Origami Space Technology Combines Art, Design, Science

  Since he was eight years old, Robert Salazar has been making artistic creations from folded paper. Now, he is taking his love of origami to a different place: outer space. Salazar works with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the United States space agency NASA. He says that ideas from origami can help design devices for research and exploration: "Origami offers the potential to take a very large structure, even a vast structure, and you can get it to fit within the rocket, go up, then deploy back out again. So it greatly magnifies what we are capable of building in space." Researchers are using ideas from origami on several space agency projects. Starshade Manan Arya is a technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is working on a project called Starshade. The project's goal is to fit a large object into a rocket. Once the rocket reaches the correct point in space, the Starshade opens like a flower. This large flower shape is meant to block light to permit a space telescope to better see areas close to bright stars. Starshade, Arya says, can be used to look for planets that orbit other stars. "Seeing an exoplanet next to its parent star is like trying to image a firefly next to a search light, the searchlight being the star. Starshade seeks to block out that starlight so you can image a really faint exoplanet right next to it." Other uses: a Robot and an Antenna Researchers are also using ideas from origami to design a robot and a special antenna for satellites. The robot is called the Pop-up Flat Folding Explorer Robot, or PUFFER. It can fold itself flat to get into small spaces. Salazar says the robot can explore environments "otherwise inaccessible" to a robot. It could even be used to explore cave systems on our own planet, he adds. Antennas on satellites capture and send communications signals. Arya notes that the idea behind the special antenna's design is to pack it into very small satellites that are known as CubeSats. Arya says it is very useful to be able to fit large antennas into a small space: "The bigger the antenna you have, the more gain your antenna has, so it is useful to have a big antenna that gets packaged into this tiny space that unfolds out to be a large antenna. The biggest CubeSat antennas we have right now are about half a meter." NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory origami-based technologies have a graceful beauty.  In origami, Salazar said, art, science and engineering only have small differences. I'm John Russell.   Elizabeth Lee reported on this story for VOA News. John Russell adapted it for Learning English. Mario Ritter was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   origami – n. the Japanese art of folding paper into shapes that look like birds, animals, etc. deploy –v. : to open up and spread out the parts of (something, such as a parachute) exoplanet – n. a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system. inaccessible – adj. difficult or impossible to reach, approach, or understand : not accessible technologist – n. someone who is an expert in technology

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November 3, 2017

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What it Takes - Desmond Tutu

00:00:02     OPRAH WINFREY: "Hattie Mae, this child is gifted," and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.   00:00:08     ROGER BANNISTER: If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity, and you don't take it, you may never have another chance.   00:00:14     LAURYN HILL: It all was so clear. It was just, like, the picture started to form itself.   00:00:19     DESMOND TUTU: There was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth, darkness over light, death over life.   00:00:27     CAROL BURNETT (quoting CARRIE HAMILTON): “Every day I wake up and decide, today I'm going to love my life. Decide.”   00:00:35     JOHNNY CASH: My advice is, if they're going to break your leg once when you go in that place, stay out of there.   00:00:40     JAMES MICHENER: And then along come these differential experiences that you don't look for, you don't plan for, but boy, you’d better not miss them.   00:00:53     DESMOND TUTU: I have an easy name, Tutu, and any European can say, any American can say, “Tutu.”   00:01:00     ALICE WINKLER: That would be Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa trying to humbly argue here that his name had something to do with why he was chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.   00:01:15     DESMOND TUTU: Whereas if I had been something like “Matashavalla,” that might have made it a little more difficult.   