The Economist Vocabulary

TABLE OF CONTENTS
HƯỚNG DẪN SỬ DỤNG TÀI LIỆU ......................................................................... 4

TOPIC 1: BUSINESS ................................................................................................... 5
1. How small businesses have dealt with the crisis .............................................. 5
2. Facebook’s retirement plan ............................................................................... 8
3. How to make hybrid work a success............................................................... 13
TOPIC 2: EDUCATION ............................................................................................ 17
1. The role of employers ..................................................................................... 17
2. The return of the MOOC................................................................................. 23
3. How to turn a qualification into a salary ......................................................... 32
TOPIC 3: ENTERTAINMENT ................................................................................ 37
1. Who will win the media wars?........................................................................ 37
2. How the coronavirus is changing arts and entertainment in America ............ 41
3. Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in America ......................................... 45
TOPIC 4: ENVIRONMENT ..................................................................................... 48
1. Making trade greener ...................................................................................... 48
2. Stopping pollution with pine needles .............................................................. 54
3. Green power needs more than just solar panels and wind turbines ................ 58
TOPIC 5: CULTURE ................................................................................................. 63
1. Some languages pay closer attention to family ties than others ..................... 63
2. Social media are changing the way art is seen and presented ........................ 66
3. How Netflix is creating a common European culture..................................... 70
TOPIC 6: HEALTH ................................................................................................... 76
1. Dramatic growth in mental-health apps has created a risky industry ............. 76
2. What if everyone’s nutrition was personalised? ............................................. 79
3. What if smartphones became personal health assistants? ............................... 83
TOPIC 7: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY........................................................... 88
1. Genetic screening can improve drug prescribing ........................................... 88
2. Sidewalk robots are already busy delivering groceries .................................. 92
3. Fatherless sons have more testosterone .......................................................... 95
TOPIC 8: LANGUAGE ............................................................................................. 99
1. Body language in the post-pandemic workplace ............................................ 99
2. To master a language, start learning it early ................................................. 103
3. The advantages of speaking a second language............................................ 106
TOPIC 9: WORK ..................................................................................................... 110
1. Do not bring your whole self to work ........................................................... 110
2. The benefits of part-time work ..................................................................... 113
3. Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs ............................... 117
TOPIC 10: INTERNET ........................................................................................... 122
1. Why the internet has not freed China ........................................................... 122
2. The second half of humanity is joining the internet ..................................... 127
3. How to make social media safe for children ................................................. 131
HƯỚNG DẪN SỬ DỤNG TÀI LIỆU
Tài liệu này sẽ đưa ra các từ vựng/cách diễn đạt hay xuất hiện trong bài báo The
Economist và nghĩa tiếng Việt của chúng.
Trong mỗi bài báo sẽ có các mục như sau:
• Đoạn văn bản của bài báo
• Từ vựng/cụm từ vựng/cách diễn đạt được in đậm trong văn bản
• Nghĩa tiếng Việt của từ vựng/cụm từ vựng /cách diễn đạt
Cách sử dụng tài liệu:
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vựng lạ trong đề thi). Sau đó, bạn đọc lại bài lần thứ hai và sử dụng phím Ctrl+F để tìm
nghĩa tiếng Việt của chúng trong list từ vựng (VOCABULARY) ở phía dưới mỗi bài
(tham khảo hình minh hoạ bên dưới).
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vào các bài viết task 2 của mình.
TOPIC 1: BUSINESS
1. How small businesses have dealt with the crisis
As a special-operations pilot in the American air force, Joe Shamess was used to
handling some tricky situations. But the sudden arrival of the coronavirus
pandemic this year meant he faced an unexpected challenge. Together with
another pilot, Brian Steorts, Mr Shamess had founded Flags of Valor, a company
that focused on employing veterans to make products such as flags and gifts for
employee-recognition programmes. When the pandemic hit, the company quickly
lost two-thirds of its revenue.
Smaller companies like Flags of Valor have been the most vulnerable to the
pandemic and its economic turbulence. Most have little in the way of financial
reserves and sell a limited range of products. Tom Sullivan, vice-president of small-
business policy at the US Chamber of Commerce, points to data showing that 20%
of small businesses (those with fewer than 500 employees) in America have closed
since the virus hit. Things are worse for black-owned businesses, which often find
it more difficult to get bank loans; 40% of such firms have shut.
Government support for American small businesses has been in the form of loans
under the Paycheck Protection Programme (PPP). Mr. Sullivan says 72% of
small firms have received a PPP loan. But, Mr. Shamess reports, “even though we
were one of the very first applicants, we did not receive funds in the first round.”
He feels his bank failed to give the application the attention it deserved.
With the help of a different bank, the company managed to get funds in the second
round of PPP loans. But it still took almost a month from the initial application to
receipt of the money. Mr Shamess says that the scale of the programme was so great
and the time needed to distribute it was so short that it was rather like trying to build
a parachute while falling to the ground.
The management therefore had to act without waiting for the feds. The work week
went from 40 hours to 20. Some of the firm’s 24 workers were furloughed. The
main problem was not manufacturing; the factory was big enough to keep staff
socially distanced. It was distribution. Mr Shamess had to close the showroom;
trade shows, which brought in a lot of business, were cancelled.
So the firm had to innovate. The showroom is now closed for good and most
business is online; one of the firm’s biggest sellers is a newly launched crafts kit
for kids, to keep little ones occupied during the long break from school. All of the
craftsmen are now back working full time. Still, Mr Shamess says that “we are a
different company from four months ago.”
Another firm that has had to transform itself during the pandemic is VetCor, which
also happens to employ military veterans but operates in the service sector. Its main
business was the restoration of buildings damaged by floods and damp, a common
risk in Florida, where it is based. The pandemic forced the company to close one of
its offices, lay off some of its 31 workers and apply for a ppp loan (which it
received). But Paul Huszar, a former army lieutenant-colonel who runs VetCor,
realised the crisis created a business opportunity.
Part of the firm’s work involved dealing with the mould spores associated with
damp conditions. The same processes could be used to disinfect buildings to
eliminate the coronavirus; the company already had the right chemicals, air
scrubbers and personal-protection equipment. This has proved a popular service
with restaurants in the area.
VetCor also operates a franchising business, but four conferences where it was due
to recruit franchisees were cancelled. So it signed up for a virtual career
conference aimed at veterans from Annapolis and West Point (America’s naval and
military academies, respectively). Mr Huszar expects several franchisees to sign up
as a result.
This flexibility reflects some of the rules Mr Huszar developed when serving in
Iraq: don’t be wedded to the plan and recognise when conditions change. And that
is one of the advantages of running a small company; it is easier to change direction
quickly than at a big firm.
The 20% pandemic closure rate among small businesses in America, bad though it
is, could be read as showing that most soldier on. A survey from the National
Federation of Independent Business shows that optimism among small firms rose
for the second consecutive month in June. This month’s spike in infections might
temper it again. But then small-business managers like Messrs Shamess and Huszar
will once again adapt. They have the skills to do so.
VOCABULARY
• A special-operations pilot: phi công vận hành đặc biệt

• Handling some tricky situations: giải quyết một vài tình huống khó khăn
• Faced an unexpected challenge: đối mặt với thách thức không mong muốn
• Coronavirus pandemic: đại dịch covid-19
• Employee-recognition programmes: chương trình tuyên dương nhân viên
• Economic turbulence: bất ổn kinh tế
• Financial reserves: dự trữ tài chính
• US chamber of commerce: phòng thương mại hoa kỳ
• Government support: sự hỗ trợ chính phủ
• Paycheck protection program: chương trình bảo vệ dịch vụ kiểm tra thanh toán
• With the help of: với sự giúp đỡ của
• Furloughed: bị buộc phải thôi việc
• Newly launched craft kit: bộ thủ công mới ra mắt
• Create a business opportunity: tạo ra cơ hội kinh doanh
• Mould spores: bào tử nấm mốc
• Disinfect: khử trùng
• Air scrubbers: máy lọc không khí
• Personal-protection equipment: thiết bị bảo vệ cá nhân
• Virtual career conference: hội nghị nghề nghiệp trực tuyến
• Webbed to the plan: tin tưởng chắc chắn vào kế hoạch
• Spike in infections: sự tăng đột biến các bệnh nhiễm trùng
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business-1-12840674
2. Facebook’s retirement plan
What happens when the world’s biggest social network becomes its most doddery?
“White-hot”, a new documentary, traces the rise and fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,
an American fashion label that soared in the early 2000s before crashing just as
dramatically. The film explores the firm’s obsession with employing a certain type
of staff—handsome, chiselled, white—which led to damaging claims of racism
and sexual harassment. But just as harmful to Abercrombie was that it became
dated. Its low-rise jeans, cropped t-shirts and migraine-inducing cologne,
“Fierce”, became inseparably linked with Americans who came of age around the
turn of the century. The price of being so closely associated with one generation
was that the next wanted nothing to do with it.
Facebook, which took off around the same time, may be experiencing a similar
problem. Its millennial identity is embodied in its 37-year-old founder, Mark
Zuckerberg, who still wears his college uniform of skinny jeans and hoodie (though
these days his hoodies are bespoke). The social network, which began as a way for
oversexed Harvard undergraduates to rate each other’s looks, is now seen by
youngsters “as a place for people in their 40s and 50s”, in the words of one leaked
internal memo. Investors consider Facebook unfashionable, too: its parent
company, Meta, has lost 35% of its market value this year, including a plunge of
$232bn in February, the biggest one-day drop in stock market history.
Some of Facebook’s problems are overstated. With 2bn daily users, nearly one in
three humans, growth was bound to sputter. Its loss of 1m users in the last quarter
of 2021—the firm’s first-ever fall—was attributed to a rise in the price of mobile
data in India. A decline in European users in the latest quarter followed Meta’s
ejection from Russia. Privacy rules introduced by Apple are a more serious
problem, expected to cost Meta about $10bn this year by making it harder to target
ads for iPhone users. But the company is devising workarounds. In February it said
that since September it had clawed back half of the 15% reduction in its ability to
determine ads’ effectiveness. Similarly, it may be better able than most to absorb
the cost of new tech rules being written in Europe. Firms like Meta “have a
cockroach-like ability to find ways to maintain business as usual”, says Mark
Shmulik of Bernstein, a broker.
Yet if these hurdles can be overcome at a price, the ageing of Facebook’s audience
seems inexorable. In rich countries, which matter most to advertisers, young users
appear to be drifting away. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook executive, made
headlines last year for blowing the whistle on failures of content moderation. But
her more telling revelation was that engagement among young Americans had
plummeted. In Facebook’s five most important countries, account registrations
for under-18s had fallen by a quarter within a year, she said. Independent estimates
corroborate her claims. In Britain 18- to 24-year-olds are spending half as much
time on Facebook and Instagram, its sister app, as they were four years ago,
estimates Enders Analysis, a research firm. Mr Zuckerberg admitted last year that,
amid competition from TikTok and others, Facebook had neglected young people:
“Our services have gotten dialled to be the best for most people who use them,
rather than specifically for young adults.”
In the past, saving the flagship app was Mr Zuckerberg’s priority. After the
acquisition of Instagram in 2012, Facebook reportedly limited its adoptive sibling’s
ability to hire staff, out of fear that it would cannibalise Facebook’s users - “like
the big sister that wants to dress you up for the party but does not want you to be
prettier than she is”, in the words of a former Instagram executive quoted in “No
Filter”, a book by Sarah Frier. Today Mr Zuckerberg seems willing to sacrifice his
first-born to protect the wider business. Efforts to attract young people have focused
on other apps, such as Messenger Kids and Instagram Kids (which was shelved last
year). Reels, Meta’s TikTok clone, was rolled out first on Instagram. Last year Mr
Zuckerberg even dropped the Facebook name from his company, the better to
insulate the business from its least fashionable brand. Where once Mr
Zuckerberg’s obsession was repairing the ageing Facebook mothership, now he is
scrambling lifeboats in all directions: four new virtual-reality headsets are expected
in the next two years, as well as a smart watch.
The Face that launched a thousand shops
That is the right thing to do. But it raises the question of what will become of the
world’s biggest social network as it begins to decay. Once-mighty sites like
MySpace endure, like abandoned digital ruins. Far in the future, will Facebook, too,
become a ghost town?
Not necessarily. Young users are unlikely ever to return to Facebook for social
networking, which they increasingly do on apps like Snapchat or BeReal, a photo-
messaging service that is spreading on college campuses. But networking is only
one function of social media. People also use it to be entertained, and increasingly
to buy things. Facebook is losing its appeal as a place to socialise, but it may
reinvent itself as a platform for other activities.
In entertainment, TikTok is well ahead. Meta’s first attempt to copy it, with Lasso,
in 2018, failed. But having proved a hit on Instagram, where it accounts for 20% of
time spent, Reels is building an audience on Facebook, too. Facebook’s newsfeed
is being revamped along TikTokian lines, to recommend content suggested by
artificial intelligence, whether or not it was posted by a friend. Facebook has long
run an eBay-esque Marketplace, and in the pandemic launched Shops, to bring more
e-commerce onto its own platform. Its latest earnings call promised investment in
a service to let users send messages to companies through ads.
Abercrombie has dropped its elitist style in favour of “championing inclusivity and
creating a sense of belonging”. Half-naked hunks are out, replaced by plus-size
models in comfy athleisure wear, and last year revenue was back to 80% of its
peak. Facebook will likewise never be cool again. But there is plenty of less
glamorous money to be made.
VOCABULARY
• Retirement plan: kế hoạch nghỉ hưu

• Doddery: sự lung lay
• Racism and sexual harassment: sự phân biệt chủng tộc và xâm hại tình dục
• Chiselled: mạnh mẽ, sắc sảo
• Low-rise jeans: quần jean ống thấp
• Cropped t-shirts: áo phông lửng
• Revelation: sự tiết lộ
• The turn of the century: sự chuyển mình của thế kỷ
• Overstate: nói quá lên
• Bound to sputter: chắc chắn sẽ suy yếu
• Cockroach-like ability: khả năng bền bỉ
• Hurdle: thăng trầm
• Inexorable: khó hiểu
• Drift away: rời bỏ
• Account registrations: đăng ký tài khoản
• Acquisition: sự thu mua
• Out of fear that: vì sợ rằng
• Cannibalise: giảm
• Roll out: ra mắt
• Insulate the business from: ngăn cách doanh nghiệp khỏi
• Revamp along: cải thiện cùng với
• Artificial intelligent: trí tuệ nhân tạo
• Call promised investment: kêu gọi sự đầu tư mang tính hứa hẹn
• In favour of: nhờ sự giúp đỡ của
• Inclusivity: sự toàn diện
• Sense of belonging: cảm giác thân thuộc
• Half-naked hunk: người bán khỏa thân
• Plus-size models: mẫu ngoại cỡ
• Comfy athleisure wear: trang phục thoải mái thường nhật
• Glamorous money: tiền danh dự

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3. How to make hybrid work a success
Clarity of expectations is the key

White-collar workers tend to like hybrid working. Research by Nicholas Bloom of
Stanford University suggests that, on average, employees reckon the blend of in-
person and remote work is a perk equivalent to an 8% pay increase. The biggest
attraction of days spent working from home is the absence of a commute. Other
benefits include not having to get ready for the office: the proportion of people
wearing a fresh set of clothes drops by 20 percentage points when they are not
commuting.
Executives have been keener to get people back into the office full-time, so that
employees can bond with peers, absorb the corporate culture and appreciate the
awesome power of laundry. But even sceptics have accepted that hybrid working
will be part of the post-pandemic future: in his annual letter to shareholders this
week, Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan Chase, said he thought that about 40%
of the bank’s staff would be hybrid. The job now is to make sure that hybridisation
works as well as it can for both employees and employers. That depends on one
ingredient above all: clarity. Things function best when everyone knows what is
expected.
Start with the shape of the hybrid week. One of the great theoretical attractions of
hybrid working to employees is that they get to choose what days they come in. But
the point of in-person working is to spend time collaborating and bonding with their
colleagues: that is much more likely to happen if companies are clear about who
they want in the office on which days of the week.
Clarity also maximises the benefits of work-from-home days. If office time is best
spent in a whirlwind of collaborative brainstorming and socialising, home days are
logically the time when solo and focused work should get done. That requires
bosses to do what comes unnaturally to them, by resisting the temptation to interrupt
at will.
It is easier to do that if expectations are clear. Anne Raimondi of Asana, a work-

management platform, says the firm expects people to come in on Mondays,
Tuesdays and Thursdays, and has a “no meetings” day on Wednesday. If a manager
wants to have a meeting that day, they have to “recontract” with their team and
explain why it is needed.
By the same token, being explicit when a reply is needed on an email saves
everyone scurrying around in a desperate bid to answer the boss first. Defining
what kinds of work can be done asynchronously and what requires everyone to get
together is a recipe for fewer, better meetings. Encouraging a set of do-not-disturb
protocols makes it less likely that employees will be bothered unnecessarily.
Clear protocols also make hybrid meetings go better. Harry’s, a shaving firm that
has published its guidelines for hybrid working, expects each attendee to have their
own screen and promises not to keep discussing the matter at hand once remote
colleagues have left the meeting (though commenting on who is wearing the same
clothes as they did yesterday is presumably fine).
Some of this will be deeply alarming to managers who worry about slippery slopes.
First you give people space to focus at home, and soon enough you cannot contact
anyone because they have changed their settings on Slack and are binge-watching
“Bridgerton”.
There are three answers to such worries. First, expectations are firmly in the gift of
managers. Asana’s no-meetings day does not extend to meetings with customers,
for example.
Second, burnout is as much of a risk as slacking. New research from Microsoft

finds evidence for what it calls a “triple-peak day”. As well as the usual large crests
in activity in the early morning and after lunch, around 30% of employees at the
tech giant also experience a smaller, third bump in work in the late evening. That
may be a sign of people getting work done when it suits them—or of the workday
extending relentlessly into every waking hour. Setting expectations, over things like
how quickly notifications need to get a response, can help determine which one it
is.
Last, good performance is not defined by employees’ locations at specific times of

the day but by what they achieve—what Mr Bloom calls “managing outputs, not
inputs”. If bosses can articulate what counts as productive activity, and evaluate it
regularly, it matters less whether employees are at headquarters or stinking out the
spare bedroom. Managers may have concerns about hybrid working, but it is pretty
clear what will make it successful.
VOCABULARY
• Clarity of expectations: kỳ vọng rõ ràng

• The blend of: sự kết hợp giữa
• A perk equivalent to: một đặc quyền tương đương với
• The absence of a commute: không di chuyển đến nơi làm việc
• Bond with peers: tụ tập với đồng nghiệp
• Corporate culture: văn hóa tập thể
• Post-pandemic future: tương lai sau đại dịch
• Shareholders: cổ đông
• Hybridisation work: công việc linh động hoá
• Theoretical attractions: sức hấp dẫn về lý thuyết
• Maximise the benefits: tối đa hóa các lợi ích
• In a whirlwind of: sự lồng ghép giữa
• Solo and focused work: làm việc tập trung và độc lập
• Work-management platform: nền tảng quản lý việc làm
• By the same token: với cùng nguyên nhân
• A desperate bid: sự trả giá tuyệt vọng
• Asynchronously: một cách đồng bộ
• Do-not-disturb protocols: các giao thức không làm phiền
• Hybrid meeting: hội nghị bán trực tuyến
• Deeply alarming: báo động sâu sắc
• Binge watch: xem nhiều tập phim
• No-meetings day: ngày không cuộc họp
• Burnout: sự kiệt sức
• Slack: làm việc uể oải
• Tech giant: ông lớn công nghệ
• Get a response: nhận phản hồi
• Articulate: nói rõ

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TOPIC 2: EDUCATION
1. The role of employers
Cognition switch
Companies are embracing learning as a core skill
A strange-looking small room full of vintage furniture—an armchair, a chest of

drawers, a table—was being built in the middle of Infosys’s Palo Alto offices when
your correspondent visited in November. Tweed jackets hung from a clothes rack;
a piano was due to be delivered shortly. The structure was rough and unfinished.
And that, according to Sanjay Rajagopalan, was largely the point.
Mr Rajagopalan is head of research and design at the Indian business-services firm.

