wind as the blood pumps etc etc.
Not me. But I have to work out otherwise I would turn into a big ball of lard. Not surprising considering my love for cheese, beer and pizza. Hmmmmmm, perhaps my diet doesn't help. Anyway, I DO go to the gym, a lot. How do I stave off the boredom?
Audiobooks. Talking Books. Books on Tape. Three of the most common names for those story tapes/CDs what have you that you can get for all the best novels written. And not only novels. There's nonfiction too. And podcasts. You name it and you can get it.
All of which are a marvelous resource for listening practice! They are all out there. Some available as torrents, often legally, so be good and watch people's copyrights etc. But remember to choose something you are interested in rather than something worthy, as you're more likely to listen to it all, and enjoy it more too.

Superfreak

I must apologise for less activity on the blog recently of late. I am slowing down in part due to a course of study I am doing at the moment, meaning I am writing a lot and have little mental energy left for the blog. So just a short post right now, though a recommendation for students of economics and life in general. The economist Steven Levitt has written another book which came out yesterday (Superfreakonomics). I have yet to read it of course, but can't wait. I will take this opportunity to remind readers of his older work, Freakonomics. It's an excellent book discussing why we humans act the way we do. Each of us rational actors seemingly behave in irrational ways. Brilliant. Easy to read too, so students of all three exams would find it accessible.