00:01:21     ALICE WINKLER: Well, anyone who knows anything about South Africa knows that “Tutu” was more than just an easy and fun-to-say name. The archbishop was one of the leading forces behind the dismantling of apartheid. The Nobel Prize he received that year energized the movement against apartheid worldwide, but it would be another ten years before that brutal system of segregation was finally buried in the dung heap of history.   00:01:53     DESMOND TUTU: I never should have doubted that, ultimately, we were going to be free because, ultimately, I knew there was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth, darkness over light, death over life. What, I have to say, really bowled me over was how quickly the change happened when it happened.   00:02:25     I mean how quickly it came, because one moment, Nelson Mandela is in jail, and the next moment, he's walking a free man. One moment, we are shackled as the oppressed of apartheid, the next, we are voting for the very first time. I was 63 when I voted for the first time in my life in the country of my birth. Nelson Mandela was 76 years of age, but it happened. It happened.   00:03:01     ALICE WINKLER: Welcome to another episode of What It Takes, a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy of Achievement. And I'm going to insert a little plug here. Please, follow us on Twitter. Our handle is @WhatItTakesNow. Thanks. When I dipped into the Academy's archive this week, I discovered several interviews with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and several speeches, all recorded between 2002 and 2007.   00:03:30     Listening to the hours of tape, I was kind of overwhelmed that this icon of freedom and justice, this fearless champion of what is right, is also a tremendously joyful and funny man. He often howls with laughter or squeals out an excited phrase, and he's always quick with a joke or a hilarious metaphor, even when he's talking about the most sacred stories in Christianity.   00:03:58     DESMOND TUTU: Knock, knock. Who's there?   00:04:02     Gabriel.              Gabriel who?   00:04:05     Gabriel the Archangel.   00:04:09     Hi, Mary.   00:04:12     Hi, Gabriel.   00:04:15     Mary?              Yes?   00:04:19     God would like you to be the mother of God's son. WHAT! 00:04:27     You know, in this village, you can't scratch yourself without everybody knowing about it, and you want —   00:04:34     And you want me to be what?   00:04:37     An unmarried mother! Sorry. I'm a decent girl. Try next door. I mean...!   00:04:46     We would have been in a real pickle.   00:04:48     ALICE WINKLER: The archbishop did not always know he was headed for a life in the Anglican Church, and he could never have predicted he'd help take down the apartheid system. Growing up, he said, oppression was just all around him, but it didn’t stop him from having a happy childhood.   00:05:06     DESMOND TUTU: It was fun. It was fun because I don't think, at the time, that you sat around and felt sorry for yourself. You had friends. You kicked a football around, you fought, and you had caring parents.   00:05:27     ALICE WINKLER: His father was a schoolmaster, and the schools for black South Africans were abysmal, so that was where Tutu began to recognize the inequities.   00:05:37     DESMOND TUTU: Yeah, we lived a segregated life. When you went to town where the whites lived, you saw their schools, much, much, much better in equipment, better grounds and, even more extraordinary — you see, I used to — my father bought me a bicycle, and I was about the only kid in the ghetto who had a bicycle, and he would send me into town.   00:06:13     And frequently I would see black kids scavenging in the dustbins of the schools, where they picked out perfectly okay apples and fruit. White kids were being provided with school feeding, government school feeding, but most of the time they didn't eat it. They preferred what their mommies gave them, and so they would dump the whole fruit into the dustbin.   00:06:53     And these kids, coming from a township, who needed free meals, didn't get them, and so they got — it was things that registered without your being aware that they were registering, and you're saying, there are these extraordinary inconsistencies in our lives.   00:07:16     ALICE WINKLER: Luckily for Tutu, his father taught him Aesop's Fables and the stories of Shakespeare, and let him devour comic books, which gave Tutu a lifelong love of reading. And the dedicated teachers at his school made all the difference, too, making him feel that the sky was the limit, even with all the obvious obstacles in view.   00:07:38     When Tutu was a freshman in high school, for instance, the school was so inadequate that four classes met at the same time in a church hall instead.   00:07:48     DESMOND TUTU: You had to have a teacher who was engrossing because you could hear what the teacher in the other class was saying, and if that was more interesting, your teacher really had his job cut out to keep your attention. And we didn't have desks. We sat on benches that were used on Sundays as the pews for the church, and you sat when the teacher was holding forth.   