He is a disciple of “design thinking”, a problem-solving methodology rooted in
observation of successful innovators. His goal is an ambitious one: to turn a firm
that built a global offshoring business by following client specifications into one
that can set the terms of its projects for itself.
Design thinking emphasizes action over planning and encourages its followers to
look at problems through the eyes of the people affected. Around 100,000 Infosys
employees have gone through a series of workshops on it. The first such workshop
sets the participants a task: for example, to improve the experience of digital
photography. That involves moving from the idea of making
a better camera to considering why people value photographs in the first place, as a
way of capturing memories. Asideasflow, people taking part in the workshops
immediately start producing prototypes with simple materials like cardboard and
paper. “The tendency is to plan at length before building,” says Mr Rajagopalan.
“Our approach is to build, build, build, test and then plan.”
That baffling structure in Palo Alto was another teaching tool. Mr Rajagopalan had
charged a small team with reimagining the digital retail experience. Instead of
coming up with yet another e-commerce site, they were experimenting with
technologies to liven up a physical space. (If a weary shopper sat in the chair, say,
a pot of tea on an adjacent table would automatically brew up.) The construction of
the shop prototype in Infosys’s offices was being documented so that employees
could see design thinking in action.
Infosys is grappling with a vital question: what do people need to be good at to

succeed in their work? Whatever the job, the answer is always going to involve
some technical and specific skills, based on knowledge and experience of a
particular industry. But with design thinking, Infosys is focusing on “foundational
skills” like creativity, problem-solving and empathy. When machines can put
humans to shame in performing the routine job-specific tasks that Infosys once
took offshore, it makes sense to think about the skills that computers find harder to
learn.
David Deming of Harvard University has shown that the labour market is already
rewarding people in occupations that require social skills. Since 1980 growth in
employment and pay has been fastest in professions across the income scale that
put a high premium on social skills.
Social skills are important for a wide range of jobs, not just for health-care workers,
therapists and others who are close to their customers. Mr Deming thinks their main
value lies in the relationship between colleagues: people who can divide up tasks
quickly and effectively between them form more productive teams. If work in future
will increasingly be done by contractors and freelancers, that capacity for
cooperation will become even more important. Even geeks have to learn these
skills. Ryan Roslansky, who oversees LinkedIn’s push into online education, notes
that many software engineers are taking management and communication courses
on the site in order to round themselves out.
Building a better learner
Another skill that increasingly matters in finding and keeping a job is the ability to
keep learning. When technology is changing in unpredictable ways, and jobs are
hybridizing, humans need to be able to pick up new skills. At Infosys, Mr Rajago-
palan emphasizes “learning velocity”—the process of going from a question to a
good idea in a matter of days or weeks. Eric Schmidt, now executive chairman of
Alphabet, a tech holding company in which Google is the biggest component, has
talked of Google’s recruitment focus on “learning animals''. Mark Zuck- erberg,
one of Facebook’s founders, sets himself new personal learning goals each year.
An emphasis on learning has long been a hallmark of United Technologies (UTC),

a conglomerate whose businesses include Pratt & Whitney, a maker of aircraft
engines, and Otis, a lift manufacturer. Since 1996 UTC has been running a
programme under which its employees can take part-time degrees and have tuition
fees of up to $12,000 a year paid for them, no strings attached. Employers often
balk at training staff because they might leave for rivals, taking their expensively
gained skills with them. But Gail Jackson, the firm’s vice-president of human
resources, takes a different view. “We want people who are intellectually curious,”
she says. “It is better to train and have them leave than not to train and have them
stay.”
Such attitudes are becoming more common. When Satya Nadella took over as boss
of Microsoft in 2014, he drew on the work of Carol Dweck, a psychology professor
at Stanford University, to push the firm’s culture in a new direction. Ms Dweck
divides students into two camps: those who think that ability is innate and fixed
(dampening motivation to learn) and those who believe that abilities can be
improved through learning. This “growth mindset” is what the firm is trying to
encourage. It has amended its performance-review criteria to include an appraisal
of how employees have learned from others and then applied that knowledge. It has
also set up an internal portal that integrates Lynda, the training provider bought
by LinkedIn (which Microsoft itself is now buying).
AT&T, a telecoms and media firm with around 300,000 employees, faces two big
workforce problems: rapidly changing skills requirements in an era of big data and
cloud computing, and constant employee churn that leaves the company having
to fill 50,000 jobs a year. Recruiting from outside is difficult, expensive and liable
to cause ill-feeling among existing staff. The firm’s answer is an ambitious plan to
reskill its own people.
Employees each have a career profile that they maintain themselves, which contains
a record of their skills and training. They also have access to a database called
“career intelligence”, which shows them the jobs on offer within the company, what
skills they require and how much demand there is for them. The firm has developed
a short course called nanodegree with Udacity, the MOOC provider, and is also
working with universities on developing course curriculums. Employees work in
their own time to build their skills. But AT&T applies both carrot and stick to
encourage them, by way of generous help with tuition fees (totalling $30m in 2015)
for those who take courses and negative appraisal ratings for those who show no
interest.
As continued learning becomes a corporate priority, two questions arise. First, is it

possible for firms to screen candidates and employees on the basis of curiosity,
or what psychologists call “need for cognition”? Getting through university is one
very rough proxy for this sort of foundational skill, which helps explain why so
many employers stipulate degrees for jobs which on the face of it do not require
them.
Curiouser and curiouser
More data-driven approaches are also being tried. Man-power, a human-resources
consultancy, is currently running trials on an app that will score individuals on their
“learn-ability”. Knack, a startup, offers a series of apps that are, in effect, gamified
psychological tests. In Dashi Dash, for example, participants play the part of waiters
and are asked to take the orders of customers on the basis of (often hard to read)
expressions. As more and more customers arrive, the job of managing the work-
flow gets tougher. Every decision and every minute change in strategy is captured
as a data point and sent to the cloud, where machine-learning algorithms analyze
players’ aptitudes against a reference population of 25,000 people. An ability to
read expressions wins points for empathy; a decision always to serve customers in
the order in which they arrive in the game, for example, might serve as an indicator
of integrity. Intellectual curiosity is one of the traits that Knacktests for.
The second question is whether it is possible to train people to learn. Imaging

techniques are helping unlock what goes on in the mind of someone who is curious.
In a study published in 2014 in Neuron, a neuroscience journal, participants were
first asked to rate their curiosity to learn the answers to various questions. Later
they were shown answers to those questions, as well as a picture of a stranger’s
face; finally, they were tested on their recall of the answers and given a face-
recognition test. Greater curiosity led to better retention on both tests; brain scans
showed increased activity in the mesolimbic dopamine system, are ward pathway,
and in the hippocampus, a region that matters for forming new memories.
It is too early to know whether traits such as curiosity can be taught. But it is
becoming easier to turn individuals into more effective learners by making them
more aware of their own thought processes. Hypotheses about what works in
education and learning have become easier to test because of the rise of online
learning. MIT has launched an initiative to conduct interdisciplinary research
into the mechanics of learning and to apply the conclusions to its own teaching,
both online and offline. It uses its own online platforms, including a MOOC co-
founded with Harvard University called edX, to test ideas. When MOOC
participants were required to write down their plans for undertaking a course, for
example, they were 29% more likely to complete the course than a control group
who did not have to do so.
Information about effective learning strategies can be personalized, too. The Open
University, a British distance-learning institution, already uses dashboards to
monitor individual students’ online behavior and performance. Knewton, whose
platform captures data on 10m current American students, recommends
personalized content to them. Helping people to be more aware of their own thought
processes when they learn makes it more likely they can acquire new skills later in
life.
VOCABULARY
• Cognition switch: thay đổi nhận thức

• Problem-solving methodology: phương pháp giải quyết vấn đề
• Successful innovators: những nhà sáng chế thành công
• A global offshoring business: một doanh nghiệp gia công toàn cầu
• Client specifications: thông số kỹ thuật của khách hàng
• A way of capturing memories: một cách lưu giữ kỷ niệm
• Digital retail experience: kinh nghiệm bán lẻ số
• Liven up a physical space: làm không gian trở nên sống động
• Foundational skills: kỹ năng nền tảng
• Routine job-specific tasks: nhiệm vụ liên quan đến công việc cụ thể hàng ngày
• Put a high premium: đánh giá cao
• Capacity for cooperation: khả năng hợp tác
• Geek: người ham vui
• Software engineers: kỹ sư phần mềm
• Round themselves out: hoàn thiện bản thân họ
• Pick up new skills: tiếp thu những kỹ năng mới
• Hallmark: dấu mốc
• Take part-time degrees: nhận bằng bán thời gian
• Innate: bẩm sinh
• Dampen motivation: làm giảm động lực
• Appraisal: lời khen
• Set up an internal portal: thiết lập cổng thông tin nội bộ
• Constant employee churn: sự luân chuyển nhân viên liên tục
• Course curriculums: chương trình giảng dạy
• Screen candidates and employees: sàng lọc ứng viên và nhân viên
• Proxy: sự ủy quyền
• Stipulate: quy định
• Data-driven approaches: cách tiếp cận dựa trên cơ sở dữ liệu
• Machine-learning algorithms: thuật toán học máy
• An indicator of integrity: một biểu tượng của sự chính trực
• Intellectual curiosity: tò mò về mặt trí tuệ
• Neuroscience journal: tạp chí khoa học thần kinh
• Retention: giữ lại
• Hippocampus: hồi hải mã, 1 vùng của não mang chức năng ghi nhớ và hình
dung đường đi
• Launch an initiative: đưa ra một sáng kiến
• Conduct interdisciplinary research: tiến hành nghiên cứu liên ngành
• Effective learning strategies: phương pháp học tập hiệu quả
• Acquire new skills: lĩnh hội những kỹ năng mới

education-1-12840692
2. The return of the MOOC
Alternative providers of education must solve the problems of cost and credentials
T E O MOOCs peaked in 2012. Salman Khan, an investment analyst who had begun
teaching bite-sized lessons to his cousin in New Orleans over the internet and
turned that activity into a wildly popular educational resource called the Khan
Academy, was splashed on the cover of Forbes. Sebastian Thrun, the founder of
another MOOC called Udacity, predicted in an interview in Wired magazine that
within 50 years the number of universities would collapse to just ten worldwide.
The New York Times declared it the year of the MOOC.
The sheer numbers of people flocking to some of the initial courses seemed to
suggest that an entirely new model of open-access, free university education was
within reach. Now MOOC sceptics are more numerous than believers. Although
lots of people still sign up, drop-out rates are sky-high.
Nonetheless, the MOOCs are on to something. Education, like health care, is a

complex and fragmented industry, which makes it hard to gain scale. Despite
those drop-out rates, the MOOCs have shown it can be done quickly and
comparatively cheaply. The Khan Academy has 14m-15m users who conduct at
least one learning activity with it each month; Coursera has 22m registered learners.
Those numbers are only going to grow. FutureLearn, a MOOC owned by Britain’s
Open University, has big plans. Oxford University announced in November that it
would be producing its first MOOC on the edX platform.
In their search for a business model, some platforms are now focusing much more
squarely on employment (though others, like the Khan Academy, are not for profit).
Udacity has launched a series of nanodegrees in tech-focused courses that range
from the basic to the cutting-edge. It has done so, moreover, in partnership with
employers. A course on Android was developed with Google; a nanodegree in
self-driving cars uses instructors from Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia and others. Students
pay $199- 299 a month for as long as it takes them to finish the course (typically
six to nine months) and get a 50% rebate if they complete it within a year. Udacity
also offers a souped-up version of its nanodegree for an extra $100 a month, along
with a money-back guarantee if graduates do not find a job within six months.
Coursera’s content comes largely from universities, not specialist instructors; its
range is much broader; and it is offering full degrees (one in computer science, the
other an MBA) as well as shorter courses. But it, too, has shifted its emphasis to
employability. Its boss, Rick Levin, a former president of Yale University, cites
research showing that half of its learners took courses in order to advance their
careers. Although its materials are available without charge, learners pay for
assessment and accreditation at the end of the course ($300-400 for a four-course
sequence that Coursera calls a “specialization”). It has found that when money is
changing hands, completion rates rise from 10% to 60%. It is increasingly working
with companies, too. Firms can now integrate Coursera into their own learning
portals, track employees’ participation and provide their desired menu of courses.
These are still early days. Coursera does not give out figures on its paying learners;
Udacity says it has 13,000 people doing its nanodegrees. Whatever the arithmetic,
the reinvented MOOCs matter because they are solving two problems they share
with every provider of later-life education.
The first of these is the cost of learning, not just in money but also in time. Formal
education rests on the idea of qualifications that take a set period to complete. In
America the entrenched notion of “seat time”, the amount of time that students
spend with school teachers or university professors, dates back to Andrew Carnegie.
It was originally intended as an eligibility requirement for teachers to draw a
pension from the industrial- ist’s nascent pension scheme for college faculty.
Students in their early 20s can more easily afford a lengthy time commitment
because they are less likely to have other responsibilities. Although millions of
people do manage part-time or distance learning in later life—one-third of all
working students currently enrolled in America are 30-54 years old, according to
the Georgetown University Centre on Education and the Workforce—balancing
learning, working and family life can cause enormous pressures. Moreover, the
world of work increasingly demands a quick response from the education system to
provide people with the desired qualifications. To take one example from Burning
Glass, in 2014 just under 50,000 American job-vacancy ads asked for a CISSP
cyber-security certificate. Since only 65,000 people in America hold such a
certificate and it takes five years of experience to earn one, that requirement will
be hard to meet. Less demanding professions also put up huge barriers to entry. If
you want to become a licensed cosmetologist in New Hampshire, you will need to
have racked up 1,500 hours of training.
In response, the MOOCs have tried to make their content as digestible and flexible
as possible. Degrees are broken into modules; modules into courses; courses into
short segments. The MOOCs test for optimal length to ensure people complete the
course; six minutes is thought to be the sweet spot for online video and four weeks
for a course.
Scott DeRue, the dean of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan,
says the unbundling of educational content into smaller components reminds him
of another industry: music. Songs used to be bundled into albums before being
disaggregated by iTunes and streaming services such as Spotify. In Mr DeRue’s
analogy, the degree is the album, the course content that is freely available on
MOOCs is the free streaming radio service, and a “microcredential” like the
nanodegree or the specialisation is paid-for iTunes.
How should universities respond to that kind of disruption? For his answer, Mr
DeRue again draws on the lessons of the music industry. Faced with the disruption
caused by the internet, it turned to live concerts, which provided a premium
experience that cannot be replicated online. The on-campus degree also needs to
mark itself out as a premium experience, he says.
Another answer is for universities to make their own products more accessible by
doing more teaching online. This is beginning to happen. When Georgia Tech
decided to offer an online version of its masters in computer science at low cost,
many were shocked: it seemed to risk cannibalizing its campus degree. But
according to Joshua Goodman of Harvard University, who has studied the
programme, the decision was proved right. The campus degree continued to recruit
students in their early 20s whereasthe online degree attracted people with a median
age of 34 who did not want to leave their jobs. Mr Goodman reckons this one
programme could boost the numbers of computer-science masters produced in
America each year by 7-8%. Chip Paucek, the boss of 2U, a firm that creates online
degree programmes for conventional universities, reports that additional marketing
efforts to lure online students also boost on-campus enrolments.
Educational Lego
Universities can become more modular, too. EdX has a micromasters in supply-
chain management that can either be taken on its own or count towards a full
masters at MIT. The University of Wisconsin-Extension has set up a site called the
University Learning Store, which offers slivers of online content on practical
subjects such as project management and business writing. Enthusiaststal of a world
of “stackable credentials” in which qualifications can be fitted together like bits of
Lego.
Just how far and fast universities will go in this direction is unclear, however.
Degrees are still highly regarded, and increased emphasis on critical thinking and
social skills raises their value in many ways. “The model of campuses, tenured
faculty and so on does not work that well for short courses,” adds Jake Schwartz,
General Assembly’s boss. “The economics of covering fixed costs forces them to
go longer.”
Academic institutions also struggle to deliver really fast-moving content.
Pluralsight uses a model similar to that of book publishing by employing a network
of 1,000 experts to produce and refresh its library of videos on IT and creative skills.
These experts get royalties based on how often their content is viewed; its highest
earner pulled in $2m last year, according to Aaron Skonnard, the firm’s boss. Such
rewards provide an incentive for authors to keep updating their content. University
faculty have other priorities.
Besides costs, the second problem for MOOCs to solve is credentials. Close col-
leagues know each other’s abilities, but modern labor markets do not work on the
basis of such relationships. They need widely understood signals of experience and
expertise, like a university degree or a baccalaureate, however imperfect they may
be. In their own fields, vocational qualifications do the same job. The MOOCs’
answer is to offer microcredentials like nanodegrees and specializations. But
employers still need to be confident that the skills these credentials vouchsafe are
for real. LinkedIn’s “endorsements” feature, for example, was routinely used by
members to hand out compliments to people they did not know for skills they did
not possess, in the hope of a reciprocal recommendation. In 2016, something
faintly regressive about the world of microcredentials. Like a university degree, it
still involves a stamp of approval from a recognised provider after a proprietary
process. Yet lots of learning happens in informal and experiential settings, and lots
of workplace skills cannot be acquired in a course.
Gold stars for good behaviour

One way of dealing with that is to divide the currency of knowledge into smaller
denominations by issuing “digital badges”to recognise less formal achievements.
RMIT University, Australia’s largest tertiary-education institution, is working
with Credly, a credentialing platform, to issue badges for the skills that are not
tested in exams but that firms nevertheless value. Belinda Tynan, RMIT’s vice-
president, cites a project carried out by engineering students to build an electric car,
enter it into races and win sponsors as an example.
The trouble with digital badges is that they tend to proliferate. Illinois State
University alone created 110 badges when it launched a programme with Credly in
2016. Add in MOOC certificates, LinkedIn Learning courses, competency-based
education, General Assembly and the like, and the idea of creating new
currencies of knowledge starts to look more like a recipe for hyperinflation.
David Blake, the founder of Degreed, a startup, aspires to resolve that problem by
acting as the central bank of credentials. He wants to issue a standardized
assessment of skill levels, irrespective of how people got there. The plan is to create
a network of subject-matter experts to assess employees’ skills (copy-editing, say,
or credit analysis), and a standardized grading language that means the same
thing to everyone, everywhere.
Pluralsight is heading in a similar direction in its field. A diagnostic tool uses a

technique called item response theory to workout users’ skill levels in areas such as
coding, giving them a rating. The system helps determine what individuals should
learn next, but also gives companies a standardized way to evaluate people’s skills.
People are more likely to invest in training if it confers a qualification that others
will recognise. But they also need to know which skills are useful in the first place
the firm tightened things up, but getting the balance right is hard. Credentials
require just the right amount of friction: enough to be trusted, not so much as to
block career transitions.
Universities have no trouble winning trust: many of them can call on centuries of
experience and name recognition. Coursera relies on universities and business
schools for most of its content; their names sit proudly on the certificates that the
firm issues. Some employers, too, may have enough kudos to play a role in
authenticating credentials. The involvement of Google in the Android nanodegree
has helped persuade Flipkart, an Indian e-commerce platform, to hire Udacity
graduates sight unseen. Wherever the content comes from, students’ work usually
needs to be validated properly for a credential to be trusted. When student numbers
are limited, the marking can be done by the teacher. But in the world of MOOCs
those numbers can spi- ral, making it impractical for the instructors to do all the
assess- ments. Automation can help, but does not work for complex assignments
and subjects. Udacity gets its students to submit their coding projects via GitHub, a
hosting site, to a network of machine-learning graduates who give feedback
within hours.
Even if these problems can be overcome, however, there is A system of

standardized skills measures has its own problems, however. Using experts to grade
ability raises recursive questions about the credentials of those experts. And it is
hard for item response theory to assess subjective skills, such as an ability to
construct an argument. Specific, measurable skills in areas such as IT are more
amenable to this approach.
So amenable, indeed, that they can be tested directly. As an adolescent in Armenia,

Tigran Sloyan used to compete in mathematical Olympiads. That experience helped
him win a place at MIT and also inspired him to found a startup called CodeFights
in San Francisco. The site offers free gamified challenges to 500,000 users as a way
of helping programmers learn. When they know enough, they are funnelled towards
employers, which pay the firm 15% of a successful candidate’s starting salary.
Sqore, a startup in Stockholm, also uses competitions to screen job applicants on
behalf of its clients.
However, it is done, the credentialing problem has to be solved. People are much
more likely to invest in training if it confers a qualification that others will
recognise. But they also need to know which skills are useful in the first place.
VOCABULARY
• Credentials: chứng chỉ

• Bite-sized lessons: bài học nhỏ
• Learning resource: tư liệu học tập
• Drop-out rates: tỉ lệ bỏ học
• Complex and fragmented industry: ngành phức tạp và phân hóa
• Tech-focused courses: những khóa học tập trung vào công nghệ
• Cutting-edge: hiện đại, tân tiến
• Money-back guarantee: cam kết hoàn tiền
• Employability: khả năng tuyển dụng
• Advance sb’s career: phát triển sự nghiệp
• Accreditation: công nhận
• Eligibility requirement: yêu cầu đủ điều kiện
• Draw a pension: rút tiền lương hưu
• Afford a lengthy time commitment: đủ khả năng cam kết thời gian dài
• The unbundling of educational content: sự phân nhóm trong nội dung giáo
dục
• Disaggregate: tách ra
• Provide a premium experience: cung cấp trải nghiệm chất lượng cao
• Boost on-campus enrolment: tăng cường tuyển sinh trong trường
• Critical thinking: tư duy phản biện
• Fast-moving contents: nội dung chuyển động nhanh
• Provide an incentive: tạo động lực, khích lệ
• Baccalaureate: bằng tú tài
• Vocational qualifications: trình độ nghề nghiệp
• Reciprocal recommendation: đề xuất có đi có lại
• Denomination: đơn vị nhỏ hơn
• Digital badges: huy hiệu số
• Tertiary-education institution: cơ sở giáo dục đại học
• Proliferate: phổ biến
• New currencies of knowledge: đơn vị kiến thức mới
• Hyperinflation: siêu lạm phát
• Subject-matter experts: các chuyên gia về các chủ đề quan trọng
• Standardized assessment: đánh giá được tiêu chuẩn hoá
• Standardized grading language: ngôn ngữ chấm điểm tiêu chuẩn hóa
• Pluralsight: tầm nhìn đa chiều
• Diagnostic tool: công cụ chẩn đoán
• Friction: sự ma sát
• Machine-learning graduates: những người tốt nghiệp học máy

3. How to turn a qualification into a salary
University education is designed to act as a slipway, launching students into the

wider world in the expectation that the currents will guide them into a job. In
practice, many people get stuck in the doldrums because employers demand
evidence of specific experience even from entry-level candidates. Whether this
counts as a skills gap is a matter of debate. “If I cannot find a powerful, fuel-
efficient, easy-to-park car for $15,000, that doesn’t mean there is a car shortage,”
say Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. But
whether the fault lies with the educators or the employers, there is a need for
pathways that lead individuals into jobs.
Sometimes those pathways are clearly defined, as in medicine and the law.
Vocational education combines classroom and work-based learning to prepare
young people for specific trades. In many European countries, one-third to half of
later-stage secondary school goers are on a vocational path. Britain is due to
introduce an apprenticeship levy in April.
But pathways are needed to smooth transitions in other countries (America, for
example, lacks a tradition of vocational education); in less structured occupations;
and when formal education has come to an end. The nanodegree is an example of
such a pathway, as is General Assembly’s bootcamp model. Both rely heavily on
input from employers to create content; both use jobs rather than credentials as a
measure of success.
That is particularly important in the early stages of people’s careers, which is not
just when they lack experience but also when earnings grow fastest. An analysis of
American wage growth by economists at the New York Federal Reserve showed
that the bulk of earnings growth took place between the ages of 25 and 35; on
average, after the age of 45 only the top 2% of life-time earners see any earnings
growth. So it is vital for people to move quickly into work once qualified, and to
hold on to jobs once they get them.
That is the insight behind LearnUp, a startup that works with applicants without
college degrees for entry-level positions. Users applying for a job online can click
on a link and take a one-hour online training session on how to be a cashier, or sale
clerk or whatever they are after. Employers pay LearnUp a fixed fee to improve the
pool of candidates. Recruitment and retention rates have risen.
Generation, a philanthropically funded programme run by the McKinsey Social

Initiative, a not-for-profit arm of consultancy, use a boot camp approach and
some typically McKinsey-esque thinking to train people from difficult backgrounds
for middle-skilled positions in industries like retailing and health care. The
programme starts by going into workplaces and identifying key events (how an IT
helpdesk handles a call from an irate customer, for example) that distinguish high
performers from the rest.
Curriculum designers then use that analysis to create a full-time training programme
lasting between four and 12 weeks that covers both technical knowledge and
behaviorial skills. The programme has gone live in America, Spain, India, Kenya
and Mexico. By the end of 2016 it had 10,000 graduates, for whom it claims an
employment rate of 90% and much higher retention rates than usual. The trainees
pay nothing; the hope is that employers will fund the programme, or embed it in
their own training programmes, when they see how useful it is.
A little help from your friends
Such experiments use training to take people into specific jobs. In the past, an initial
shove might have been all the help they needed. But as middle-skilled roles
disappear, some rungs on the job ladder have gone missing. And in a world of
continuous reskilling and greater self-employment, people may need help with
repeatedly moving from one type of job to another. Vocational education is good at
getting school-leavers into work, but does nothing to help people adapt to changes
in the world of work. Indeed, a cross-country study in 2015 by researchers at the
Hoover Institution suggests that people with a vocational education are more likely
than those with a general education to withdraw from the labour force as they
age. The pattern is particularly marked in countries that rely heavily on
apprenticeships, such as Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.
Large companies may have the scale to offer their employees internal pathways to
improve their skills, as companies like AT&T do. But many workers will need
outside help in deciding which routes to take. That suggests a big opportunity for
firms that can act, in effect, as careers advisers. Some are better placed than others
to see where the jobs market is going. Manpower, which supplies temporary
workers to many industries, last year launched a programme called MyPath that is
based on the idea of an iterative process of learning and working. It allows Man-
power’s army of temporary workers in America to earn a degree from Western
International University at no financial cost to them. The degree is structured as a
series of three or four episodes of education followed by periods in work, in the
expectation that Manpower has a good overview of the skills leading to well-paid
jobs.
LinkedIn is another organisation with a decent understanding of wider trends. The

professional-networking site likes to call the data it sits on “the economic graph”, a
digital map of the global economy. Its candidate data, and its recruitment
platform, give it information on where demand from employers is greatest and
what skills job seekers need. And with LinkedIn Learning it can now also deliver
training itself.
The firm can already tell candidates how well their qualifications for any advertised
job stack up against those of other applicants. In time, its data might be used to
give “investment advice”, counselling its members on the financial return to
specific skills and on how long they are likely to be useful; or to show members
how other people have got into desirable positions.
The difficulty with offering mass-market careers advice is finding a business model
that will pay for it. LinkedIn solves this problem by aiming itself primarily at
professionals who either pay for services themselves or who are of interest to
recruiters. But that raises a much bigger question. “There is no shortage of options
for folks of means,” says Adam Newman of Tyton Partners, an education
consultancy. “But what about LinkedIn for the linked-out?”
VOCABULARY
• Turn a qualification into a salary: biến trình độ thành thu nhập

• Entry-level candidates: ứng viên trình độ đầu vào
• Skills gap: khoảng cách về kỹ năng
• Vocational path: con đường sự nghiệp
• Introduce an apprenticeship levy: đưa ra một khoản tiền trợ cấp học nghề
• A measure of success: thước đo của sự thành công
• The bulk of earnings growth: phần lớn của sự tăng trưởng thu nhập
• Entry-level positions: các vị trí không yêu cầu kinh nghiệm
• Philantrophycally funded programme: chương trình gây quỹ từ thiện
• Non-for-profit arm of consultancy: tổ chức tư vấn phi lợi nhuận
• Middle-skilled positions: các vị trí kỹ năng trung bình
• Behavioral skills: kỹ năng ứng xử
• Retention rate: tỷ lệ duy trì
• Rung on the job ladder: nấc thang sự nghiệp
• School leavers: những người bỏ học
• Withdraw from the labor force: rút khỏi lực lượng lao động
• Career adviser: người tư vấn nghề nghiệp
• Earn a degree: kiếm một cái bằng
• Well-paid jobs: nghề có thu nhập tốt
• Digital map: bản đồ số
• Recruitment platform: nền tảng tuyển dụng
• Job seeker: người tìm kiếm việc làm
• Stack up: chồng chất
• Desirable positions: vị trí khao khát
• Business model: mô hình doanh nghiệp

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TOPIC 3: ENTERTAINMENT
1. Who will win the media wars?
Disney’s new streaming service and the media wars
America has seen some spectacular investment booms: think of the railways in
the 1860s, Detroit’s car industry in the 1940s or the fracking frenzy in this century.
Today the latest bonanza is in full swing, but instead of steel and sand it involves
scripts, sounds, screens and celebrities. This week Disney launched a streaming
service which offers “Star Wars” and other hits from its vast catalogue for $6.99 a
month, less than the cost of a DVD. As the business model pioneered by Netflix is
copied by dozens of rivals, over 700m subscribers are now streaming video across
the planet. Roughly as much cash—over $100bn this year—is being invested in
content as it is in America’s oil industry. In total the entertainment business has
spent at least $650bn on acquisitions and programming in the past five years.
This binge is the culmination of 20 years of creative destruction. New technologies

and ideas have shaken up music, gaming and now television. Today many people
associate economic change with deteriorating living standards: job losses, being
ripped-off, or living under virtual monopolies in search and social networks. But
this business blockbuster is a reminder that dynamic markets can benefit
consumers with lower prices and better quality. Government has so far had little to
do with the boom, but when it inevitably peaks the state will have a part to play, by
ensuring that the market stays open and vibrant.
The entertainment business is fast-moving by its very nature. It has few tangible
assets, it relies on technology to distribute its wares and its customers crave novelty.
The emergence of sound in the 1920s cemented Hollywood as the centre of the
global film business. But by the end of the 20th century the industry had grown as
complacent as a punchline in a repeat episode of “Friends”. It relied on old
technologies—analogue broadcasting, slow internet connections and the storage of
sounds and sights on fiddly CDs, DVDs and hard drives. And the commercial
approach was to rip off consumers by overcharging for stale content packaged into
oversized bundles.
The first shudder came in music in 1999, with internet services soon putting
established music firms such as emi and Warner Music under pressure. In television
Netflix broke the mould in 2007 by using broadband connections to sell video
subscriptions, undercutting the cable firms. When the smartphone took off it
tailored its service to hand-held devices. The firm has acted as a catalyst for
competition, forcing the old guard to slash prices and innovate, and sucking in new
contenders. The boom has seen star writers paid as if they were Wall Street titans,
sent rents for Hollywood studio lots into the stratosphere and overtook the 20th
century’s media barons, including Rupert Murdoch, who sold much of his empire
to Disney in March.
Amid the debris and deals the outlines of a new business model are becoming
clear. It relies on broadband and devices, not cable-packages, and overwhelmingly
on subscriptions, not advertising. Unlike in search or social media, no firm in
television and video streaming has more than a 20% market share by revenues. The
contenders include Netflix, Disney, at&t-Time Warner, Comcast and smaller
upstarts. Three tech firms are active, too—YouTube (owned by Alphabet), Amazon
and Apple, although their collective market share is still small. The music industry
is also contested, with the biggest firm, Spotify, having a 34% market share in
America.
Disruption has created an economic windfall. Consider consumers, first. They have
more to choose from at lower prices and can pick from a variety of streaming
services that cost less than $15 each compared with $80 or more for a cable bundle.
Last year 496 new shows were made, double the number in 2010. Quality has also
risen, judged by the crop of Oscar and Emmy nominations for streamed shows and
by the rising diversity of storytelling. Workers have done reasonably. The number
of entertainment, media, arts and sports jobs in America has risen by 8% since 2008
and wages are up by a fifth. Investors, meanwhile, no longer enjoy abnormally fat
profits, but those who backed the right firms have done well. A dollar invested in
Viacom shares a decade ago is worth 95 cents today. For Netflix the figure is $37.
Many booms turn to bust. Unlike, say, WeWork, most entertainment firms have a
plausible strategy, but too much cash is now chasing eyeballs. Netflix is burning
$3bn a year and would need to raise prices by 15% to break even—tricky when
there are over 30 rival services. It hopes that its fast-growing international markets
will create economies of scale. As well as saturation, the other danger is debt. Deals
and high spending have caused American media firms to build up $500bn of
borrowing.
When the shake-out comes, history offers two dispiriting examples of how a
consumer-friendly boom can turn into a stitch-up. Telecoms and airlines in America
saw a riot of competition in the 1990s only to become financially stretched and
then reconsolidated into oligopolies that are known today for poor service and high
prices.
This is why government has a role in keeping the entertainment business

competitive. First, it should prevent any firm—including the tech giants—from
acquiring a dominant share in the content business. Second, it should require the
companies that own the gateways to content, such as telecoms firms or handset
providers such as Apple that can control what screens show—to have an open-
access policy and not discriminate against particular content firms. Last, it should
make sure subscribers can move their personal data from one firm to another, so
they do not become locked in to one service.
Don’t lose the plot
Few people look to Hollywood for economics lessons. But the entertainment epic
has featured vibrant capital markets. Buy-out firms, stockmarkets and junk bonds
have all financed the industry’s reinvention. The stars have been billionaire
entrepreneurs such as Reed Hastings, Netflix’s boss. And open borders have set the
scene, since talent comes from around the world and a majority of streaming
subscribers now live outside America. Across the economy, these elements are at
risk as politicians and voters veer away from open trade and free markets. For a
reminder of why they matter, turn on your screen and press play.
VOCABULARY
• Spectacular investment booms: sự bùng nổ ngoạn mục về đầu tư

• Streaming service: dịch vụ phát trực tuyến
• Culmination: kết quả
• Deteriorate living standards: làm tệ đi điều kiện sống
• Ripped-off: bị bán đắt
• Live under virtual monopolies: sống trong sự độc quyền ảo
• Dynamic markets: thị trường năng động
• Tangible assets: tài sản hữu hình
• Complacent: tự mãn
• Stale content: nội dung cũ rích
• Broke the mould: phá vỡ khuôn khổ
• Hand-held devices: thiết bị cầm tay
• Amid the debris and deals: giữa những đổ vỡ và thỏa thuận
• Economic windfall: kinh tế thất bại
• Cable bundle: bó cáp
• Abnormally fat profits: lợi nhuận béo bở bất thường
• Turn to bust: không thành công, thất bại
• Dispiriting: tuyệt vọng, chán nản
• A riot of competition: bạo loạn cạnh tranh
• Financially stretched: khó khăn về mặt tài chính
• Acquire a dominant share: giành được cổ phần chi phối
• Vibrant capital market: thị trường vốn sôi động
• Veer away from: tránh xa

entertainment-1-12840704
2. How the coronavirus is changing arts and entertainment in America
Museums have shut their doors. Theatres on Broadway have put away their props
and sent their performers home. Sports tournaments, concerts and the Tribeca Film
Festival have been postponed; South by Southwest was cancelled; Coachella has
been (rather optimistically) pushed back to the autumn. But lovers of the arts need
not despair. As state governors across the country impose mandatory social-
distancing measures to slow the spread of covid-19, Americans, like other
discombobulated isolators, are being presented with new ways to keep
entertained. In this, the internet plays a huge role.
Streaming services are the most obvious beneficiary of a populace cooped up

indoors. A recent report from Nielsen, a market-research firm, suggests that the
crisis could lead to a 60% increase in the amount of content streamed. Nielsen
looked at media consumption during past crises: during Hurricane Harvey in 2017,
for example, total TV use in Houston rose 56% from the period preceding the storm.
Viewers particularly sought out feature films and entertainment.
Such companies are meeting that demand by putting new titles on their platforms.
Disney announced that “Frozen 2” would be available on Disney+ three months
ahead of schedule to provide families “with some fun and joy during this
challenging period”. (Parents of young children will no doubt be grateful.) Other
studios have similarly released recent movies online, or are skipping releases in
cinemas altogether. Universal Pictures says it plans to make “The Invisible Man”,
“The Hunt” and “Emma” available to online audiences for a rental fee while they
are still in cinemas. “Birds of Prey”, the latest DC Comics instalment from Warner
Bros. Pictures, will also make a sooner-than-expected digital debut.
Musical ensembles are also providing levity and distraction. Enterprising

institutions have been live-streaming opera, ballet and classical-music
performances to cinemas for some years, so some have adapted quickly to recent
developments. The Metropolitan Opera in New York is hosting “Nightly Met Opera
Streams” on its website. Opera-lovers will be treated to filmed performances of
favourites such as Puccini’s “La Bohème” and Verdi’s “La Traviata”. Last week,
the Philadelphia Orchestra played two of Beethoven’s symphonies to an empty hall,
broadcast on Facebook Live. As the camera pans over the musicians, showing
fingers and bows flying, it is impossible to tell that the performance is in any way
unusual. It is only when the camera zooms out from the stage, and rows of empty
seats are revealed, that the show takes on a more solemn feel.
Even museums, arguably the hardest cultural experience to replicate in your living
room, are making the most of existing technology. Google’s Arts & Culture project,
which began in 2011, allows internet users to explore the collections of 1,200
museums and archives around the world, including the and the Art InstitMuseum
of Modern Art in New Yorkute of Chicago. Many more museums feature parts of
their collections online in scrollable photo galleries or digitised archives.
Clicking through pictures or documents on a website may be less thrilling than
exploring labyrinthine galleries, but the potential to discover and connect with
new artists, forms and history remains.
Social media provides an obvious way for self-isolating artists to connect with
their self-isolating fans. With a message of “we’re staying home too / it’s the safe
and cool thing to do”, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton”, live-
streamed an impromptu performance of “My Shot” to nearly 800,000 Twitter users.
Chris Martin, of Coldplay, and John Legend, a singer-songwriter, have also
performed “concerts” at home. For fans accustomed to following their favourite
stars and influencers on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram, not much may change:
younger people are already used to getting their entertainment fix through a screen.
Yet streaming, in all its myriad forms, will not be enough to offset the economic
cost of the virus on the entertainment industry. More people may be watching
Disney+, but the company’s shuttered theme parks resemble ghost towns. (A
standard single ticket to Disney World costs just over $100, while a year’s
subscription to Disney+ is $70.) ESPN, which Disney owns, will have to cope with
the cancellation of all major sporting events. Disney’s blockbuster film releases,
such as the live-action remake of “Mulan”, are being delayed; their new
productions have been halted. However long the self-isolation measures last, their
effects will be felt for some time.
The picture looks even bleaker for cultural institutions (such as Broadway
theatres) which rely on ticket sales and tourism to survive. Such organisations—
and the thousands of people who do shift work for them—will struggle as a result
of a long quarantine period. Some shows or theatres may not be able to re-open
at all; the same is true of art exhibitions and galleries. In the meantime, though,
entertainers strive to keep spirits up. “Stay home, wash hands,” Mr Miranda
writes. Then, “here’s a live tune.”
VOCABULARY
• Despair: tuyệt vọng

• Impose mandatory social-distancing measures: áp đặt các biện pháp giãn cách
xã hội bắt buộc
• Slow the spread of covid-19: làm chậm sự lây lan của covid-19
• Discombobulated isolators: khu vực cách ly rải rác
• Beneficiary: trung gian
• A populace cooped up indoors: một người dân ở trong nhà
• Market-research firm: công ty nghiên cứu thị trường
• Feature films and entertainment: phim truyện và giải trí
• Meet the demand: đáp ứng nhu cầu
• Music ensembles: nhóm nhạc
• Provide levity and distraction: cho thấy sự nhàm chán và thiếu nghiêm túc
• Solemn: nghiêm túc
• Scrollable photo galleries: thư viện ảnh
• Digitised archives: kho lưu trữ số hóa
• Labyrinthine galleries: phòng trưng bày mê cung
• Bleaker: bạc màu
• Cultural institutions: địa điểm văn hóa
• Rely on ticket sales: dựa vào doanh thu vé
• A long quarantine period: thời gian dài cách ly
• Try to keep spirit up: cố gắng vực dậy tinh thần
• Self-isolating artists: nghệ sĩ tự cách ly
• Accustomed to: quen với
• Blockbuster film releases: sự phát hành phim bom tấn
• Delay: trì hoãn
• Halt: ngừng

entertainment-2-12840710
3. Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in America
But it has kept a low profile
In 1965 three fathers in Washington state faced a dilemma familiar to beleaguered

parents in 2021: how to keep their restless children entertained. They threw
together wooden paddles, a badminton net, and a perforated plastic ball. The
sport “pickleball” was born, deriving its name—according to one legend—from a
dog named Pickle, which kept running away with the ball.
Today pickleball, which is a hybrid of tennis, badminton, and ping-pong, is the

fastest-growing sport in America. In the five years to the end of 2019, pickleball
participation grew by more than 7%, while Americans’ overall activity level stayed
flat, according to the Sport & Fitness Industry Association. Although data from
2020 have not yet been released, the sport has picked up more swing thanks to
Covid-19. Last March, when quarantines went into effect and gyms closed,
portable pickleball nets temporarily sold out. Players set up courts, which are half
the size of tennis courts, in driveways. “It’s the new thing,” says Derek Heil, an
employee at Dick’s Sporting Goods in Dallas, who has seen a sales spike for
pickleball equipment over the last year, including for higher-end paddles which
sell for around $100.
The 3.5m Americans who play pickleball are about one-tenth the number who golf
and one-fifth the number who play tennis. Yet there are reasons to bet on the sport’s
spread. Like many outdoor activities, pickleball is social, but it is easier to learn
than tennis and faster and less expensive than golf. Country clubs and recreation
centres across the country are converting some of their tennis courts into pickleball
courts to meet demand. The more places there are to play, the more players will try
the sport.
Hoping to predict where the ball is going to land, manufacturers of tennis racquets
are starting to make pickleball kit too. “Pickleball was seen as a threat in the tennis
community,” says Stu Upson of USA Pickleball, the sport’s national governing
body, who used to work for the International Tennis Hall of Fame. But now, he
insists, it is viewed as an opportunity. Tennis pros are adding pickleball lessons to
their repertoire. As more people take up the sport, demand for televised matches
and sponsorships will increase. Mr. Upson hopes that one day pickleball will
become an Olympic sport, although that may be a long shot.
VOCABULARY
• Kept a low profile: tránh gây sự chú ý, xem xét kĩ lưỡng từ mọi người
• Faced a dilemma: đối mặt với một tình huống khó xử
• Beleaguered parents: cha mẹ gặp nhiều khó khăn
• Restless children: trẻ em hiếu động
• Wooden paddles, a badminton net, and a perforated plastic ball: mái chèo
bằng gỗ, lưới cầu lông và một quả bóng nhựa đục lỗ
• Hybrid: sự lai giữa
• The fastest-growing sport: môn thể thao phát triển nhanh nhất
• Stayed flat: giữ vững, không thay đổi
• Set up courts: thiết lập sân chơi
• Picked up more swing: đã thu hút nhiều sự chú ý
• Quarantines went into effect: sự cách ly có hiệu lực
• A sales spike: sự tăng đột biến doanh số bán hàng
• Higher-end paddles: mái chèo cao cấp hơn
• The sport’s spread: sự phổ biến của môn thể thao
• Pickleball kit: 1 bộ chơi môn thể thao kết hợp
• Repertoire: tiết mục
• Televised matches: những trận đấu được phát sóng
• A long shot: điều ít khả năng xảy ra
Link CRAM: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/01/28/pickleball-is-the-

fastest-growing-sport-in-america

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TOPIC 4: ENVIRONMENT
1. Making trade greener
When environmental protection turns into trade protection
For decades, the dominant view among policymakers was that trade and
environmental policy should be kept out of each other’s way. Limited measures to
help the environment were allowed under WTO rules, but only so long as they
restricted trade no more than was deemed absolutely necessary. Environmental
provisions crept into trade deals, but were usually framed as a way to stop partners
from gaining an unfair competitive advantage by exploiting natural resources.
Trade negotiators tried to slash tariffs on greener goods, including those that
measure or reduce pollution, and to agree rules to curb damaging subsidies. But
this broadly supported multilateralism while eliminating distortions that they
mostly wanted to get rid of anyway.
The most obvious change in recent years has been in the priority that politicians
(and voters) now place on environmental goals. In 2008 41% of American adults
told the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank and pollster, that protecting the
environment should be a top priority for the president and Congress, but that
number rose to 64% in 2020. A survey of Europeans in 2021 found nearly one in
five saying that climate change was the world’s most serious problem, slightly
ahead of poverty, hunger, lack of drinking water, and infectious diseases. Ambition
has been codified in the Paris agreement on climate change of 2015 and in the un’s
sustainable development goals.
These commitments have increased the pressure on trade policy to contribute by

giving unenforceable agreements more teeth. They also point to greater support
for direct environmental goals through deals to cut damaging subsidies or to slash
barriers to trade in green goods. There is plenty of scope for improvement.
According to the IMF, governments spend the equivalent of 0.4% of GDP a year
on fossil-fuel subsidies. One study by Joseph Shapiro of the University of
California, Berkeley, compares tariffs on products made by polluting industries
with those made by cleaner ones, and finds that the more carbon-intensive
products are actually taxed less. The difference is equivalent to an implicit
subsidy for carbon emissions of between $85 and $120 per tonne.
There is growing acceptance of the links between trade and the environment.
Estimates from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, find that CO2 emissions
associated with trade make up over a quarter of the global total. Although
economists in the 1990s failed to find much evidence that differences in
environmental policy affected trade flows, a newer body of work suggests that
they matter. One study found that changed regulatory costs account for as much
as 10% of the rise in American trade flows to Canada and Mexico between 1977
and 1986. Another found that new Canadian air-quality standards in the late 2000s
had cut export revenues by around a fifth.
It is less clear that trade liberalisation is likely to prompt polluters to relocate to

places with laxer environmental standards. Other factors seem more important.
But if policymakers want to toughen standards at home, they will also need to take
trade into account. Economic modelling has found that, if countries take certain
steps to cut carbon emissions, a little under a third of that will “leak” abroad in the
form of higher foreign emissions than otherwise. In heavily traded, carbon-
intensive industries, like steel and aluminium, the leakage rate can be even
higher.
In theory, the WTO should be an ideal forum in which to consider environmental

issues. Global problems of the commons require global solutions. The WTO’s 164
members have in the past agreed to curb farm subsidies, as well as to cut tariffs. “I
see the WTO and trade as part of the solution to climate change,” insists Ms. Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general. Yet the WTO's trade negotiators do not seem
to be much good at environmental deals. Talks to liberalize trade in green goods
collapsed in 2016 partly because the EU did not want to expose bicycle producers
to Chinese competition. Negotiations to curb subsidies for fisheries have been going
on for over two decades. According to scientists at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, an ambitious deal to remove all capacity-enhancing subsidies
could raise fish stocks by 12.5% between now and 2050. But the deal under
discussion would increase them by just 1.6%.
Some are also frustrated by the insistence in the WTO's rules that environmental
measures must be applied so as to minimise their effect on trade. In April Ms. Tai
said that exceptions allowing trade restrictions had been difficult to invoke, one
reason why “today, the WTO is considered by many as an institution that not only
has no solutions to offer on environmental concerns, but is part of the problem.”
This reputation is worse than the WTO deserves. America lost two cases not
because it had tried to help the environment, but because it sought to do so in a
discriminatory way. But the WTO’s lawyers tend not to approve of discrimination
based on how products are made, which is crucial if carbon-intensive products are
to be treated differently from cleaner ones.
Without the option of agreements at the WTO, policymakers are pursuing

environmental goals in other ways. One is to use trade to reinforce international
climate agreements, though so far this has been mainly a European project. The EU
refuses to sign new trade deals with countries that have not ratified the Paris
agreement or taken steps to combat global warming, and it may add compliance
with Paris as a condition for poor countries to gain enhanced access to its market.
Its Brexit trade deal with Britain includes “acts or omissions that would materially
defeat the object and purpose of the Paris agreement” as potential grounds for
suspension.
Greasing the palms

Another idea is to link trade policy and environmental outcomes directly. A trade
deal approved in April between Indonesia and the European Free Trade
Association, a trade bloc, offers Indonesian palm-oil exporters lower tariffs if they
meet certain environmental standards. In May, APEC trade ministers launched a
process for identifying environmental services to inform future talks. Several
countries are trying to conclude an “agreement on climate change, trade, and
sustainability” by the end of this year, to curb fossil-fuel subsidies, liberalise tariffs
on environmental goods and offer eco-labelling guidelines. “It may be hard to get
everyone on the same page,” says Damien O’Connor, New Zealand’s trade
minister; but he adds, “let’s start with those who do agree.”
Bigger players are also throwing their support behind environmental measures. In
2018 China banned the import of plastic waste. The EU is working on legislation
to require companies to show that their supply chains meet certain green standards.
It is also considering “digital passports” to contain information on environmental
and material characteristics. In theory the European Commission’s negotiators have
agreed a trade deal with Mercosur, a South American trade bloc. But after some
members protested about Brazilian deforestation and the European Parliament
resolved that it could not approve the deal as it stands, the commission is demanding
new green commitments before the ratification process is resumed.
A final idea is to find ways to allow ambitious policies at home, while protecting
domestic producers against the possibility of leakage and shutting out foreign
suppliers from the benefits of green investments. At the forefront, the EU has
operated an emissions trading system (ETS) for years, making companies it covers
buy permits if they want to emit CO2. Some sectors have been protected from
foreign competition with free permits, a handout the commission wants to scrap. In
July it unveiled plans for a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) that
would gradually extend the ETS to importers. Where a carbon price has already
been paid, the charge will be lower. This is designed to encourage foreign
governments to introduce carbon pricing.
Others are watching carefully. Canada’s government has announced plans to

develop its own carbon border adjustment mechanism. The Biden
administration has called the CBAM a potentially useful tool, and the British
government took care in a recent report on greening trade not to rule out the idea.
Concerns for consistency with the multilateral rules-based system vary. Valdis
Dombrovskis, the EU trade commissioner, stresses that the CBAM was designed in
a WTO-compatible way. But American officials who talk about the environment
and national security in the same breath seem less fussed about whether this is true.
Ms. Okonjo-Iweala believes it is possible to design carbon border adjustments in a

way that is not protectionist, but “the devil is in the detail.” Many other measures
designed to shore up domestic support for the green transition are less successful in
avoiding the label, such as the Indian government’s plans for tariffs of 40% on
imported solar modules from 2022, or the Biden administration’s Buy America
conditions for infrastructure spending. As governments cultivate more climate-
related investments, one can expect similar naked grabs for more jobs at home.
A generous assessment of this mish-mash of trade and environmental policies is

that, given the scale of the challenge, it is worth reaching for anything that might
work. Waiting while 164 WTO members struggle to reach a consensus might mean
waiting a lifetime. Unilateralism from countries with enough clout could deliver
quicker results. Carolyn Deere Birkbeck of the Forum on Trade, Environment and
the Sustainable Development Goals, a research outfit, says that bans on plastic
waste imports started by China have pushed rich countries to take more
responsibility for the stuff.
A harsher view would be that policymakers are being pulled along by a mix of
evolving domestic green policies and populist outrage, rather than a considered
assessment of the right measures to help the environment. Arguably, the collection
of countries trying to curb fossil-fuel subsidies are showing more leadership than
the many Europeans who are breathlessly demanding that market access be made
vaguely conditional on adherence to climate commitments.
Policymakers would be wise to remember a lesson from the old regime: that trade
restrictions can have unintended consequences. When a country applying one
represents only a small share of the exporter’s market, it is unlikely to affect policy
change. Tariffs and local content requirements can cut off cheap suppliers, making
environmental goals even more expensive to reach. Pamela Coke-Hamilton,
executive director of the International Trade Centre, a un development agency, says
the rising number of sustainability standards, from around 15 in 1990 to more than
250 today, has “significantly increased the stress on a lot of businesses”. She thinks
there should be more financing so that companies can build the capacity to become
greener.
Policymakers face a delicate balancing act between domestic and foreign interests.
Trade liberalisation is supposed to be win-win. Yet climate mitigation involves
short-term costs for all, and there will always be a temptation to push these
elsewhere. Go too far, and that will have other costs, including retaliation, ill will
and less co-operation. Trade policy may sometimes seem like an easy shortcut to
climate improvement. Unfortunately, it is not.
VOCABULARY
• Gaining an unfair competitive advantage: đạt được lợi thế cạnh tranh không
công bằng
• Slash tariffs on greener goods: cắt giảm thuế đối với hàng hóa xanh hơn
• Curb damaging subsidies: giảm các khoản trợ cấp thiệt hại
• Multilateralism: chủ nghĩa đa phương
• Distortions: sự biến dạng
• Infectious diseases: bệnh truyền nhiễm
• Codified: được hệ thống hóa
• Unenforceable agreements: thỏa thuận không thể thực thi
• Slash barriers: cắt bớt rào cản
• Scope for improvement: phạm vi cải thiện
• Fossil-fuel subsidies: những trợ cấp nhiên liệu hóa thạch
• Tariffs on products: thuế quan đối với sản phẩm
• Carbon-intensive products: các sản phẩm sử dụng nhiều carbon
• An implicit subsidy: trợ cấp ngầm
• Growing acceptance: sự chấp nhận ngày càng tăng
• Trade flows: dòng chảy thương mại
• Regulatory costs: chi phí điều chỉnh
• Cut export revenues: cắt giảm doanh thu xuất khẩu
• Trade liberalisation: tự do hóa thương mại
• Laxer environmental standards: những tiêu chuẩn về môi trường lỏng lẻo hơn
• Toughen standards: nâng cao tiêu chuẩn
• Carbon-intensive industries: các ngành công nghiệp sử dụng nhiều carbon
• The leakage rate: tỷ lệ rò rỉ
• Green goods: sản phẩm xanh
• Capacity-enhancing subsidies: trợ cấp nâng cao năng lực
• Introduce carbon pricing: giới thiệu định giá carbon
• Carbon border adjustment mechanism: cơ chế điều chỉnh biên giới carbon
• Multilateral rules-based system: hệ thống dựa trên quy tắc đa phương
• Populist outrage: sự phẫn nộ của chủ nghĩa dân túy
• Reach a consensus: đạt được sự đồng thuận
• Domestic green policies: chính sách xanh trong nước
• Retaliation, ill will and less co-operation: sự trả đũa, ác ý và ít hợp tác hơn
• Temptation: sự cám dỗ

environment-1-12840718
2. Stopping pollution with pine needles
A pair of problems may be made to cancel each other out
Killing two birds with one stone is a desirable objective, but rarely an achievable
one. However, Dinesh Mohan of Nehru University, in Delhi, thinks he may have
worked out how to do it in the case of a pair of local environmental problems. One
is the risk of fire in the pine forests cloaking the foothills of the Himalayas. The
other is pollution by heavy metals, particularly lead, of some of the country’s water
supply.
The fire risk comes from pines’ needle-like leaves. These decay only slowly once
shed, and thus build up on the ground into thick, inflammable layers. Nor are they
just a fire hazard. They also slow down the replenishment of groundwater and
make the soil more acidic than it otherwise would be, discouraging the growth of
grass and other non-arboreal plants.
The pollution risk comes from lead derived from fuels, old water pipes and paint.
Heavy-metal pollution is by no means the only water-quality problem facing India,
but it is one of the most pernicious. Like many other countries, India has adopted
the maximum level in drinking water for lead set by the World Health
Organisation (who). This is ten micrograms per litre. In 2014 (the most recent year
for which data are available) the country’s Central Water Commission reported
concentrations above this threshold at 47 of its 387 river-water-quality
monitoring stations.
The simultaneous solution of the two problems, proposed by Dr. Mohan in a paper
in ACS Omega, is simple and elegant. It is to use the needles to clean up the water.
One way to extract heavy metals like lead from polluted water is to pass that water
through charcoal filters. Charcoal, or “biochar” as it is now fashionably known in
environmental circles, is a porous, amorphous material, which thereby folds a
large surface area into a small volume. It is composed partly of elemental carbon,
but this is accompanied by lots of organic molecules such as fatty acids, phenols
and quinones, and also by salts of potassium, magnesium and calcium, all left
behind from its previous existence as plant matter.
Many heavy-metal ions react enthusiastically with certain oxygen-containing

groups of atoms that form parts of the organic molecules, and thus stick to them.
They also, through a process called ion exchange, swap places with potassium,
magnesium and calcium ions. The upshot is that biochar is good at pulling
pollutants like lead out of water. And once a filter was saturated with the stuff, it
would be a simple matter to replace it, strip out the accumulated lead using nitric
acid, and then burn or dump the exhausted biochar.
Dr Mohan already knew, from previous work, that pine-wood biochar is an

effective agent for stripping lead from water. But pine wood is a valuable
commodity, so he wondered if he could pull off a similar trick using another forest
product—one that currently has no value, namely pine needles. To test this idea he
and his colleagues went foraging for needles in the forests of Uttarakhand state,
north-east of Delhi. They returned their spoils to the laboratory, divided the needles
into batches, and charred the batches in an electric furnace at temperatures ranging
from 350-750°C.
Experiments suggested that material charred at 550°C extracted lead most
efficiently, and examination showed that this material had the largest internal
surface area per gram (determined by a technique that measures a substance’s
ability to adsorb gases), and the optimal level of carbonisation needed to preserve
the metal-capturing organic compounds. The best temperature for the process,
they discovered, was 35°C—just under body heat, and also ambient, at least in the
summer, in the wide plain south of the Himalaya through which the Ganges, one of
the most polluted rivers on the planet, flows.
Whether these laboratory observations can be turned into a practical process is hard
to say. Special filtration-beds would have to be built in water-treatment plants—
facilities of which India is in any case woefully short. But it is not short of material
to make the biochar.
An average hectare of Himalayan conifer forest produces over six tonnes of needles
a year. The process of charring would reduce this to two tonnes, but that is still a
fair yield. How much of this fallen foliage would need to be removed to reduce the
fire risk and gain the other potential benefits, and what further effects this might
have on the local ecology, remain to be determined. But Dr. Mohan’s work does
show how the cost of this removal might be turned into a benefit enjoyed by all.
VOCABULARY
• Thick, inflammable layers: lớp dày, dễ cháy

• Fire hazard: nguy cơ hỏa hoạn
• Replenishment of groundwater: sự bổ sung nước ngầm
• Heavy-metal pollution: sự ô nhiễm kim loại nặng
• Pernicious: ác độc
• The maximum level in drinking water for lead: mức chì tối đa trong nước
uống
• River-water-quality monitoring stations: trạm giám sát chất lượng nước sông
• Charcoal filters: bộ lọc than chì
• A porous, amorphous material: một vật liệu xốp, không định hình
• Organic molecules: các phân tử hữu cơ
• Fatty acids: axit béo
• Oxygen-containing groups of atoms: nhóm nguyên tử chứa ôxy
• Potassium, magnesium and calcium ions: các ion kali, magiê và canxi
• Pine-wood biochar: than sinh học gỗ thông
• Electric furnace: lò sưởi điện
• The optimal level of carbonisation: mức độ cacbon hóa tối ưu
• Preserve the metal-capturing organic compounds: bảo quản các hợp chất hữu
cơ bắt kim loại
• Filtration-beds: các lớp lọc
• Water-treatment plants: nhà máy xử lý nước
• A fair yield: một sản lượng lớn

3. Green power needs more than just solar panels and wind turbines
No good deed, an old saying has it, goes unpunished. That is certainly true of the
introduction of green energy. The unreliability of solar and wind power compared
with that generated by fossil fuels is well known—and with it the concomitant
need for storage facilities such as large battery packs to smooth things over.
But green energy brings another, more subtle, problem. Modern electrical grids
operate on alternating currents (ac), and these need to be of a fixed and reliable
frequency (usually either 50hz or 60hz). This frequency’s stability is maintained
by a phenomenon called grid inertia, which results from the real, physical inertia
(as described by Isaac Newton’s first law of motion) embodied in the power-
generating turbines of fossil-fuel (and also nuclear and hydroelectric) power
stations.
Going for a spin
These turbines act as massive, inertia-storing flywheels. As long as their outputs

are in synchrony (and one important part of grid management is to keep them that
way), the resistance to change which their inertia provides stabilises the whole grid.
The fewer the number of these turbines (as opposed to wind turbines, which rotate
out of sync with the grid, and solar panels, which do not rotate at all), the less inertia
a grid has. And in some particularly green countries, this is getting to be a problem,
to the extent that non-power-generating flywheels are being added to the system to
provide the missing inertia.
One such place is Britain, which generates about 30% of its electrical power from
wind and sunlight. On March 17th, for example, National Grid ESO—the firm that,
as its name suggests, operates the country’s electricity grid—cut the opening
ribbon on a plant built near Keith, in northern Scotland, by Statkraft, a Norwegian
renewable-energy firm. The inertia in this plant is stored by a pair of steel flywheels
(see pictures of the road train required to deliver them). Each of these flywheels
weighs 194 tonnes and rotates at up to 500 revolutions per minute (rpm).
A second Statkraft plant should open in the autumn, near Liverpool. Instead of large
masses rotating relatively slowly, this will rely on smaller ones spinning fast
(1,500rpm). Both approaches embody about the same amount of inertia, and in
combination the pair will store around 2% of the inertia currently required to
support Britain’s grid. That is equivalent to the inertial contribution of a
conventional coal-fired station. Moreover, later in the year National Grid eso plans
to add two more systems, built by Siemens, to increase its inertia-storing potential
still further.
There is, though, an alternative to building new flywheels, and that is to repurpose
old ones—in other words, to redesign existing fossil-fuel stations simply to store
inertia, rather than generating electricity. National Grid ESO is testing that idea,
too, in a former gas-fired station in north Wales. This has been open for business
as an inertia store since 2021.
The firm hopes, as well as all this, to develop ways of stabilising the network
without spinning lumps of metal for their own sake. That will involve the use of
what are known as grid-forming inverters.
Both solar power, which is a direct current (dc) when it comes out of the
generating panel, and wind power, which is ac but still needs to be tweaked before
being fed into a grid, are first processed by semiconductor-based devices called
inverters. This is also true of the dc drawn from storage devices such as batteries,
which are employed to smooth out irregularities in solar and wind power.
Existing inverters are described as “grid following”. This means they monitor and
fit in with the established frequency of the grid they are feeding into. That suits grid
managers well enough when solar and wind contribute only a small fraction of a
grid’s total power, but is progressively less suitable as that contribution rises.
However, inverters can be designed to be “grid forming” instead—meaning the
current they put out mimics the external stabilising effect of mechanical inertia.
Using grid-forming inverters rather than grid-following ones should allow much
more wind and solar power to be integrated easily into a grid.
Until recently, grid-forming inverters had been tested only at small scale. In
January, however, Britain’s energy regulator, Ofgem, signed off on a technical
standard acceptable to both manufacturers and service providers. That will permit
their large-scale deployment, and Julian Leslie, National Grid ESO’s chief
engineer, says he expects big grid-forming inverters to be providing inertia within
two years.
Grid lock
Being an island, Britain has a more or less self-contained electricity grid. This
makes it a good place to try such an experiment. Success would encourage other
island grids, both real (Australia’s and Ireland’s, for example) and metaphorical
(such as Texas’s, which has few links with the rest of North America) to try. Larger
grids in North America and Europe will no doubt be watching from the wings.
The quest for grid inertia, then, is an example of the nitty-gritty adjustments
needed to accommodate the shift in energy production and use that is now going
on. Other technologies, from electric cars to hydrogen-gas supplies, may have
higher profiles. But what is happening down in the engine room of the green
economy is just as important—if not more so.
VOCABULARY
• Concomitant need: nhu cầu đồng thời

• A fixed and reliable frequency: một tần số cố định và đáng tin cậy
• Grid inertia: quán tính lưới
• Power-generating turbines: tuabin phát điện
• Massive, inertia-storing flywheels: bánh đà lưu trữ quán tính lớn
• Cut the opening ribbon on a plant: cắt băng khánh thành nhà máy
• Steel flywheels: bánh đà thép
• Repurpose: sử dụng với mục đích khác
• Fossil-fuel station: trạm nhiên liệu hoá thạch
• Gas-fired station: trạm xăng
• Lumps of metal: cục kim loại
• Grid-forming inverters: biến tần tạo lưới
• Direct current: dòng điện một chiều
• Tweaked: bị tinh chỉnh
• Semiconductor-based devices: thiết bị dựa trên chất bán dẫn
• Irregularities in solar and wind power: tính không đều trong năng lượng mặt
trời và năng lượng gió
• The external stabilising effect: hiệu ứng ổn định bên ngoài
• Energy regulator: bộ điều chỉnh năng lượng
• Self-contained electricity grid: lưới điện khép kín
• The nitty-gritty adjustments: các điều chỉnh thực trạng
• Hydrogen-gas supplies: nguồn cung cấp khí hydro
• The engine room: buồng chứa động cơ, nhiên liệu

review-4-12951715
TOPIC 5: CULTURE
1. Some languages pay closer attention to family ties than others
Spanish, for example, has a term for your spouse’s sibling’s husband
“Merry Christmas from the Family”, a country song by Robert Earl Keen released
in 1994, tells the tale of a sprawling festive get-together, replete with champagne
punch, carol-singing, and turkey. Many listeners will recognize the chaos the
narrator describes; even more than that, they may identify with his struggle to recall
how he is related to the various guests. “Fred and Rita drove from Harlingen,” Mr
Keen croons. “Can’t remember how I’m kin to them.”
That may have something to do with the English language. It is often joked that
anyone around your age is a “cousin”, regardless of actual relation, and anyone
older is an “uncle” or “aunt”. English is rather bare in its terms for family members.
Other languages pay far more attention to the details.
Take “brother” and “sister”. Societies that value age order highly often have
different terms for older brother, older sister, younger brother and younger sister.
These are ge, jie, di and mei in Mandarin (usually doubled in speech, as in didi), or
ani, ane, ototo, imoto in Japanese. Though generic alternatives exist for certain
situations (like the abstract concept of “siblings”), not specifying a specific person’s
seniority in these languages would be odd.
Then take marriage relations. English just adds the rather cold -in-law to refer to
a relationship through a spouse. French has the rather warmer beau- or belle- (belle-
mère for mother-in-law, beau-frère for brother-in-law, and so on), but at least it
means “beautiful” rather than implying a bureaucratic shackle.
Other European languages have distinct words for the many different relatives by
marriage. A Spanish-learner must memorise cuñado/cuñada, yerno, nuera, and
suegro/suegra for brother-/sister-, son-, daughter- and father-/mother-in-law (the
terms are similar in Portuguese). Spanish even distinguishes cuñado (brother-in-
law by blood relation to your spouse) from concuñado, your spouse’s sibling’s
husband—something like “co-brother-in-law”. It also has the term cuñadismo,
brother-in-law-ism, or talking about things you know little about as though you
were an authority—the phrase is akin to “mansplaining” in English.
Things get much more complicated from there. Arabic accounts for which side of
the family the speaker’s uncles and aunts come from: an amm or amma is an uncle
or aunt on your father’s side, while a khal or khala is on your mother’s. But those
who marry into the family do not marry into those titles. Your amm’s wife does not
become your amma, but is called a zawjat al-amm, “uncle’s wife”, lest you should
forget which of the pair is your father’s sibling. The same goes for cousins, who
have no distinct term, but are the son or daughter (ibn or ibna) of your amm, amma,
khal or khala, as the case may be.
Chinese makes many of the same distinctions. But its system is even more complex,
as in many cases it requires the speaker to remember whether a relative is older or
younger than they are, whether relatives of their parents are older or younger than
they, and so forth. There are many armchair theories about the relationship
between language and culture that do not hold up to scrutiny. The East Asian
languages’ focus on seniority, however, is quite plausibly related to the importance
Confucianism places on the virtue of respecting your elders and forebears.
Finally, it is a curious fact that English lacks a word to describe the crucial
relationship between the parents of a married couple. Hebrew and Yiddish, though,
have mehutanim and machatunim, and Spanish offers consuegros for this critical
relationship. Anglophones, meanwhile, are forced to say something awkward like
“my son’s wife’s parents”.
The focus that some cultures put on labelling every possible relation with a distinct
term does not mean that those who lack those terms do not pay heed to familial
networks. Every English-speaking family seems to have at least one armchair
genealogist who can tell you that Henry Ford was a great-great-great uncle or fourth
cousin five times removed. But each family also has members who couldn’t care
less, waving a hand and saying “uncle” or “cousin”.
All languages permit you to describe relationships in any amount of detail your
listener would like. But those that require highly specific labels for kinfolk, forcing
you to recall the details every time you speak, surely etch those facts deep in the
mind. That makes an Arabic singer much less likely to croon “can’t remember how
I’m kin to them” than an American one.
VOCABULARY
• A sprawling festive get-together: 1 cuộc tụ họp rực rỡ, vui vẻ

• Replete with: đầy đủ, no nê
• Kin: họ hàng
• Age order: thứ tự tuổi tác
• Generic alternatives: lựa chọn thay thế chung
• Seniority: thâm niên
• Marriage relations: quan hệ hôn nhân
• Bureaucratic shackle: sự trói buộc quan liêu
• Akin to: giống với
• On your father’s side: về phía cha bạn
• Armchair theories: học thuyết ghế bành (1 học thuyết nghiên cứu nhân học)
• Hold up to scrutiny: được xem xét kỹ lưỡng
• Elders and forebears: trưởng lão và tổ tiên
• Critical relationship: mối quan hệ quan trọng
• Pay heed to chú ý đến
• Familial networks: mạng lưới gia đình
• Genealogist: người viết gia phả
• Kinfolk: họ hàng, bà con
• Etch those facts deep in the mind: khắc sâu những sự thật đó trong tâm trí
• Croon: than vãn, rên rỉ
Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-culture-

1-12840682
2. Social media are changing the way art is seen and presented
The marriage of art and apps is especially conspicuous in China
On a wintry weekend, young couples wander through “ lovelovelove”, an exhibition

at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. Some of the items on display are tenuously
related to the theme, but the visitors seem not to mind, intent as they are on
snapping a striking selfie amid the mirrors and neon lights. A young woman poses
on a white staircase, peeking over her shoulder at her friend’s camera.
Elsewhere in the museum “Bord de Mer”, a film by Agnès Varda, a late French
director, plays on a loop. The floor of the gallery has been covered in sand;
deckchairs are set up in front of a screen showing gently lapping waves. Viewers
discuss the best angle for a picture. Each has around ten seconds to rush into a chair,
simulate a relaxing beach scene and get out of the way. Experiencing love, or
Varda’s sea view, seems less important than showing others that you have
experienced it.
Galleries across the world are attracting snap-happy youngsters eager to impress
their online followers. Immersive exhibitions of the art of Yayoi Kusama and
Vincent van Gogh have drawn camera-wielding crowds from Melbourne to New
York. But in China the marriage of art and social media is especially conspicuous.
The country’s private museums have long been subject to oversight by local
bureaucrats. Increasingly, however, curators are as beholden to the whims of
online tastemakers and fads as they are to the censors. Old assumptions about
power in the art world are being overturned. More and more it is the crowd, not the
experts, who determine the status of artworks.
Young at art
The word wanghong roughly means “viral” or “internet famous”, with a hint of
tackiness. As a noun, it can refer to China’s social-media influencers, otherwise
known as “key opinion leaders” (KOLs). As an adjective, it describes hotspots to
which young Chinese flock to take selfies, urging their followers to “ da ka”, or
check in, at the same place: the phrase basically means “been there, done that”, says
Cathy Cao, a 22-year-old kol. “It validates that you are on the trend and that you
aren’t left behind.” The wanghong location might be a café, a tree—or, quite often,
an art gallery.
The wanghong effect can be mutually beneficial. Reliant on ticket sales as they are,
many private art museums welcome it. Galleries often hike their prices in
anticipation of wanghong-inspired demand. Philip Tinari, director of the ucca
Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing, says his institution “has evolved to
embrace” kols, who are invited to private views. A partnership with Douyin—the
inside-China version of TikTok—means UCCA’s shows are promoted to its 600m
daily users.
As marketing, it works. Mr Tinari says UCCAhas seen a boost in visitor numbers

since it began thinking hard about social media. A recent exhibition on Maurizio
Cattelan, an Italian artist, was crammed with wanghong devotees, thanks to a
promotional push that included social-media competitions, KOLs and Chinese
pop idols. Search for the show on Xiaohongshu, a photo-sharing app, and you find
posts advising visitors to sport dark colours to complement its neutral palette. In
their pictures they lie languidly beside a stuffed horse, a sign reading “ inri” (the
Latin abbreviation for “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”) jutting out of its
flank.
Much more than in Western galleries, these visitors tend to be young—and, says
Mr Tinari, they “don’t have this accumulated austerity” in their approach to art.
Many private contemporary-art galleries and museums in China are young too, and
attitudes in and towards them are different; the Western etiquette of hushed tones
and awed deference is absent. Although many visitors want to explore and learn,
these are also places to hang out and have fun.
These technological and demographic shifts are opening up old debates about the
role and value of art. What is it for, diversion or edification—and who has the
authority to say? For centuries, museums, curators and collectors have judged what
is enduring and what is schlock. They sought to interpret the intentions, influences
and contexts of each piece. On social media, that hierarchy is upended and scholarly
exposition discarded. Here, says Mr Tinari, “everyone has a perspective, and that
perspective has some degree of validity.”
Some internet celebrities seem to care about art for art’s sake. Ms Cao’s feed on
Weibo, a microblogging service on which she has over 267,000 fans, is a mix of
museum selfies and photos of the works. She does not post lengthy captions about
the artists or canvases, but strives to “take pictures that can really show the glamour
and the beauty of the artwork”, and to dress in “harmony” with the exhibits. But
detractors of the wanghong trend argue that paintings and sculptures are being
relegated to a mere backdrop for marketing. The art itself is receding from view.
Concern, or snobbery, about seriousness and expertise is not the only objection to
the rise of wanghong art. Curators dislike it when KOLs paid to promote clothing
or perfumes stage photoshoots in their museums. A few are discouraging the
practice, banning visitors from taking pictures with people in them, or asking KOLs
to delete them when they do.
But dissenters are in a shrinking minority. Mr. Tinari says shows that prioritise
photo opportunities are being put on “all over the place” (though not by UCCA, he
insists). The curators of an exhibition of Man Ray’s photography at the M Woods
museum in Beijing installed artificial grass and a tree as aids to posing. The Fosun
Foundation in Shanghai posted an article on WeChat, another app, encouraging
visitors to exploit the interplay of light and shadow in certain rooms. The
Museum of Art Pudong, also in Shanghai, has publicised the top selfie spots in and
around the building.
In China and beyond, apps with hundreds of millions of users will increasingly
shape the ways visual art is displayed and consumed—and ultimately, because
artists want their work to be seen and bought, how it is created. When Ms Cao
promoted an exhibition of Raphael’s work in Beijing, the vast majority of
comments remarked on her appearance rather than the art. Piggybacking on her
post, the organisers promised that visitors to the show “may come across beautiful
people like her”.
VOCABULARY
• Conspicuous: dễ thấy
• Tenuously: một cách đặc biệt
• Snap a striking selfie: chụp một bức ảnh tự sướng ấn tượng
• Plays on a loop: phát đi phát lại
• Snap-happy youngsters: những người trẻ tuổi vui vẻ
• Online followers: người theo dõi trực tuyến
• Camera-wielding crowds: đám đông cầm máy ảnh
• Local bureaucrats: quan chức địa phương
• As beholden to: để ý tới
• The whims of online tastemakers and fads: những ý tưởng bất chợt của các
nhà tạo hương vị và tạo mốt trực tuyến
• Overturned: lật ngược
• Social-media influencers: những người có ảnh hưởng trên mạng xã hội
• On the trend: bắt kịp xu hướng
• Left behind: bị bỏ lại phía sau
• Hike their prices: sự tăng giá
• A promotional push: một sự thúc đẩy quảng cáo
• A photo-sharing app: một ứng dụng chia sẻ ảnh
• Accumulated austerity: sự khắc khổ được tích lũy
• Technological and demographic shifts: sự thay đổi về công nghệ và nhân khẩu
học
• Curators: giám tuyển
• For art’s sake: vì lợi ích của nghệ thuật
• The glamour and the beauty of the artwork: sự quyến rũ và vẻ đẹp của tác
phẩm nghệ thuật
• Detractor: người gièm pha
• Snobbery: sự hợm hĩnh
• Promote clothing or perfumes stage photoshoots: buổi chụp ảnh sân khấu
quảng cáo quần áo hoặc nước hoa
• Exploit the interplay of light and shadow: khai thác sự tương tác của ánh sáng
và bóng tối
Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-culture-

2-12840687
3. How Netflix is creating a common European culture

Streaming subtitled box sets is the new Eurovision
“Barbarians”, a Netflix drama set 2,000 years ago in ancient Germania, inverts some
modern stereotypes. In it, sexy, impulsive, proto-German tribesmen take on an
oppressive superstate led by cold, rational Latin-speakers from Rome. Produced in
Germany, it has all the hallmarks of a glossy American drama (gratuitous violence and
prestige nudity) while remaining unmistakably German (in one episode someone
swims (in one episode someone swims through a ditch full of scheisse). It is a popular
mix: on a Sunday in October, it was the most-watched show on Netflix not just in
Germany, but also in France, Italy and 14 other European countries.
Moments when Europeans sit down and watch the same thing at roughly the same
time used to be rare. They included the Eurovision Song Contest and the Champions
League football, with not much in between. Now they are more common, thanks to
the growth of streaming platforms such as Netflix, which has 58m subscribers on
the continent. For most of its existence, television was a national affair.
Broadcasters stuck rigidly to national borders, pumping out French programmes for
the French and Danish ones for the Danes. Streaming services, however, treat
Europe as one large market rather than 27 individual ones, with the same content
available in each. Jean Monnet, one of the EU's founding fathers, who came up with
the idea of mingling together national economies to stop Europeans from killing
each other, was once reputed to have said: “If I were to do it again from scratch, I
would start with culture.” Seven decades on from the era of Monnet, cultural
integration is beginning to happen.
Umberto Eco, an Italian writer, was right when he said the language of Europe is
translation. Netflix and other deep-pocketed global firms speak it well. Just as the
EU employs a small army of translators and interpreters to turn intricate laws or
impassioned speeches of Romanian MEPs into the EU's 24 official languages, so
do the likes of Netflix. It now offers dubbing in 34 languages and subtitling in a
few more. The result is that “Capitani”, a cop drama written in Luxembourgish, a
language so modest it is not even recognised by the EU, can be watched in any of
English, French or Portuguese (or with Polish subtitles). Before, a top French show
could be expected to be translated into English, and perhaps German, only if it was
successful. Now it is the norm for any release.
The economics of European productions are more appealing, too. American

audiences are more willing than before to give dubbed or subtitled viewing a
chance. This means shows such as “Lupin”, a French crime caper on Netflix, can
become global hits. It is worth taking a punt on an expensive retelling of an early-
20th-century detective series about a gentleman jewel thief in Paris, if it has the
potential to explode beyond France. In 2015, about 75% of Netflix’s original
content was American; now the figure is half, according to Ampere, a media-
analysis company. Netflix has about 100 productions under way in Europe, which
is more than big public broadcasters in France or Germany.
And European officials wield a stick to encourage investment. European film-

makers rival farmers in the ranking of cosseted European industries. To operate in
the EU, streaming companies are required to ensure at least 30% of their catalogue
hails from the bloc—and to promote it. Buying a back catalogue of 1990s Belgian
soap operas and hiding them in a digital cupboard does not count. France compels
big media firms to kick back revenues into domestic production. If European
governments are intent on shaking down big American firms, it is better for
everyone that the money is spent on something watchable.
Not everything works across borders. Comedy sometimes struggles. Whodunits

and bloodthirsty maelstroms between arch Romans and uppity tribesmen have a
more universal appeal. Some do it better than others. Barbarians aside, German
television is not always built for export, says one executive, being polite. A bigger
problem is that national broadcasters still dominate. Streaming services, such as
Netflix or Disney+, account for about a third of all viewing hours, even in markets
where they are well-established. Europe is an aging continent. The generation of
teens staring at phones is outnumbered by their elders who prefer to gawp at the
box.
In Brussels and national capitals, the prospect of Netflix as a cultural hegemon is

seen as a threat. “Cultural sovereignty” is the watchword of European executives
worried that the Americans will eat their lunch. To be fair, Netflix content
sometimes seems stuck in an uncanny valley somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, with
local quirks stripped out. Netflix originals tend to have fewer specific cultural
references than shows produced by domestic rivals, according to Enders, a market
analyst. The company used to have an imperial model of commissioning, with
executives in Los Angeles cooking up ideas French people might like. Now Netflix
has offices across Europe. But ultimately the big decisions rest with American
executives. This makes European politicians nervous.
They should not be. An irony of European integration is that it is often American
companies that facilitate it. Google Translate makes European newspapers
comprehensible, even if a little clunky, for the continent’s non-polyglots. American
social-media companies make it easier for Europeans to talk politics across borders.
(That they do not always like to hear what they say about each other is another
matter.) Now Netflix and friends pump the same content into homes across a
continent, making culture a cross-border endeavour, too. If Europeans are to share
a currency, bail each other out in times of financial need and share vaccines in a
pandemic, then they need to have something in common—even if it is just bingeing
on the same series. Watching fictitious northern and southern Europeans tear each
other apart 2,000 years ago beats doing so in reality.
VOCABULARY
• Gratuitous violence: bạo lực vô cớ

• Streaming platforms: nền tảng phát trực tuyến
• A national affair: một vấn đề quốc gia
• Mingle together national economies: hòa trộn, kết hợp các nền kinh tế quốc
gia với nhau
• Deep-pocketed global firms: các công ty toàn cầu giàu có
• Employs a small army: thuê một đội ngũ
• Intricate laws or impassioned speeches: những luật phức tạp hoặc bài phát biểu
sôi nổi
• Offer dubbing and subtitling: cung cấp thuyết minh và phụ đề
• Dubbed or subtitled viewing: xem thuyết minh hoặc phụ đề
• Media-analysis company: công ty phân tích truyền thông
• Encourage investment: khuyến khích đầu tư
• Catalogue hails from the bloc: danh mục ca ngợi từ khối
• Back revenues: doanh thu trở lại
• Shake down: làm rung chuyển
• Works across borders: hoạt động xuyên biên giới
• Whodunits and bloodthirsty maelstroms: đạn dược và tình trạng rối loạn khát
máu
• A universal appeal: một sức hấp dẫn toàn cầu
• National broadcasters: phát thanh viên quốc gia
• An aging continent: 1 lục địa lâu đời
• Gawp at the box: xem tivi
• A cultural hegemon: một bá chủ văn hóa
• Cultural sovereignty: chủ quyền văn hóa
• Watchword: từ khóa
• Uncanny valley: hiệu ứng thung lũng kỳ lạ
• Cultural references: tài liệu tham khảo văn hóa
• An imperial model of commissioning: mô hình vận hành thử nghiệm của đế
quốc
• European integration: sự hội nhập châu âu
• Non-polyglots: không có nhiều thứ tiếng
• A cross-border endeavour: một nỗ lực xuyên biên giới
• Bail each other out: cứu trợ nhau

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review-5-12951720
TOPIC 6: HEALTH
1. Dramatic growth in mental-health apps has created a risky industry
When Carolina Escudero was severely depressed, going to a therapist’s office

became hard to face. So she joined BetterHelp, a popular therapy app. She paid $65
each week but spent most of her time waiting for her assigned counsellor to
respond. She got two responses in a month. “It was like texting an acquaintance
who has no idea how to deal with mental illness,” she says. BetterHelp says its
service does not claim to operate around the clock, all its therapists have advanced
degrees and “thousands of hours of hands-on clinical work”, and users are able
easily to switch them if scheduling is hard.
Helping people to deal with mental problems has rarely been more urgent. The
incidence of depression and anxiety has soared in the pandemic—by more than
25% globally in 2020, according to the Lancet, a medical journal. That, combined
with more people using online services, has led to a boom in mental-health apps.
The American Psychological Association reckons 10,000-20,000 are available for
download. But evidence is mounting that privacy risks to users are being ignored.
No one is checking if the apps work, either.
Mental-health-tech firms raised nearly $2bn in equity funding in 2020, according
to cb Insights, a data firm. Their products tackle problems from general stress to
serious bipolar disorder. Telehealth apps like BetterHelp or Talkspace connect
users to licensed therapists. Also common are subscription-based meditation
apps like Headspace. In October Headspace bought Ginger, a therapy app, for $3bn.
Now that big companies are prioritising employees’ mental health, some apps are
working with them to help entire workforces. One such app, Lyra, supports 2.2m
employee users globally and is valued at $4.6bn.
Underneath, though, a trauma lurks in some corners of the industry. In October

2020 hackers who had breached Vastaamo, a popular Finnish startup, began
blackmailing some of its users. Vastaamo required therapists to back up patient
notes online but reportedly did not anonymise or encrypt them. Threatening to
share details of extramarital affairs and, in some cases, thoughts about
paedophilia, on the dark web, the hackers reportedly demanded bitcoin ransoms
from some 30,000 patients. Vastaamo has filed for bankruptcy but left many Finns
wary of telling doctors personal details, says Joni Siikavirta, a lawyer representing
the company’s patients.
Other cases may arise. No universal standards for storing “emotional data” exist.
John Torous of Harvard Medical School, who has reviewed 650 mental-health apps,
describes their privacy policies as abysmal. Some share information with
advertisers. “When I first joined BetterHelp, I started to see targeted ads with words
that I had used on the app to describe my personal experiences,” reports one user.
BetterHelp says it shares with marketing partners only device identifiers associated
with “generic event names”, only for measurement and optimisation, and only if
users agree. No private information, such as dialogue with therapists, is shared, it
says.
As for effectiveness, the apps’ methods are notoriously difficult to evaluate.

Woebot, for instance, is a chatbot which uses artificial intelligence to reproduce
the experience of cognitive behavioural therapy. The product is marketed as
clinically validated based in part on a scientific study which concluded that humans
can form meaningful bonds with bots. But the study was written by people with
financial links to Woebot. Of its ten peer-reviewed reports to date, says Woebot,
eight feature partnerships with a main investigator with no financial ties to it. Any
co-authors with financial ties are disclosed, it says.
Mental-health apps were designed to be used in addition to clinical care, not in lieu
of them. With that in mind, the European Commission is reviewing the field. It is
getting ready to promote a new standard that will apply to all health apps. A letter-
based scale will rank safety, user friendliness and data security. Liz Ashall-Payne,
founder of orcha, a British startup that has reviewed thousands of apps, including
for the National Health Service, says that 68% did not meet the firm’s quality
criteria. Time to head back to the couch?
VOCABULARY
• Depressed: chán nản, buồn rầu

• Counsellor: người tư vấn
• Operate around the clock: vận hành 24h
• Hands-on clinical work: việc thực hành lâm sàng
• Urgent: cấp bách
• depression and anxiety: lo âu và trầm cảm
• Soar: tăng nhanh
• Reckon: cho rằng, nghĩ rằng
• Mount: gia tăng
• Privacy risks: rủi ro về quyền riêng tư
• Equity funding: vốn đầu tư
• Bipolar disorder: rối loạn lưỡng cực
• Telehealth apps: ứng dụng chăm sóc sức khỏe từ xa
• Licensed therapist: nhà trị liệu được cấp phép
• Subscription-based meditation apps: ứng dụng thiền đăng ký trả phí
• Trauma: tổn thương
• Lurk: ẩn nấp
• Blackmailing: tống tiền
• Back up: sao lưu
• Anonymise: ẩn danh
• Encrypt: mã hoá
• Extramarital affairs: ngoại tình
• Paedophilia: ấu dâm
• Bitcoin ransoms: tiền chuộc bằng bitcoin
• Bankruptcy: phá sản
• Wary: cẩn trọng, đề phòng
• Universal standards: tiêu chuẩn chung
• Abysmal: rất kém, kinh khủng
• Device identifiers: số nhận dạng thiết bị
• Optimisation: tối ưu hoá
• Notoriously different: khác biệt một cách khét tiếng
• Artificial intelligence: trí tuệ nhân tạo
• Cognitive behavioural therapy: liệu pháp nhận thức hành vi
• Clinically validated: kiểm chứng lâm sàng
• Financial ties: ràng buộc tài chính
• Disclose: tiết lộ
• User friendliness: thân thiện với người dùng
• Data security: bảo mật dữ liệu
Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-health-

1-12840698
2. What if everyone’s nutrition was personalised?
Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” The diktat from Hippocrates,
who defined the principles of medicine in ancient Greece, hovers in bright
holographic characters over the main stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The central theme this year is how to make personalised nutrition more widely
available to those unable to afford its benefits. Hot topics include whether metabo-
watches, implants and other personal-nutrition trackers should be free for everyone
(as they are now in some Nordic countries), why personalised nutrition is good for
Business and the perennial debate over how governments can best regulate
corporate use of consumers’ personal data.
Amid the arguments, there is broad consensus that the rise of personalised nutrition
has done a lot to promote healthy and environmentally friendly eating over the past
decade. In 2031 the proportion of obese Americans fell for the first time in more
than 20 years, and the rate of diabetes has fallen for three years in a row from its
all-time high of 22%. Europeans are getting slimmer and healthier, too.
But progress has been slower than hoped, and in emerging markets obesity is still
rising, hobbling economic growth. Environmentally sustainable eating, though
increasingly popular in the rich world, is still not on track to reach the “planetary
health diet” target set by scientists in 2019 in the Lancet, a medical journal. That
target, which big food manufacturers and many other firms have pledged to
support, called for a 50% worldwide cut in red meat and sugar consumption and a
doubling of the consumption of nuts, fruits, vegetables and legumes between 2020
and 2050.
That personalised nutrition is the best way to drum up demand for healthier and
more earth-friendly foods became clear in the mid-2020s. A decade earlier,
scientists had begun to unravel why one-size dietary guidelines in the form of
food pyramids, sugar and fat labels and so forth were not turning the tide on
diabetes, obesity and other diseases caused by bad diets. Faddish regimens with
catchy names like Keto or Paleo worked for some people but were useless for many,
if not most, people who tried them. And people who lost weight often found it hard
to sustain.
The diets that came and went until the 2020s required steely willpower and careful
planning. The biggest problem, however, was their failure to recognise that people’s
bodies react differently to the same foodstuffs. By the late 2010s mounting
scientific evidence showed that meals that were perfectly healthy for one person
could be another person’s fast-track path to diabetes, obesity or heart disease.
It turned out that even the same meal eaten by the same person at a different time
of day could be metabolised in a more or less healthy way, depending on their other
eating, sleeping and exercise patterns. The most crucial discovery was the role of
the microbiome, the colony of 100trn microbes living in the human gut. The
microbiome, it turned out, was the factory that converted food into the various
substances the body needs to function—as well as those that cause poor health. And
everyone’s microbiome is unique.
A landmark in the idea of personalised nutrition was a study published in 2015 by

researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. They devised an algorithm based
on artificial intelligence that could accurately predict an individual’s response to
any given food, measured by continuous blood-glucose monitoring with a small
device attached to the upper arm. Spikes in blood glucose after meals are known
markers for weight gain and a panoply of metabolic disorders. The algorithm used
data on lifestyle, medical background and the composition of the microbiome.
Within three years scientists in America, Britain and Germany had replicated the
Israeli team’s work and the business of personalised nutrition entered a new era.
During the early 2020s the number of startups offering bespoke nutritional advice
by algorithm soared. Some used mail-in samples of body fluids or continuous
monitoring devices to track blood levels of glucose, lipids, vitamins and so on. A
few, including DayTwo, Million Friends and Zoe, did microbiome mapping too
(through genomic analysis of everything found in a person’s stool sample). Many
firms did just the bare minimum: checking for a handful of genes that had been
linked with certain reactions to various foods. This had limited utility. By the late
2020s the market had reached maturity after a brutal shake-out.
VOCABULARY
• Thy: của bạn (cách dùng cổ)

• Diktat: mệnh lệnh, thông báo
• To hover: phân vân
• Holographic characters: ký tự 3 chiều
• Personalised nutrition: dinh dưỡng cá nhân hoá
• Personal-nutrition trackers: thiết bị theo dõi dinh dưỡng cá nhân
• Perennial debate: cuộc tranh luận bất diệt, luôn tái diễn
• Broad consensus: sự đồng thuận, nhất trí rộng rãi
• Diabetes: tiểu đường
• Three years in a row: 3 năm liên tiếp
• Its all-time high: mức cao nhất mọi thời đại
• Hobble economic growth: cản trở tăng trưởng kinh tế
• Susstainable eating: ăn uống bền vững
• To be still not on track: chưa đi đúng hướng
• Pledge: hứa, cam kết
• Drum up demand for: thúc đẩy nhu cầu cho cái gì
• Unravel: làm sáng tỏ
• One-size dietary guidelines: hướng dẫn về chế độ ăn uống cho một khẩu phần
• Food pyramids: tháp dinh dưỡng
• To be not turning the tide on: không thể lật ngược tình thế
• Faddish regimens: chế độ ăn uống lỗi mốt
• Steely willpower: ý chí kiên cường
• Fast-track path: con đường nhanh chóng dẫn đến
• Metabolise: chuyển hoá
• Microbiome: vi sinh vật
• Convert into: chuyển đổi thành
• Landmark: cột mốc, bước ngoặt
• Devise an algorithm: đưa ra một thuật toán
• Continuous blood-glucose monitoring: theo dõi đường huyết liên tục
• Spikes in blood glucose: tăng đường huyết
• A panoply of metabolic disorders: các bệnh rối loạn chuyển hoá
• Medical background: tình trạng sức khoẻ
• Replicate: tái tạo, nhân rộng
• Bespoke nutritional advice: lời khuyên dinh dưỡng riêng
• Body fluids: dịch cơ thể, chất lỏng cơ thể
• The bare minimum: mức tối thiểu
• Utility: tính thiết thực
• Reach maturity: đạt đến độ chín muồi (giai đoạn khi thị trường chững lại)
• Shake-out: nạn khủng hoảng rơi rụng (một tình huống trong đó nhiều nhà đầu
tư rời khỏi vị trí của họ trong một phân khúc cổ phiếu hay phân khúc thị trường
cùng một lúc, thường là do thua lỗ.)

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3. What if smartphones became personal health assistants?
In 2019 Tim Cook, then boss of Apple, gave an interview in which he said, “if you
zoom out into the future…and you ask the question, ‘What was Apple’s greatest
contribution to mankind?’ It will be about health.” It sounded like standard-issue CEO
boosterism at the time. But nearly a decade later, with this week’s announcement of
the iPhone XX (pronounced “iPhone 20”), might his prediction be about to come true?
The latest iPhone is not so much a phone as a personal medical-data hub. Some of its
features are upgrades of existing functions, such as tracking of sleep, menstruation
and movement, and seamless access to health records and other personal documents.
Physically, the device itself looks much the same—little has changed about these slim
black rectangles over the past 15 years. Instead, it is the myriad accessories
unveiled this week that define the iPhone XX. They could be game-changers for
both personal and public health.
For many years the company’s approach to health tracking has focused on the Apple
Watch. Even the original model, launched in 2015, could measure movement and
heart rate. Since then, sensors have been added to measure heart activity, blood
pressure, body temperature and levels of oxygen, sugar and alcohol in the blood. In
addition, software tweaks have granted it the ability to spot fevers, falls, irregular
heart rhythms and early signs of dementia.
But not everyone wants (or can afford) to buy a fancy watch with all these features.
Meanwhile, the market in consumer-health devices has boomed. With its new range
of add-on accessories, Apple has both expanded and unbundled its health-tracking
features. Unlike the clunky devices available at pharmacies, Apple’s are elegant,
require minimal setup, integrate seamlessly with Apple handsets and are aimed at
people with specific concerns. A $49 device for people with diabetes, for example,
offers blood-sugar monitoring, while a $69 device for those with respiratory
conditions includes an oximeter and a spirometer.
Other sensors focus on monitoring of sleep, hypertension, coeliac disease and

fertility. Several have yet to win regulatory approval. In the past three years alone,
Apple has acquired a dozen firms that make home-diagnostics tools, not all of
which can be built into a watch or a smartphone. So it makes sense to start selling
some health devices and services separately.
Alongside these devices, Apple unveiled a range of extra subscription services. The
diabetes package, for instance, includes a nifty app that guesses the glycaemic
index and nutritional and calorific content of any food at which you point your
iPhone’s camera. After two weeks of learning about your diet, the app starts subtly
suggesting substitutions and changes to your eating patterns. Each accessory
comes with a year’s subscription to the relevant service. And while some
accessories are compatible with older iPhones, only the new model works with all
of them.
All of this could be a boon for public health. The more people walk around with
devices constantly monitoring their vital signs, the more likely it is that ailments
can be caught early, and outbreaks of infectious diseases nipped in the bud.
Yet there are huge worries, too. The first is privacy. Apple touts the iPhone as a
secure repository for personal data of all kinds, and emphasises its model of storing
and processing data locally, on the user’s device, rather than in the cloud. It also
allows users to share data with medical specialists and participate in trials approved
by its semi-autonomous data-ethics committee. But privacy activists say Apple’s
rules are opaque and confusing. The second concern is fairness. Most people cannot
afford an iPhone. Apple’s devices will therefore mostly benefit those who already
have access to good diagnostics and doctors.
There is also cause for optimism, however. When Apple launched the iPhone in
2007, it seemed implausible that just over a decade later half the world’s population
would possess a smartphone. If the past two decades are any guide, other companies
(such as Samsung and Google) will copy Apple’s ideas—spurring an outburst of
competition, innovation and mass adoption in health-monitoring and diagnostics,
as previously happened in handsets. That, even more than what Apple does with its
own devices, may be the true contribution it makes to humankind.
VOCABULARY
• Boosterism: hành động quảng bá

• A personal medical-data hub: trung tâm dữ liệu y tế cá nhân
• Tracking of sleep: theo dõi giấc ngủ
• Menstruation: kinh huyệt, hành kinh
• Seamless access: sự truy cập liền mạch, liên tục
• Health records: hồ sơ sức khoẻ
• Myriad accessories: vô số phụ kiện
• Software tweaks: những điều chỉnh nhỏ trong phần mềm
• Irregular heart rhythms: nhịp tim không đều
• Early signs of dementia: dấu hiệu sớm của bệnh đãng trí
• Respiratory conditions: vấn đề hô hấp
• Oximeter: máy đo oxy
• Spirometer: phế dung kế (máy đo chức năng hô hấp)
• Sensors: bộ cảm biến
• Hypertension: tăng huyết áp
• Coeliac disease: bệnh celiac
• Fertility: khả năng sinh sản
• Home-diagnostics tools: công cụ chẩn đoán tại nhà
• Glycaemic index: chỉ số đường huyết
• Nutritional and calorific content: hàm lượng dinh dưỡng và nhiệt lượng
• Subtly: tinh vi
• Substitution: sự thay thế
• Eating patterns: thói quen ăn uống
• To be compatible with: tương thích với
• Boon: lợi ích
• Ailment: bệnh tật
• Outbreaks of infectious diseases: việc bùng phát các bệnh truyền nhiễm
• Nip in the bud: ngăn chặn từ khi mới chớm, ngăn chặn từ trong trứng nước
• Repository: kho, chỗ chứa
• Trial: thử nghiệm
• Privacy activists: các nhà hoạt động về quyền riêng tư
• Opaque: không rõ ràng, khó hiểu
• Diagnostic: chẩn đoán
• Implausible: hoang đường, khó thể tin được
• Spur an outburst: thúc đẩy một sự bùng phát
• Mass adoption: việc áp dụng, sử dụng hàng loạt

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review-6-12951722
TOPIC 7: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
1. Genetic screening can improve drug prescribing
Peter Ley, a retired civil servant who lives in London, was diagnosed with colon
cancer in 2017. An operation to remove the tumour was successful. But the
chemotherapy that followed caused a severe reaction that required a two-week
hospital stay and a pause in his cancer treatment.
All that could have been avoided had a simple test been done. The test examines a
gene that encodes a liver enzyme called dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (or dpd
for short). The enzyme breaks down several common cancer drugs. Without it, toxic
levels of the drugs build up in the body, sometimes with fatal results. A complete
inability to make dpd is rare, but there are four mutations in the dpd-regulating
gene that are known to reduce its production. As it turned out, Mr Ley had one of
them.
Screening for such “pharmacogenes” is an idea that is catching on among doctors.

Several big hospitals in America are testing their patients for a dozen or more of
them. Separate pilot projects are under way in at least seven of the European
Union’s member states. Britain’s National Health Service (nhs) is doing screening
tests for some patients being prescribed cancer and hiv drugs. A report on March
29th by the British Pharmacological Society (bps) and the Royal College of
Physicians (rcp) proposed widening that testing to cover the 40 drugs among the
100 most-prescribed that are known to be affected by pharmacogenes. The report’s
authors reckon testing could feasibly be rolled out across the nhs as soon as 2023.
Genetic screening promises big benefits. Mutations can affect drugs in all sorts of
ways, determining a pill’s efficacy, toxicity, how well it is absorbed, and how well
it is broken down. Some genetic variants affect several drugs at once, because they
alter common enzymes in widely used metabolic pathways. Britain’s 100,000
Genomes project has shown that almost 99% of people carry at least one
pharmacogene; 25% have four. About 9% of Caucasian people have, like Mr Ley,
dpd deficiency; one in 200 lack the enzyme completely. Roughly 8% of Britain’s
population get little pain relief from codeine, because they lack an enzyme
responsible for metabolising the drug into morphine (they instead metabolise it into
other substances that have little influence on pain).
All told, scientists have identified about 120 such drug-gene pairs so far. Roughly
half of them are “actionable”, says Henk-Jan Guchelaar, a pharmacologist at the
University of Leiden in the Netherlands—meaning that changing the dose or
replacing the drug can lead to a better clinical outcome. And most people will be
prescribed at least one of those drugs at some point in their lives. In Britain people
over the age of 70 have around 70% chance of taking at least one drug whose safety
or efficacy is compromised by their genes, says Munir Pirmohamed, a
pharmacologist and geneticist at the University of Liverpool.
Currently, clashes between a patient’s genome and his drug regimen are dealt
with by trial-and-error prescribing. But that is time-consuming, and may be
harmful. If a drug is being prescribed for high blood pressure or artery-clogging
levels of cholesterol, time spent trying different drugs means time in which a
stroke, heart attack or organ damage may occur. And cleverer prescribing would
have benefits for the health-care system overall, as well as for individual patients.
Adverse drug reactions account for 6.5% of hospital admissions in Britain.
The chief issue, as ever, is cost. In the Netherlands a test for 50 pharmacogenes
costs about €200 ($217). In Britain a panel test for 40 such genes costs £100-150
($130-195). Carrying out testing on an entire population would, therefore, be
extremely expensive. Some light on whether it is worth the cost will be shone later
this year when prepare, a study that began in 2017, publishes its results. The project,
which is led by Dr Guchelaar, recruited 7,000 people across seven European
countries for a study of mutations affecting 42 different drugs. Half the participants
were screened, and given cards listing the drugs flagged up. That information, in
turn, was made available to doctors, pharmacists and the like. Dr Guchelaar and his
colleagues are analysing how much this reduces adverse drug reactions compared
with the unscreened participants—and, crucially, the health-care costs averted as a
result.
Such cost-benefit analyses will be vital in making the argument that governments
or insurance firms should pay for widespread genetic testing. In the meantime,
though, doctors are already pondering ways to get the most bang for their buck.
The bps and rcp study suggest several ways to expand pharmacogene screening.
One is to test for the genes the first time a drug known to be susceptible is
prescribed. Another option is to offer that test to everyone over a certain age,
perhaps 50—though the NHS is also pondering the idea of comprehensive genetic
screening for all newborn babies. That could pay off handsomely later in their
lives.
VOCABULARY
• Drug prescribing: kê đơn thuốc

• Civil servant: công chức
• Colon cancer: ung thư ruột kết
• Remove the tumour: loại bỏ khối u
• Chemotherapy: hoá trị liệu
• Liver enzyme: men gan
• Fatal results: kết quả chết người
• Mutations: đột biến
• Be under way: đang tiến hành
• Be prescribeb cancer and hiv drugs: được kê đơn thuốc ung thư và HIV
• Roll out: triển khai
• Pill’s efficacy: hiệu quả của thuốc
• Toxicity: độc tính
• Absorb: hấp thụ
• Alter: thay đổi, biến đối
• Deficiency: sự thiếu hụt
• Pain relief: giảm đau
• Drug-gene pairs: cặp gen thuốc
• Compromise: làm tổn hại, ảnh hưởng xấu
• Pharmacologist: nhà dược học
• Geneticist: nhà di truyền học
• Clash: sự xung đột, mâu thuẫn
• Patient’s genome: bộ gen của bệnh nhân
• Drug regimen: phác đồ thuốc
• Artery-clogging levels of cholesterol: mức cholesterol làm tắc nghẽn động
mạch
• Stroke: đột quỵ
• Adverse drug reactions (adr): phản ứng có hại của thuốc
• Hospital admissions: nhập viện
• A panel test: xét nghiệm panel
• Carrying out testing: thực hiện thử nghiệm
• Drug reaction: phản ứng với thuốc
• Avert: ngăn chặn, hạn chế
• Ponder: suy nghĩ, cân nhắc về
• Bang for their buck: nhận được món hời hoặc giá trị lớn từ một khoản đầu tư
nhỏ
• Susceptible: mẫn cảm
• Genetic screening: sàng lọc di truyền
• Pay off handsomely: được đền đáp xứng đáng

science-and-technology-1-12840708
2. Sidewalk robots are already busy delivering groceries
Although it is a business not many are aware of, sidewalk robots are set to become
an industry with annual sales of $1bn within a decade, reckons idTechEx, a British
firm of analysts. These four- or six-wheeled autonomous machines, usually the size
of a suitcase, are already delivering groceries and other goods in America, China
and Europe.
That puts them ahead of many driverless cars, vans and lorries being developed.
Those bigger vehicles are held back not by technology but regulation, says Zehao
Li of idTechEx. This means having a “safety driver” on board ready to take over
if there is a problem, which is hardly labour-saving.
For these larger contraptions regulators want to see safety systems thoroughly
proved. But there are legal hurdles, too. In January Britain’s Law Commission,
which reviews legislation, recommended that it should not be the person in the
driver’s seat who faces prosecution if a vehicle in autonomous mode crashes, but
the manufacturer or body that sought approval for its use.
Meanwhile, sidewalk robots are getting on with the job. Among them, Starship
Technologies, based in San Francisco, reckons it has already clocked up more than
2.5m deliveries with bots in a number of cities, university campuses and business
parks in Europe and America. Amazon is carrying out trials with a similar sort of
machine it calls Scout. Kiwibot, a Colombian startup, is making sidewalk deliveries
in California.
Typically, these robots carry a few bags of groceries using a variety of sensors,
including cameras, radar and gps to navigate and avoid obstacles and people.
Their progress can be monitored on a phone app, which also unlocks them for
goods to be retrieved. As they are small, move slowly (Starship’s bots might reach
a heady 6kph) and are “telemonitored” by people in a control room who can take
over, authorities seem more willing to give them a green light.
Such robots are also becoming more autonomous. In January Serve Robotics,
another San Franciscan firm whose backers include Uber, a ride-hailing giant,
said it had deployed a new sidewalk bot with “level 4” autonomy, which means it
can operate without telemonitoring in some predesignated areas.
Robotic versions which operate on roads but have no driver’s cab are also
appearing. Nuro, a Silicon Valley firm, makes one about the size of a small car that
can carry 24 bags of groceries. It has chilled and heated compartments for food
and drinks. Udelv, also a Californian firm, is developing a larger type called
Transporter to operate at highway speeds. Being much further along the road in
earning their keep, these delivery bots are helping to pave the way for the time
when bigger autonomous vehicles can join them.
VOCABULARY
• Sidewalk robots: robot vỉa hè

• Annual sales: doanh thu hàng năm
• Driverless cars: xe không người lái
• Hold back: giữ lại
• On board: trên xe
• Take over: tiếp quản, kiểm soát
• Labour-saving: tiết kiệm lao động
• Contraptions: máy kỳ cục, dụng cụ thay thế tạm thời
• Legal hurdles: rào cản pháp lý
• Prosecution: truy tố
• Autonomous mode: chế độ lái tự động
• Seek approval for its use: yêu cầu phê duyệt việc sử dụng chúng
• Get on with something: bắt đầu/ tiếp tục làm điều gì đó
• Delivery: giao hàng
• Bot: người máy
• Navigate and avoid obstacles: định vị và tránh chướng ngại vật
• Monitor: giám sát
• Give them a green light: bật đèn xanh, chấp thuận, cho phép hành động hay
thực thi một dự án
• Backer: người cấp vốn
• A ride-hailing giant: ‘gã khổng lồ’ gọi xe
• Telemonitoring: giám sát từ xa
• Predesignated areas: khu vực được chỉ định trước
• Cab: taxi
• Compartment: ngăn
• Highway speeds: tốc độ đường cao tốc
• Earning their keep: kiếm tiền sinh hoạt
• Pave the way for: mở đường cho

3. Fatherless sons have more testosterone
Most males in the animal kingdom do little parenting. Their strategy is simple:
inseminate as many females as possible and hope for the best. Sometimes, though,
parental investment by a male pays off. Songbird chicks are usually tended by
both mother and father. Wolf packs see alpha males and females collaborate to
raise the cubs. And in human beings, too, the children’s father hangs around to
lend a hand in bringing up the kids.
Understanding why some men settle down to form families with the mothers of
their children, and others don’t, is normally seen as the prerogative of social
science. But biology has a role, too. And work just published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, by Lee Gettler of the University of Notre Dame,
in Indiana, clarifies how part of that biological mechanism, testosterone, operates.
Previous studies suggest that high levels of testosterone, the principal male
hormone, are bad for family life. Fathers with lower testosterone levels provide
more child care and are better partners to the children’s mothers. Indeed,
fatherhood is often associated with a drop in testosterone levels. Conversely, high-
testosterone males are less likely to stick around.
Dr Gettler has shown something further. This is that a man’s adult testosterone level
seems correlated with whether his father was present during his teenage years. His
data come from a survey begun in Cebu City, in the Philippines, in 1983. This
monitored the health and nutrition of 966 men enrolled as babies. It also collected
extensive information on whether the fathers of these men were around and
providing parental care in the households in which they were brought up. It further
documented whether participants got married, had children and, if they did, whether
they participated in child care. Crucially, it also measured their testosterone levels
at the ages of 21, 26 and 30.
Overall, Dr Gettler and his colleagues found that on becoming fathers, men had
lower testosterone levels if their own fathers had lived with them and been involved
in their care during their teenage years. Specifically, if that had happened,
testosterone levels in their saliva were 16% below those of men whose fathers had
not stuck around to help raise them.
This difference has two possible explanations. One is that it is directly genetic, with
high-testosterone fathers (those least likely to stick around) begetting high-
testosterone sons. In this case the correlation with paternal absence would be a
coincidence. The other is that teenage experience actually modulates testosterone
levels. This explanation, which Dr Gettler favours, could lead to a vicious circle of
high-testosterone men abandoning their sons, who thus become high-testosterone
in their turn.
Testosterone levels are not, Dr Gettler found, completely deterministic in the

matter of parental care. Some of those in the survey whose fathers were absent
during their adolescence, and who ended up with high levels of the hormone, did
nevertheless become nurturing parents. But they are indicative.
Why this pattern should pertain is an unanswered question. But a zoologist looking
at these data might be tempted to see in them an example of developmental
plasticity, in which the same genes produce different, but appropriate, outcomes in
different circumstances.
If nurturing young carries a cost in reproductive opportunities forgone elsewhere
(which it presumably does), then it would not have been favoured by evolution in
times of uncertainty—the sorts of times that lead to early death. A dead man
cannot care for his children, and dead children cannot be cared for. Better,
evolutionarily speaking, to spread your genes far and wide while you can. Since the
absence of a father could, in turn, mark such uncertain times, for that absence to
trigger a high-testosterone developmental pathway encouraging this would make
sense, even if it is not appropriate to the modern world.
That is speculation. But whatever the truth, Dr Gettler’s discovery surely throws a
useful light on the problem of fatherless families, and how to try to end it.
VOCABULARY
• Testosterone: hoóc-môn hay hormone testosterone

• Inseminate: thụ tinh
• Parental investment: đầu tư của cha mẹ
• Songbird chick: chim sẻ hót non
• Collaborate to raise the cubs: hợp tác để nuôi dạy đàn con
• Lend a hand in bringing up the kids: giúp đỡ nuôi dưỡng con cái
• Settle down: ổn định cuộc sống
• Prerogative: đặc quyền
• Biological mechanism: cơ chế sinh học
• Fatherhood: tình phụ tử
• Stick around: ở yên một chỗ
• Correlated with: tương quan với
• Enrolled: đăng ký, ghi danh
• Extensive information: thông tin sâu rộng
• Parental care: sự chăm sóc của cha mẹ
• Saliva: nước miếng
• Paternal absence: sự thiếu vắng bố
• Coincidence: sự trùng hợp
• Modulate testosterone levels: điều chỉnh nồng độ testosterone
• A vicious circle: một vòng luẩn quẩn
• Completely deterministic: hoàn toàn xác định, tất định
• Adolescence: thời thanh niên
• Nurturing parents: bố mẹ nuôi
• Indicative: mang tính chất biểu thị
• Zoologist: nhà động vật học
• To be tempted to: bị cám dỗ để làm gì
• Developmental plasticity: độ dẻo phát triển (một thuật ngữ chung đề cập đến
những thay đổi trong các kết nối thần kinh trong quá trình phát triển là kết quả
của sự tương tác môi trường cũng như những thay đổi thần kinh do học tập gây
ra.)
• Reproductive opportunities: cơ hội sinh sản
• Forgo: thôi, bỏ
• Times of uncertainty: thời điểm bất ổn
• Trigger: gây ra
• Speculation: sự suy đoán
• Fatherless families: gia đình không có cha/ thiếu cha

review-7-12951724
TOPIC 8: LANGUAGE
1. Body language in the post-pandemic workplace
Communication is an essential part of leadership. And body language is an

essential part of communication. On these slim pillars rests a mini-industry of
research and advice into how executives can influence, encourage and ascend
without needing to say a word. The pandemic has made much of it redundant.
Plenty of studies have looked into the non-verbal behaviour that marks out
“emergent leaders”, people who do not have a specified role in the hierarchy but
naturally assume a position of authority in groups. They are a bag of tics. They
nod; they touch others but not themselves; they gesture; they furrow their brows;
they hold themselves erect; their facial expressions are more animated.
Other research suggests that, to win votes in an election, candidates should deliver
speeches with their feet planted apart. The second-most popular ted talk claims that
two minutes of private, hands-on-hips “power posing” can infuse a job candidate
with confidence and improve others’ perceptions of them.
Gazing can foster a sense of psychological safety as well as confer authority: in

a recent paper, a trio of researchers from Harvard Business School found that
receiving more eye contact from a bigwig led to greater participation in group
interactions. Leaders who adopt open body positions, with arms and legs
uncrossed, are also more likely to encourage contributions.
There are three problems with this body of research on non-verbal

communication. One is that so much of it is blindingly obvious. Nodding at
someone rather than shaking your head in incredulity when they are speaking to
you—this does indeed send a powerful signal. But so does punching someone in
the face, and no one thinks that requires a journal publication.
A second problem is that people look for different things from their bosses.
Frowning is seen as a mark of emergent leaders but not of supportive ones; the
reverse is true of smiling. (The effect of smiling with lowered eyebrows cries out
for study.) A recent paper found that male recipients regarded bosses who used
emojis, a form of not-quite-verbal communication, in an email as more effective,
but that female recipients perceived them as less effective.
The third problem is newer. Almost all of the research on body language dates from
a time of in-person interactions. Even when the pandemic wanes and offices in
the West refill, most buildings will not return to full capacity. Employees will keep
working remotely for at least part of the week; Zoom will remain integral to white-
collar working lives. And if there is one thing for which online interactions are not
suited, it is body language.
That is partly because bodies themselves are largely hidden from view: whatever
language they are speaking, it is hard to hear them. You will know the partners, pets
and home-decor choices of new colleagues before you will know how tall they are.
And although faces fill the video-conferencing screen, meaningful eye contact is
impossible.
Once past a basic threshold of attentiveness—not looking down at your mobile

phone, say—most people have the same glassy-eyed stare. If several faces appear
on screen, these participants have no way of knowing that you are gazing
specifically at them. (Anyway, admit it: the face you are looking at with most
interest is your own.) If your camera is in the wrong place, you may think you are
looking meaningfully at your team but you are actually just giving them a view of
your nostrils. Animated expressions are hard to spot, particularly when people
attending hybrid meetings in the office are Lowry-like figures seated metres
away.
There are no good ways to compensate for these problems. One tactic is to go all
in on expressiveness, nodding furiously and gesturing dementedly—a small tile
of caged energy somewhere in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. Another
is to do a “Zoom loom”, placing yourself so close to the camera that you will give
everyone nightmares.
The simpler option is not to think too hard about body language. At a few specific
moments, like job interviews and set-piece speeches, first impressions matter and a
bit of self-conscious posing pays off. But posture is not leadership. If you want to
give people a break from staring at a screen, turning off your camera is a good way
to do it. If you want to waggle your eyebrows, up or down, let them loose. And if
you need to be told that looking at someone makes them feel valued, you have
bigger issues.
VOCABULARY
• Body language: Ngôn ngữ cơ thể

• Ascend: Lên, thăng chức
• Redundant: Thừa thãi
• Non-verbal behaviour/ communication: Hành vi/ giao tiếp không lời
• Emergent leaders: người lãnh đạo mới nổi
• Hierarchy: Hệ thống cấp bậc
• Assume a position of authority: Đảm nhận một chức vụ quyền hạn
• A bag of tics: Những người có vận động hay phát âm không chủ ý, xảy ra nhanh,
lặp đi lặp lại và thường liên quan đến một nhóm cơ nhất định (thường ở mặt).
• Gesture: Cử chỉ, điệu bộ
• Erect: Đứng thẳng
• Facial expressions: Biểu cảm khuôn mặt
• Animated: Sinh động, đầy sức sống
• Infuse … with: Truyền
• Foster a sense of psychological safety: Nuôi dưỡng cảm giác an toàn về tâm lý
• Confer authority: Trao quyền hạn
• Trio: Nhóm 3 người hoặc đồ vật
• Eye contact: Giao tiếp bằng mắt
• Bigwig: Nhân vật quan trọng, quan to
• Adopt open body positions: Giữ tư thế cởi mở
• Blindingly obvious: rất hiển nhiên, rõ ràng
• Incredulity: Sự hoài nghi
• Date from: Bắt nguồn từ
• In-person/ online interactions: Tương tác trực tiếp/ trực tuyến
• Wane: Suy yếu
• Hidden from view: Che khuất mắt
• Video-conferencing screen: Màn hình hội nghị truyền hình
• A basic threshold of attentiveness: Một ngưỡng cơ bản của sự chú ý
• Compensate for: Bù đắp cho
• Tactic: Chiến thuật
• Nodding furiously and gesturing dementedly: Gật đầu tức giận và biểu cảm
một cách trìu mến
• Posture: Tư thế

language-1-12840690
2. To master a language, start learning it early
Those who want to learn a foreign language, or want their children to, often feel
they are racing against the clock. People seem to get worse at languages as they
age. Children often learn their first without any instruction, and can easily become
multilingual with the right exposure. But the older people get, the harder it seems
to be. Witness the rough edges on the grammar of many immigrants even after
many years in their new countries.
Scientists mostly agree that children are better language learners, but do not know
why. Some posit biological factors. Is it because young brains have an extreme
kind of plasticity? Or, as Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, argues, an
instinct for language-learning specifically, which fades as the brain ages and (in
evolutionary terms) is no longer needed? Others think children have special
environments and incentives, not more conducive brains. They have a strong
motivation to communicate with caregivers and imitate peers, and are not afraid of
making mistakes in the way adults are.
Some believe any “critical period” may only apply to the sounds of a foreign
tongue. Adults struggle with accents: eight decades after immigrating to America
and four after serving as secretary of state, Henry Kissinger still sounds fresh off
the boat from Fürth—in what is nevertheless elaborately accurate English. (An
alternative explanation, runs a joke about Mr Kissinger, is that he never listens.)
But grammar is different, and some researchers have reckoned that adults, with their
greater reasoning powers, are not really at a disadvantage relative to children. One
study found that when adults and children are exposed to the same teaching
materials for a new language for several months, the adults actually do better. Most
such research has had to rely on small numbers of subjects, given the difficulty of
recruiting them; it is hard to know how meaningful the results are.
Now a large new study led by Joshua Hartshorne of Boston College (with Mr Pinker
and Joshua Tenenbaum as co-authors) has buttressed the critical-period
hypothesis. The study ingeniously recruited 670,000 online test-takers by framing
the exercise as a quiz that would guess the participants’ native language or dialect.
This made it a viral hit. The real point was to test English-learners’ knowledge of
tricky bits of grammar, and to see how this correlates with the age at which their
studies began.
Do younger beginners do better because their earlier start gave them more learning
time, or because they learned faster in early years? It can be hard to tease apart
these two questions. But testing a huge amount of data against a number of possible
learning curves allowed Mr Hartshorne to do precisely that. Many previous
researchers had posited a drop-off at around puberty. The new study found it to be
rather later, just after 17.
Despite that later cut-off, learners must begin at around ten if they are to get to near-
native fluency. If they start at, say, 14, they cannot accumulate enough expertise in
the critical period. Unfortunately, 14 or so is precisely when many students,
especially in America, are first introduced to a new language. (Even worse, this is
an age when children are acutely sensitive to embarrassment in front of peers.)
Children who start at five don’t do noticeably better than those who start at ten over
their lifetimes. But there is still reason to begin in the first years of school, as in
Denmark and Sweden. Because mastery takes a long time—perhaps 30 years until
improvement ceases—those who begin at five and are obliged to read and write
English at university will by then have made much more progress than those who
took the plunge at ten, even if their level is roughly the same by 40.
The existence of the critical period is not a reason for anyone 11 or older to give up.
Some people remain excellent language students into adulthood. And Mr
Hartshorne tested some truly subtle features of grammar that take years to master.
A language learned even to a lower level can still be extraordinarily useful at work
or enjoyable while travelling.
But for policymakers, the implication is clear. Earlier is better. Students outside the
English-speaking world will eventually face English in the classroom or at work:
they’ll have a better shot if they start younger. As for the Anglophone countries,
getting foreign languages into the tender years is a hard sell. Many bureaucrats
can hardly see past reading and maths. That is a mistake for many reasons. This
study demonstrates one of them.
VOCABULARY
• Race against the clock: chạy đua với thời gian

• Multilingual: người nói được nhiều thứ tiếng
• Rough edges: lỗi nhỏ
• An extreme kind of plasticity: tính khả biến/tính dẻo đặc biệt
• An instinct for: năng khiếu/bản năng cho việc gì
• Incentive: sự khích lệ/khuyến khích
• Critical period: giai đoạn quan trọng/giai đoạn trưởng thành
• Fresh off the boat: vừa mới đến/nhập cư
• Elaborately: tỉ mỉ, kỹ lưỡng
• Reasoning powers: khả năng lập luận
• Be exposed to: tiếp xúc với cái gì
• Buttress: củng cố/ủng hộ
• A viral hit: sự thành công phổ biến
• Tricky bits of grammar: các đoạn ngữ pháp phức tạp
• Correlate with: tương quan/liên quan với
• Tease apart: tách ra
• Learning curve: đường cong học tập
• Puberty: tuổi dậy thì
• Near-native fluency: sự lưu loát gần như người bản xứ
• Acutely sensitive: nhạy cảm một cách trầm trọng
• Cease: dừng lại
• Be obliged to: bắt buộc phải làm gì
• Make progress: tiến bộ
• Take the plunge: bắt đầu hành động
• Subtle features: đặc trưng khó nhận thấy
• Have a better shot: có cơ hội hơn
• Tender years: những năm trẻ tuổi
• A hard sell: một điều khó khăn
• Bureaucrats: quan chức, công chức

language-2-12840694
3. The advantages of speaking a second language
Just a few generations ago, speaking two languages was supposed to be bad for you.
Tests in America found that bilingual people had lower IQs, which seemed evidence
enough. Later it became clear that those surveys were really measuring the material
poverty of immigrants; members of such families were more likely to be
undernourished and understimulated, not to mention the obvious fact that they often
sat the tests in a language that was not their best.
How things have changed. In the past decade it has become almost common knowledge
that bilingualism is good for you—witness articles such as “Why Bilinguals are
Smarter” and “The Amazing Benefits of Being Bilingual” by the New York Times and
the BBC. Stacks of research papers have suggested that two-tongued people enjoy a
variety of non-linguistic advantages. Most notably, they have shown that bilinguals
get dementia on average four years later than monolinguals, and that they have an
edge in “executive control”—a basket of abilities that aid people doing complex
tasks, including focusing attention, ignoring irrelevant information and updating
working memory.
Why bilingualism would enhance these capabilities is unclear. Researchers

hypothesise that having two languages means suppressing one when speaking the
other, a kind of constant mental exercise that makes the brain healthier. This in
particular is thought to be behind the finding of a later onset of dementia.
But as intellectual pendulums do, this one has begun to swing again, against the
“bilingual advantage”. Though many papers have identified such a bonus, many
more have tried and failed to replicate those studies. Roberto Filippi of University
College London and his colleagues have spent five years testing more than 600
people, from seven to 80 years old and including some who oscillate between two
languages. They could find no statistically significant advantage in any age cohort.
In response to the scepticism, researchers who believe in the advantage have

refined their studies—now acknowledging that, beneath their common trait,
bilingual people use their languages in varying ways that may account for the
incongruent previous results. Does speaking two very distinct languages have a
different effect from speaking two very similar ones? What about two dialects?
Does speaking more than two provide any additional benefit? Does it matter if
subjects live among people who speak their first language or their second?
A recent study by four researchers at the University of the Balearic Islands is a good
example. They studied 112 bilinguals using three criteria: the age they acquired a
second language; fluency in their two languages (most are not equally adept in
both); and the frequency with which they switch between the two options.
Frequency of switching, it turned out, was the variable that correlated best with
improved executive control. Unlike Mr Filippi’s, other studies have hinted that
frequent switching may be a good predictor of the bilingual advantage.
On balance, it seems that if the dividend is real, it is subtle and affected by many
other factors. Though wealthy parents have been taken by the notional leg-up,
hiring foreign nannies for their offspring and so on, it may be poorer individuals
who get the biggest benefit. A study in Hyderabad, for instance, reproduced the
finding of a four-year delay in the onset of dementia among bilinguals—except that
the gap was six years for those test cases who were illiterate. If switching languages
is healthy mental exercise, other highly skilled, cognitively demanding kinds of
labour are likely to provide good work-outs, too. People who do other forms of
mental multitasking all the time may not get such a big lift from bilingualism, if
they get any at all.
The bottom line is that learning another language (or teaching a child one)
sometimes confers an intellectual boost, though not always. But that has never
been the main reason to do it. A second language expands the number of people
you can talk to. It adds to the ways you can say things, and so offers a second point
of view on the whole business of expression. Bilingualism may help you understand
other people; one study found that bilingual children are better at grasping other
perspectives, perhaps because they are always keeping track of who speaks what,
a regular reminder that everyone is different. Finally, speaking a second language
less well than your first supplies another kind of useful practice: it is a constant
exercise in humility.
VOCABULARY
• Material poverty: sự nghèo đói vật chất

• Undernourished: suy dinh dưỡng
• Understimulated: không có động lực
• Sit a test: tham gia kì thi
• Bilingualism: song ngữ
• Get dementia: gặp chứng mất trí
• Have an edge in sth: có lợi thế trong việc gì
• Suppress: ngừng
• Mental exercise: bài tập trí óc
• An onset of: sự bắt đầu của
• Intellectual pendulum: con lắc thông minh
• Swing: thay đổi, đổi
• Oscillate between two languages: chuyển qua lại giữa 2 ngôn ngữ
• Scepticism: thái độ hoài nghi
• Common trait: đặc điểm phổ biến
• Dialect: ngôn ngữ địa phương
• Equally adept: thành thạo ngang nhau
• Notional leg-up: sự giúp đỡ tưởng tượng
• Nanny: người giữ trẻ
• Illiterate: mù chữ
• Cognitively demanding kinds of labour: công việc yêu cầu trí óc
• An intellectual boost: sự thúc đẩy trí tuệ
• Grasp other perspectives: hiểu được các quan điểm/cái nhìn khác
• Keep track of: theo dõi (để nắm được thông tin)

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TOPIC 9: WORK
1. Do not bring your whole self to work
A phrase that first became fashionable a decade ago is everywhere. “Bring your
whole self” is one of four values that British Land, a property developer, trumpets
on its website. Quartz, a publisher, ran a workshop last year called “How to navigate
the whole-self workplace”. “Your whole self is welcome here,” pledges ING, a
bank, to prospective employees. (Whole Foods uses the phrase on its global careers
site, too, but it has a decent excuse.)
There are spin-off selves. Workday, an enterprise-software firm, wants its
employees to be their “best selves” at work. Finn, a classified-ads site in Norway,
is hiring for a compensation and benefits specialist who loves to bring their “full
self” to the office. Key, an American bank, prefers to use the term “authentic self”.
The idea that unites these phrases is that employees need not pretend to be someone
they aren’t. Instead of having a workplace persona and a non-workplace persona,
people can just relax and always be themselves.
Behind this thought lies a good intention—or rather lots of good intentions. The
notion of the whole self variously captures the idea that people are more engaged
in work if they believe in a firm’s purpose; that teams are more effective if
colleagues understand each other; that people with different identities should feel
comfortable in their own skins; that firms should care about and respond to issues
that affect their staff’s well-being, from mental health to child care; and that leaders
need to show some of their personal side to be connected with their staff.
None of these things is silly. Many are in fact actively desirable. However, any idea
that covers so much ground is bound to have holes in it, and this one would make
a colander blush.
Most obviously, no one should actually bring their whole selves to work. People
are a melange of traits, some good and some bad. Many of them should be kept
well away from the workplace. Your professional self displays commitment to the
job and eats lunch at a desk. Your whole self is planning the next holiday and binges
ice cream on the sofa. Your professional self makes presentations to the board and
says things like: “Let’s get the analytics team to kick the tyres on this.” Your whole
self cannot operate a toaster and says things like: “Has anyone seen my socks?”
Pretending to be someone you are not is not a problem; it’s essential.
For the same reasons, your employer may say it wants you to bring your whole self
to work but doesn’t really mean it. A company is a hierarchy, in which even the
most understanding bosses expect people to follow orders rather than their hearts.
Say something that causes your firm embarrassment, as a senior HSBC executive
did last month by making fun of apocalyptic warnings about climate change, and
you will end up being disowned rather than lauded for authenticity. This column
is named for a short story by Herman Melville, in which the eponymous character
speaks his own truth by saying “I would prefer not to” to every single request made
of him by his manager. He ends up dead.
Any job that involves a uniform is by definition asking employees to subsume their
personalities, not express them. When times are tough or performance is shoddy,
an employee is an individual second and a line item in the budget first. If the
circumstances require it, he will be asked to leave and take his whole self with him.
As a result, the bringing of whole selves is carefully circumscribed. Candidates for

jobs typically feel obliged to tell interviewers a few things about themselves in order
to show that they are rounded human beings. Without fail those things are along the
lines of “I have a dog called Casaubon, run a local food bank and love to go sea
kayaking.” They are never “I hate animals, exercise and my fellow humans.”
Lots of executives, too, deal in whole-selfery of a very synthetic kind. As a rule of

thumb, if you are taking advice on how to be authentic, you are not being authentic.
And if you are scheduling meetings in order to display vulnerability, you are
mainly showing controlled cunning.
One of the attractions of the workplace is that it is a place where there is a shared
endeavour. That endeavour is called “work”. You need to be friendly to be a good
colleague, but you don’t need to be friends. You need to be capable of empathy, but
you don’t need to constantly emote. You have to turn up, try hard and play your
part. You have to bring your role self.
VOCABULARY
• A prospective employee: nhân viên tương lai/triển vọng

• A decent excuse: một lý do thỏa đáng
• A classified-ads site: trang web phân loại quảng cáo
• Capture the idea: nắm bắt ý tưởng
• Be engaged in work: cống hiến cho công việc
• Cover so much ground: đề cập đến quá nhiều vấn đề
• A melange of: một hỗn hợp/ sự trộn lẫn
• Display commitment to the job: thể hiện sự gắn bó với công việc
• Hierarchy: hệ thống cấp bậc
• Kick the tyres on sth: kiểm tra chất lượng cái gì
• Follow orders: nghe lệnh
• Apocalyptic warnings: cảnh báo ngày tận thế
• Be disowned: bị từ chối
• Be lauded for authenticity: được tán dương bởi sự thành thật
• Eponymous character: nhân vật cùng tên
• Subsume their personalities: hợp nhất tính cách
• Shoddy: không có giá trị/ kém chất lượng
• Be circumscribed: bị hạn chế/khoanh vùng
• A rule of thumb: nguyên tắc ngón tay cái
• Display vulnerability: thể hiện sự yếu đuối
• Show controlled cunning: thể hiện sự tinh ranh/xảo quyệt có kiểm soát
• Turn up: vùng lên
• Play one’s part: làm việc của mình
Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-work-

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2. The benefits of part-time work
People’s relationship with work is complex. For all the complaining about the
tedium and bureaucracy, the power-crazed bosses and recalcitrant colleagues,
individuals need the security of a job. A century of research has shown that
unemployment is bad for mental health, leading to depression, anxiety and reduced
self-esteem. On average, it has an even greater effect than divorce.
But how much work do you need to do? A recent paper* by the Centre for Business
Research at Cambridge University took the opportunity of the pandemic to examine
the impact of reduced working hours on well-being. Many British employees were
placed in a furlough scheme, under which their hours were reduced and their wages
were subsidised by the government. “We found that people working reduced
working hours or being furloughed do not have poorer mental health,” the authors
conclude. This suggests that social welfare would be improved if governments
adopted furlough schemes in future recessions, even when they are not triggered
by a virus.
What was particularly surprising is how little work was needed to keep people
happy. The threshold for good mental health was just one day a week—after that,
it seemed to make little difference to individuals’ well-being if they worked eight
hours or 48 hours a week. The boost from working clearly comes from the feeling
of purpose, from the social status it creates and from the camaraderie of
colleagues engaged in the same tasks.
A little bit of work may be satisfying but too much is not. An enterprising junior
analyst at Goldman Sachs recently surveyed his peers and fashioned his report in
the style of a research presentation from the investment bank itself. The survey
found those first-year analysts had worked an average 98 hours a week since the
start of 2021, and only managed five hours of sleep a night. It found that 77% of
them had been the subject of workplace abuse, that 75% had sought, or considered
seeking, counselling, and that, on average, the cohort had suffered sharp declines
in mental and physical health. Unsurprisingly, the analysts thought it was unlikely
they would still be working at the bank in six months’ time.
To be fair to Goldman Sachs, the survey had only 13 respondents. Discontented

workers may have been the most likely to respond. And the bank’s reaction was
restrained. “A year into covid, people are understandably quite stretched, and
that’s why we are listening to their concerns and taking multiple steps to address
them,” a spokesperson said.
Nevertheless, the general reaction to the story was remarkably unsympathetic. In

some people’s eyes, the young analysts should have expected to be treated in such
a fashion; after all, that is why they were being paid so well. Veterans of the
investment-banking industry reminisced along the lines of “It was the same in my
day. Never did me any harm.” But it is hard to see why young Goldman analysts
(or indeed, anyone) should expect to suffer workplace abuse. They joined a bank,
not the Mafia.
Nor does it make much business sense to have employees working so long that they
only get to sleep five hours a night. They can hardly be operating at full efficiency
when they are dog-tired. Surely it is better to hire more analysts, and pay each of
them a little less. That junior professional staff have always worked long hours is
not a good explanation for piling stress onto young people at the start of their
careers. It smacks of the legendary navy motto: “The beatings will continue until
morale improves.”
Clearly, economies cannot prosper if everyone works one day a week. But the need
to limit excessive working hours was realised back in Victorian times. For much of
the 20th century the length of the average working week fell while output continued
to climb.
There will be occasions when people have to work late or rise early to finish a
project (Bartleby writes this on a day when the needs of The Economist required
him to get up at 5am). Day after day, however, a long-hours lifestyle is bad for
workers’ health. Some organisations may see the appetite for slogging it out as a
sign of an employee’s willingness to put their job ahead of their families and friends.
If so, they don’t need to have better employees. They need better managers.
VOCABULARY
• Tedium: sự chán ngắt

• Bureaucracy: bộ máy quan liêu
• Power-crazed bosses: những ông chủ khát khao quyền lực
• Recalcitrant colleagues: những người đồng nghiệp ngoan cố
• Furlough scheme: kế hoạch nghỉ phép
• Social welfare: phúc lợi xã hội
• Future recession: sự suy thoái trong tương lai
• Threshold: mức, ngưỡng
• Social status: địa vị xã hội
• Camaraderie: sự thân thiết
• The subject of workplace abuse: đối tượng của sự gièm pha nơi công sở
• Cohort: nhóm người
• Discontented: không hài lòng
• Restrained: dè dặt, thận trọng
• Understandably quite stretched: thiếu thốn/khó khăn một cách có thể hiểu
được
• Veterans: những người kỳ cựu (trong lĩnh vực nào đó)
• Reminisce: hồi tưởng
• Dog-tired: mệt rã rời
• Pile stress onto young people: gây căng thẳng cho người trẻ
• Smack: có vẻ như là
• Navy motto: khẩu hiệu hải quân
• Morale: tinh thần, chí khí
• Prosper: thịnh vượng, phồn vinh
• Rise early: dậy sớm
• Slog it out: làm việc miệt mài

2-12840721
3. Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs
When the pandemic first struck, unemployment soared. Not since the Depression
had American joblessness surpassed 14%, as it did in April 2020. But fears of a
prolonged period of high unemployment did not come to pass. According to the
latest available data, for November, the unemployment rate for the OECD club of
mostly rich countries was only marginally higher than it was before the pandemic.
By now it may even have drawn level. The rich world’s labour-market
bounceback is the latest phenomenon provoking economists to look again at a
foundational question in the discipline: whether robots help or harm workers.
The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just
around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular
imagination. Warning people of a jobless future has, ironically enough, created
plenty of employment for ambitious public intellectuals looking for a book deal
or a speaking opportunity. Shortly before the pandemic, though, other researchers
were starting to question the received wisdom. The world was supposedly in the
middle of an artificial-intelligence and machine-learning revolution, but by 2019
employment rates across advanced economies had risen to all-time highs. Japan and
South Korea, where robot use was among the highest of all, happened to have the
lowest rates of unemployment.
Many thought that the pandemic would at last prove the doom-mongers right. In
mid-2020 a highly cited paper published by America’s National Bureau of
Economic Research argued that covid-19 “may accelerate the automation of jobs”,
and another asserted that it was “reinforcing both the trend towards automation and
its effects”. A paper published by the IMF wondered whether the jobs lost during
the pandemic would “come back”. Part of the logic was that since robots don’t fall
ill, bosses would turn to them instead of to people—as seemed to have happened in
some previous pandemics. Others noted that bursts of automation tend to occur
during recessions.
Two years on, though, the evidence for automation-induced unemployment is

scant, even as global investment spending is surging. The rich world faces a
shortage of workers—by our reckoning there are a record 30m unfilled vacancies
across the OECD—which is hard to reconcile with the idea that people are no
longer necessary. Wage growth for low-skilled workers, whose occupations are
generally thought to be more vulnerable to replacement by robots, is unusually fast.
There is still little evidence from America that “routine” jobs, thought to be easier
to automate, are shrinking relative to other sorts of jobs.
Considering that so many doubts about the “robots kill jobs” narrative have arisen,
it is not surprising that a different thesis is emerging. In a recent paper Philippe
Aghion, Céline Antonin, Simon Bunel and Xavier Jaravel, economists at a range of
French and British institutions, put forward a “new view” of robots, saying that
“the direct effect of automation may be to increase employment at the firm level,
not to reduce it.” This opinion, heretical as it may sound, does have a solid
microeconomic foundation. Automation might help a firm become more
profitable and thus expand, leading to a hiring spree. Technology might also allow
firms to move into new areas, or to focus on products and services that are more
labour-intensive.
A growing body of research backs up the argument. Daisuke Adachi of Yale

University and colleagues look at Japanese manufacturing between 1978 and 2017.
They find that an increase of one robot unit per 1,000 workers boosts firms’
employment by 2.2%. Another study, by Joonas Tuhkuri of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (mit) and colleagues, looks at Finnish firms and concludes
that their adoption of advanced technologies led to increases in hiring.
Unpublished work by Michael Webb of Stanford University and Daniel Chandler
of the London School of Economics examines machine tools in British industry and
finds that automation had “a strong positive association with firm survival, and that
greater initial automation was associated with increases in employment”.
Non-economists can be forgiven for rolling their eyes at the profession’s apparent
about-face. But things are not as simple as saying that economists had got it wrong
before. For a start, statistical methods have improved since the publication of the
foundational papers in robonomics, such as one by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael
Osborne of Oxford University in 2013, which was widely interpreted as saying that
47% of American employment was at risk of automation. The methodology used
by Mr Adachi and his co-authors is particularly clever. One problem is untangling
causality: firms on a hiring spree may also happen to buy robots, rather than the
other way round. But the paper shows that firms buy robots when their prices fall.
This helps establish a causal chain from cheaper robots, to more automation, to
more jobs.
The onrushing wave…of research
A second qualification is that the “new view” does not establish that automation is
“good”. So far, it has had little to say about job quality and wages. But a
forthcoming book by David Autor, David Mindell and Elisabeth Reynolds of MIT
finds that even if robots do not create widespread joblessness, they may have helped
create an environment where the rewards are “skewed towards the top”. Others
argue that automation reduces job quality.
Mr Aghion and his colleagues add that even if automation boosts employment at
the level of the firm or industry, the effect across the economy as a whole is less
clear. In theory robot-adopting companies could be so successful that they drive
competitors out of business, reducing the total number of available jobs. Such
questions leave researchers with plenty more to investigate. But what seems clear
at this stage is that the era of sweeping, gloomy narratives about automation is well
and truly over.
VOCABULARY
• Strike (past simple: struck): bùng phát, hoành hành

• Soar: tăng nhanh chóng
• Labour-market bounceback: sự phục hồi thị trường lao động
• Provoke: thúc giục, khiêu khích
• Gloomy narrative: câu chuyện ảm đạm
• An invasion of job-killing robots: sự xâm chiếm của những con robot “cướp
việc”
• Ambitious public intellectuals: những nhà trí thức tham vọng
• Doom-mongers: những người dự đoán thảm họa
• Accelerate: đẩy nhanh, tăng tốc
• Assert: khẳng định
• Bursts of automation: sự bùng nổ của tự động hoá
• Automation-induced unemployment: thất nghiệp do tự động hoá
• Reconcile with: nhất trí, hoà hợp với cái gì
• Unfilled vacancies: những vị trí còn trống
• Put forward: phát biểu, gợi ý
• Heretical: (thuộc) phản động
• A solid microeconomic foundation: nền tảng kinh tế vi mô vững chắc
• A hiring spree: sự miệt mài tuyển nhân viên
• Labour-intensive: dùng/tập trung nhiều lao động
• Back up: ủng hộ, hậu thuẫn
• Adoption of advanced technologies: sự áp dụng các công nghệ tiên tiến
• Be associated with: liên quan đến
• Rolling one’s eyes at: khinh thường
• Apparent about-face: sự thay đổi ý kiến rõ ràng
• Statistical methods: các phương pháp thống kê
• Robonomics: một hệ thống kinh tế sử dụng robot, trí tuệ nhân tạo và công nghệ
tự động hóa để sản xuất
• Forthcoming: sắp tới, sắp xuất bản
• Skew towards the top: chạm đến đỉnh điểm
• Robot-adopting companies: những công ty sử dụng robot
• Drive competitors out of business: khiến cho đối thủ rời bỏ ngành
• Sweeping: có ảnh hưởng sâu rộng/ bao quát, chung chung

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TOPIC 10: INTERNET
1. Why the internet has not freed China
At the dawn of the digital age Bill Clinton predicted that a combination of
capitalism and the internet might liberalise China. His vision was bold, uplifting
and wrong. It was the year 2000 and America’s then-president saw a revolution in
the making, as the Communist Party ceased to be a monopoly provider of
everything from jobs and housing to news. In an age of new opportunity and
information sources, the party would be less able to control people, Mr Clinton
argued, adding: “In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable
modem.” Sure, he had heard that China was trying to control its internet. “Good
luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall,” he chuckled.
Party bosses spent the next 20 years proving that, with enough nails, the internet
can be hammered into submission. It has been a slog, involving armies of censors,
secret police and propaganda officials. Internet firms must employ moderators in
their tens of thousands, paid to spot and delete banned ideas and images within
seconds. Mr Clinton was not wholly mistaken. The state is less present in many
ordinary Chinese lives than before. In some sectors, officials have scrambled to
maintain their near-monopoly as providers of approved information. In the news
industry, party chiefs have poured resources into staid official news agencies, such
as the People’s Daily, encouraging them to create livelier subsidiaries to compete
with more commercial outlets. Private citizens occasionally dare to report news on
their own initiative, and question official accounts of events. For this they are
routinely reprimanded, sacked from jobs, detained or jailed.
The entertainment sector is the best place to see how Mr Clinton’s predictions went
awry, because it is one in which commercial competition has exploded, especially
online, but the party’s overall grip remains firm. That is remarkable, on the face of
it. A generation ago, a few pirate videos aside, state-run television stations and
official film-censors enjoyed near-total control over what was seen in homes or
cinemas. Not now. Visit a village home and a television may still blare in one
corner, half-watched by the very old and the very young. But elsewhere, in every
train carriage, canteen or dormitory, individual Chinese will be found gazing at
smartphones. They may be watching a drama, a talent contest or short videos by
amateurs with big online followings: a dancing farmer, perhaps, or a lorry driver
singing on some lonely road. A teenage boy, half asleep on the bus, may be
following a live-streamer playing a video game. The young women in the row
behind may be watching a social-media influencer with 40m followers peddling
lipstick, for China boasts the world’s largest and most developed e-commerce
market.
All this inclines officials to vigilance. On March 5th, in his annual report to the
National People’s Congress, the prime minister, Li Keqiang, called for greater
public civility in cultural industries, in the name of “advanced socialist culture”.
Four days earlier, the Chinese Association for Performing Arts, a state-backed
body, began enforcing a new list of 15 behaviours that could see actors, musicians
and other artists banned from performing for a year or longer. The penalty-
incurring activities range from insulting China’s national honour to drink-
driving, gambling or lip-synching during commercial performances. The
guidelines build on earlier moves by industry associations to defend social
stability, including rules forbidding depictions of gay love, extramarital affairs,
smoking or witchcraft. In today’s China, a painfully unequal society, film and
television regulators have tried to limit displays of wealth or inherited privilege. To
that end they have criticised reality television shows featuring the children of
famous people.
Censors have not only kept their grip on entertainers with rules. Lately, the very
nature of the modern Chinese internet, a hyper-commercial place patrolled by thin-
skinned bullies, is helping them succeed. This is a perilous time to be famous in
China. In the first few weeks of 2021, fans, prominent bloggers and state media
have united to rebuke so many celebrities that a recent item on Tencent News, an
online platform, was headlined: “The era of stars saying sorry is upon us: whatever
you did wrong, apologise.” Those who have said sorry this year include an actress
accused of abandoning two infants born via surrogacy in America and a comedian
who made a sexist advertisement for women’s underwear. Other apologies have
come from a comic actress who posed in a cardigan over the caption “husband-
snaring gear”, leading to charges of objectifying women; and from a 20-year-old
Tibetan horseman caught smoking on camera. Months earlier his good looks and
shy smile had shot him to fame and helped him into a job as a goodwill
ambassador for his hometown.
When market forces help the Communist Party to rule
Chaguan spoke recently to entertainment-industry veterans. They described famous

friends on medication for depression, and explained why. Once, stars were on show
only when they made a new film. Now, fans want to scrutinise every detail of
actors’ lives on social media, and expect perfection from their idols. Established
artists see hundreds of new rivals being created annually by talent contests. In a
country whose rulers may not be criticised, letting the public pillory the famous is
a useful safety valve, especially when stars cause real anger by dodging taxes or
otherwise abusing their privilege. Cut-throat competition has raised production
values. But political controls have reduced the diversity of cultural offerings. With
so many patriotic war films or slick dramas out there, what counts is profitability,
not art. Skittish sponsors are quick to flee at the first sign of trouble.
The party no longer monopolises entertainment. But it still writes the rules. Closed
off from the world by firewalls and import controls, China’s internet and cultural
industries have become cartels, rewarding the loyal and the biddable. That gives
censors all the power they need.
VOCABULARY
• At the dawn of digital age: khi thời đại kỹ thuật số bắt đầu
• Capitalism: chủ nghĩa tư bản
• Cease: ngừng, dừng
• Monopoly provider: nhà cung cấp độc quyền
• Liberty: quyền tự do
• Cable modem: môđem cáp
• Chuckle: cười thầm, cười khúc khích
• With enough nails, the internet can be hammered into submission: nếu có
đủ đinh thì hoàn toàn có thể khống chế được Internet
• Slog: giai đoạn khó khăn
• Propaganda officials: các quan chức tuyên truyền
• Scramble: tranh giành, tranh cướp
• Poured resources into: đổ các nguồn lực vào
• Create livelier subsidiaries: thành lập các công ty con sôi nổi hơn
• Routinely reprimanded: thường bị khiển trách
• Be sacked from jobs: bị đuổi việc
• Detain: bắt giữ
• Jail: cầm tù
• Official film-censors: bộ kiểm duyệt phim thuộc chính quyền
• Awry: không như mong đợi
• Overall grip: sự kiểm soát toàn bộ
• Blare: om sòm, ầm ĩ
• Gaze at smartphones: nhìn chằm chằm vào điện thoại
• Peddle: bán rong
• Inclines officials to vigilance: khiến chính quyền có xu hướng thận trọng
• Public civility: phép lịch sự công cộng
• State-backed: được nhà nước hỗ trợ
• Penalty-incurring activities: các hoạt động chịu phạt
• Gamble: đánh bạc/đầu cơ buôn bán
• National honour: danh dự quốc gia
• Defend social stability: bảo vệ sự ổn định xã hội
• Depictions: sự miêu tả
• Extramarital affairs: các vụ ngoại tình
• Witchcraft: ma thuật
• Perilous: nguy hiểm, đầy hiểm hoạ
• Thin-skinned bullies: những kẻ bắt nạt dễ mếch lòng (bắt nạt người khác nhưng
khi bị bắt nạt thì lại rất yếu đuối)
• Patrol: tuần tra, bảo vệ
• Be accused of: bị cáo buộc
• Surrogacy: việc mang thai hộ
• Shot one to fame: đột nhiên làm ai nổi tiếng
• A goodwill ambassador: đại sứ thiện chí
• Scrutinise: xem xét kỹ lưỡng, nghiên cứu cẩn thận
• Pillory: bêu riếu
• A useful safety valve: 1 cách giải tỏa (cảm xúc/căng thẳng/…) hữu hiệu
• Dodge taxes: trốn thuế
• Abuse one’s privilege: lạm dụng đặc quyền
• Cut-throat competition: cạnh tranh sinh tử
• Patriotic war films: những bộ phim chiến tranh yêu nước
• Slick dramas: những vở kịch thú vị
• Skittish sponsors: những nhà tài trợ nhát gan
• Flee: chạy trốn, lẩn trốn
• Cartels: độc quyền
• Biddable: vâng lời, tuân lệnh
internet-1-12840733
2. The second half of humanity is joining the internet
In 2007 more humans lived in cities than outside them for the first time. It was a
transition 5,000 years in the making. The internet has been quicker to reach the
halfway mark. Over 50% of the planet’s population is now online, a mere quarter
of a century after the web first took off among tech-savvy types in the West. The
second half of the internet revolution has begun. As our briefing describes, it is
changing how society works—and also creating a new business puzzle.
Most new users are in the emerging world; some 726m people came online in the
past three years alone. China is still growing fast. But much of the rise is coming
from poorer places, notably India and Africa. Having seen what fake news and
trolling has done to public discourse in rich countries, many observers worry about
politics being debased, from the polarisation of India’s electorate to the
persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. On the positive side, charities and
aid workers talk endlessly and earnestly about how smartphones will allow farmers
to check crop prices, let villagers sign up for online education and help doctors
boost vaccination rates.
Less well appreciated is that the main attractions of being online are the same for
the second half as they were for the first. Socialising and play, not work and self-
improvement, are the draw. Porn is popular. Messaging apps help friends stay in
touch, and let migrant workers say goodnight to their children back home. People
entertain their friends—and strangers—on social media with goofy home-made
videos on YouTube or TikTok, an app focused on short, humorous clips. Cheap
data plans and thumb drives bring pirated films to millions who may never have
been to a cinema. Dating apps are more popular than farming advice; video games
are more popular than either. Such boons are unlikely to make their way into many
UN development reports. But they are a boost to the stock of human happiness.
For businesses, the second half of the internet offers a vast pool of customers. It
also brings a headache—most of these new users are too poor to spend very much.
Tens of billions of dollars in venture-capital money have flowed into internet
startups in emerging markets, excluding China. The Silicon Valley giants have built
up big user bases—over 1.5bn Facebook users are in developing countries.
YouTube, a video site owned by Google, is increasingly dominated by non-Western
users. Last year Walmart spent $16bn buying Flipkart, an Indian e-commerce giant.
Jumia, an e-commerce firm with 4m customers in Nigeria and 13 other African
countries, floated in New York in April.
Despite these firms’ punchy valuations, they are still looking for sustainable
business models. Reliance Jio, an Indian firm, has sunk $37bn into building a high-
speed mobile network and acquiring a big base of mostly poor users. Each Facebook
user in Asia generates only $11 of advertising revenue a year, compared with $112
for a North American one. The combined revenue of all the internet firms in
emerging markets (excluding China) is perhaps $100bn a year. That is about the
same size as Comcast, America’s 31st-biggest listed firm by sales.
Nonetheless, the impact of these firms on business will get bigger in two ways.
First, they will grow fast—although whether fast enough to justify their valuations
remains to be seen. To maximise their chances, many are offering not just a single
service (such as search or video), as Western firms tended to in their early years,
but a bundle of services in one app instead, in the hope of making more money per
user. This approach was pioneered in China by Alibaba and Tencent. Go-Jek in
Indonesia offers ride-hailing, payments, drug prescriptions and massages.
Facebook is pushing a digital payments system in India through its chat service,
WhatsApp.
The second is that in the emerging world, established firms are likely to be disrupted
more quickly than incumbents were in the rich world. They have less
infrastructure, such as warehouses and retail sites, to act as a barrier to entry.
Many people, especially outside the big cities, lack access to their services entirely.
Beer, shampoo and other consumer-goods firms could find that as marketing goes
digital, new insurgent brands gain traction faster. Banks will be forced to adapt
quickly to digital payments or die. Viewed this way, there is a huge amount of
money at stake—the total market value of incumbent firms in the emerging world,
outside China, is $8trn. If you thought the first half of the internet revolution was
disruptive, just wait until you see the second act.
VOCABULARY
• 5,000 years in the making: mất 5000 năm để hình thành/tạo ra

• Take off: ra mắt
• Business puzzle: câu đố kinh doanh
• Public discourse: nghị luận công khai
• Polarisation of india’s electorate: sự phân biệt cử tri của ấn độ
• Persecution of myanmar’s rohingya minority: sự ngược đãi dân tộc thiểu số
rohingya của myanmar
• Earnestly: nghiêm túc, nghiêm chỉnh
• Sign up for: đăng ký (khoá học)
• Vaccination rates: tỷ lệ tiêm chủng
• Thumb drives: ổ usb
• Pirated films: phim bản quyền
• A boost to the stock of human happiness: sự thúc đẩy hạnh phúc con người
• A vast pool of: một số lượng lớn
• Venture-capital money: tiền vốn mạo hiểm
• Punchy valuations: sự định giá có tính thuyết phục
• Sustainable business models: mô hình kinh doanh bền vững
• Sink money into: đầu tư tiền vào làm gì
• A bundle of: nhiều, 1 chumd
• Ride-hailing: đặt xe
• Drug prescriptions: (sự)kê đơn thuốc
• Incumbent: người giữ chức vụ quan trọng nào đó
• Infrastructure: cơ sở hạ tầng
• A barrier to entry: rào cản gia nhập
• Insurgent brands: những nhãn hàng nổi dậy/nổi loạn
• Gain traction: trở nên phổ biến/nổi tiếng
• At stake: lâm nguy, bị đe doạ
• Internet revolution: cách mạng internet

internet-2-12840735
3. How to make social media safe for children
In March and April Jim Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, a children’s
advocacy group, badgered members of America’s Congress to regulate the apps
children are using online. Their response on Capitol Hill shocked him. “We already
regulated Nickelodeon, Disney channel and PBS Kids,” they replied, referring to
rules for television enacted in the 1990s and 2000s (with his help). They had
apparently missed a series of recent scandals: children exposed to violence and
pornography, their data being collected, paedophiles lurking in comments sections
of videos depicting youngsters. “We’re changing at warp speed,” Mr Steyer says,
“and we’re still talking about ‘Sesame Street’.”
Not for much longer. Members of Congress are drafting multiple bills to regulate
how internet platforms treat children. Britain has proposed child-safety rules,
including prohibitions on features designed to keep users hooked. From July it is
expected to require porn sites to bar users under 18; MindGeek, which owns many
salacious sites, wants to use an age-verification registry in order to comply (and,
in doing so, make it easier to charge adult visitors for content). In Delhi politicians
are considering rules that could stop the data of anyone under 18 from being
collected. The EU bars tech giants from garnering data and targeting ads at
children. Last year California adopted similar privacy protections that also forbid
tech companies from ignoring users’ actual age. Most of these provisions will be
enforced with heavy penalties.
In the 1980s and 1990s public officials in America worried about what shows and
advertisements children were being exposed to on TV. The Children’s Television
Act of 1990 and subsequent regulations limited the number of commercials
interrupting children’s shows and required that television stations provide
educational programming for children.
Compared with that concern, politicians and regulators have treated online video
services like YouTube (owned by Google) with insouciance verging on neglect.
Today children and teenagers are exposed to much dodgier fare in cyberspace than
they were in the 1990s on broadcast tv—at the touch of a fingertip on their (or their
parents’) iPad or smartphone. Teens run into white nationalists. Ten-year-olds
encounter flat-earthers. Toddlers stumble on violent, scary or pornographic
content. In comments attached to YouTube videos featuring children, molesters
identify the parts they liked most, with time stamps to alert others with similar
inclinations.
In 2018 the Pew Research Centre found that 61% of American parents who let their
offspring watch YouTube reported that the children come across unsuitable content.
Youngsters are also easily manipulated, critics say, by “like” and “share” buttons,
which may induce social anxiety and infringe on privacy.
It would help matters if social-media companies worked out ways to divert children
to stripped-down versions of their services without targeted ads and certain
features—Instagram without a “like” button, YouTube without autoplay or
comments. YouTube has a separate app, YouTube Kids—but most parents have not
heard of it. On May 22nd SuperAwesome, a British company that provides software
for children’s apps, announced that it had developed a tool, KidSwitch, which can
recognise with a high degree of confidence when a child is using an app.
The social-media giants, with their algorithms and rich stores of data, should be
able to sniff out at least the very young. So far, most have merely repeated that
children under 13 are not supposed to be using them without parental permission.
That official posture is meant to shield them from liability for harvesting children’s
data without parental consent, which is prohibited under existing law.
The Federal Trade Commission, an American regulator, has received complaints

against Facebook (which owns Instagram), YouTube and TikTok, a popular
Chinese-owned video-sharing app, alleging that they collected data from children
under 13. In February TikTok agreed to pay a fine of $5.7m, said it would take
down any videos uploaded by children under 13, and pledged to limit the app’s
functions for these young users.
Data-privacy rules aside, it has mostly been up to social-media companies to

regulate other aspects of their operations themselves. They can restrict content as
they please, but have only done so in the glare of scrutiny, after journalists or
activists shed light on problems. (In February YouTube largely banned comments
on videos featuring children.) Without the threat of severe penalties, the platforms
have had little financial incentive to change. Midia, a consultancy, estimates that in
2017 children’s channels accounted for 17% of YouTube views, and 15% of
revenues, or $2.1bn.
The threat is now materialising. In June Ed Markey, a senator from Massachusetts,

is expected to introduce a sweeping child-protection bill, the “kids Act”. It would
ban continuous “autoplay” on video sites and certain social features, set standards
for content and restrict advertising. It would, in other words, be the internet era’s
equivalent of the Children’s Television Act, which Mr Markey helped pass as a
young congressman. As Mr Steyer says: “To a child a screen is a screen is a
screen.”
VOCABULARY
• Badger: thuyết phục

• Paedophile: kẻ ấu dâm
• At warp speed: với tốc độ rất nhanh
• Bar: ngăn, chặn
• Salacious sites: những trang web tục tĩu
• Age-verification registry: sự đăng ký có xác nhận độ tuổi
• Garner data: thu thập dữ liệu
• Privacy protection: bảo vệ sự riêng tư
• Heavy penalty: hình phạt nặng
• Insouciance verging on neglect: sự vô lo gần như là bỏ bê
• White nationalists: những người theo chủ nghĩa dân tộc da trắng
• Flat-earthers: những người cho rằng trái đất là mặt phẳng
• Stumble on: tình cờ bắt gặp
• Molesters: kẻ lạm dụng (tình dục)
• Time stamps: dấu thời gian (là một chuỗi các ký tự hoặc thông tin được mã hóa
xác định khi một sự kiện nào đó xảy ra).
• Similar inclinations: các ý định tương tự
• Easily manipulated: dễ dàng bị thao túng
• Infringe on privacy: xâm phạm quyền riêng tư
• Stripped-down versions: phiên bản tối giản/đơn giản
• Sniff out: phát hiện ra
• Shield one from sth: bảo vệ ai khỏi cái gì
• parental consent: sự đồng ý/cho phép của phụ huynh
• Allege: viện cớ, viện lý (nói rằng điều gì đó là sai/trái pháp luật nhưng không
đưa ra được bằng chứng)
• Pay a fine: nộp phạt
• Data-privacy rules: luật bảo mật thông tin
• In the glare of scrutiny: trong ánh mắt soi mói
• Shed light on: làm sáng tỏ điều gì
• Materialise: trở thành sự thật
• Child-protection bill: luật bảo vệ trẻ em
• Set standards for: đặt ra các tiêu chuẩn
• Congressman: nghị sĩ

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

HƯỚNG DẪN SỬ DỤNG TÀI LIỆU ......................................................................... 4

Trong mỗi bài báo sẽ có các mục như sau:

• Đoạn văn bản của bài báo

• Từ vựng/cụm từ vựng/cách diễn đạt được in đậm trong văn bản

• Nghĩa tiếng Việt của từ vựng/cụm từ vựng /cách diễn đạt

Cách sử dụng tài liệu:

1. How small businesses have dealt with the crisis

• A special-operations pilot: phi công vận hành đặc biệt

Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-

2. Facebook’s retirement plan

The Face that launched a thousand shops

• Retirement plan: kế hoạch nghỉ hưu

Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-

Clarity of expectations is the key

It is easier to do that if expectations are clear. Anne Raimondi of Asana, a work-

Second, burnout is as much of a risk as slacking. New research from Microsoft

Last, good performance is not defined by employees’ locations at specific times of

• Clarity of expectations: kỳ vọng rõ ràng

Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-

Link Review 1: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-

1. The role of employers

Companies are embracing learning as a core skill

A strange-looking small room full of vintage furniture—an armchair, a chest of

Mr Rajagopalan is head of research and design at the Indian business-services firm.

Infosys is grappling with a vital question: what do people need to be good at to

Building a better learner

An emphasis on learning has long been a hallmark of United Technologies (UTC),

As continued learning becomes a corporate priority, two questions arise. First, is it

The second question is whether it is possible to train people to learn. Imaging

• Cognition switch: thay đổi nhận thức

Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-

2. The return of the MOOC

Nonetheless, the MOOCs are on to something. Education, like health care, is a

Gold stars for good behaviour

Pluralsight is heading in a similar direction in its field. A diagnostic tool uses a

Even if these problems can be overcome, however, there is A system of

So amenable, indeed, that they can be tested directly. As an adolescent in Armenia,

• Credentials: chứng chỉ

Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-

3. How to turn a qualification into a salary

University education is designed to act as a slipway, launching students into the

Generation, a philanthropically funded programme run by the McKinsey Social

A little help from your friends

LinkedIn is another organisation with a decent understanding of wider trends. The

• Turn a qualification into a salary: biến trình độ thành thu nhập

Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-

1. Who will win the media wars?

Disney’s new streaming service and the media wars

This binge is the culmination of 20 years of creative destruction. New technologies

This is why government has a role in keeping the entertainment business

Don’t lose the plot

• Spectacular investment booms: sự bùng nổ ngoạn mục về đầu tư

Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-

2. How the coronavirus is changing arts and entertainment in America

Streaming services are the most obvious beneficiary of a populace cooped up

Musical ensembles are also providing levity and distraction. Enterprising

• Despair: tuyệt vọng

Link CRAM: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-

But it has kept a low profile

In 1965 three fathers in Washington state faced a dilemma familiar to beleaguered

Today pickleball, which is a hybrid of tennis, badminton, and ping-pong, is the

Link CRAM: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/01/28/pickleball-is-the-

Link Review 3: https://www.cram.com/flashcards/ielts-xuan-phi-the-economist-