00:08:23     Then when you wrote, you knelt behind the bench, and where you had been sitting was now your desktop.   00:08:33     ALICE WINKLER: He could easily have become bitter, but quite early in life, Tutu says, he remembers getting his first inklings that all people have some essential humanity.   00:08:44     DESMOND TUTU: Human beings are odd. I would go to town, in part to go and buy newspapers for my father. And, before taking them home, I would spread them on the sidewalk, the pavement, and I would kneel to read. Now this is a racist town. I can't ever recall any day when a white person would walk across the face of the newspaper.   00:09:19     I mean I still am puzzled that they used to walk around this newspaper, with this black kid kneeling down there reading, when you would have expected that they would have made my life somewhat uncomfortable. I mean I cannot understand that particular inconsistency. It is, therefore, one of my memories that — now why, in the name of everything that is good, didn't those whites actually just be nasty? And they weren’t.   00:10:00     ALICE WINKLER: That was a powerful realization for young Desmond Tutu. Other revelations came soon after that would also shape who and what he would become.   00:10:10     DESMOND TUTU: I mean I recall, when I was about nine, picking up a tattered copy of Ebony magazine, and I think — I mean maybe journalists ought to know just how much power they actually have, because here I was, 10,000 miles away from America, with this copy of Ebony magazine, and it was describing the exploits of Jackie Robinson, and how he broke into major league baseball.   00:10:44     Now I didn't know baseball from ping pong, but what was so important for me, what made me grow inches, was to know that a black guy had triumphed over all of the obstacles that were placed in his way, and there he was now playing for something called Brooklyn Dodgers.   00:11:12     ALICE WINKLER: Whatever the Dodgers were, no matter, Tutu says. Reading that issue of Ebony helped him to exorcise the most awful consequence of racial injustice, what Tutu calls “the demon of self-hate.” Lena Horne helped him on that front too. When Archbishop Tutu met her later in life, he confessed he'd loved her since he was nine years old and had seen Stormy Weather, with its all-black cast.   00:11:51     ALICE WINKLER: Desmond Tutu had a pretty good sense — by the time he was nine, in other words — that he would not be limited by the story the apartheid system told about what his life was worth. He set his sights on becoming a doctor, and he might have become one, too, if his family had had the funds to pay for medical school. Instead, he went to a teacher-training college where he was able to get a scholarship. He ended up teaching back at his high school alma mater and was shaken by the conditions there.   00:12:21     The educational system for blacks was totally separate, of course, and was, to quote the archbishop, “the pits.” He often had four classes of 80 kids each.   00:12:34     DESMOND TUTU: I — yeah, I tried to be as what my teachers had been to me, to these kids, seeking to instill in them a pride; pride that said, “They may define you as so-and-so. You aren't that.”   00:13:02     “Make sure you prove them wrong by becoming what the potential in you says you can become.” And so I taught for four years. And it was fun; it was fun. But then I decided, no, I would not participate any longer as a collaborator, when the government decided that they were going to have something called Bantu education, an education specifically designed for blacks, and they made no bones about the fact that it was designed as education for perpetual serfdom.    00:13:51     Dr. Verwoerd said, "Why do you have to teach blacks mathematics?  What are they going to do with mathematics?  You must teach them enough English and Afrikaans" — the other white language, as it were — "for them to be able to understand instructions given to them by their white employers." He said that. I mean unabashedly.   00:14:20     That was the purpose, for him, of education.  So I said, "No, I'm sorry. I can't collaborate with such a travesty." But I didn't have too many alternatives, too many options to choose from, and then thought, "Maybe, well, it might just be that God is calling me to become a priest."   00:14:44     ALICE WINKLER: He was a gentle soul, interested in the pastoral duties of tending to his flock, and not really all that political, which is to say he didn’t feel a constant sense of outrage — yet. But then the year he was to be ordained, 1960, police opened fire on a protest against the pass laws that governed where blacks could and could not go. Sixty-nine people were killed. It became known as the Sharpeville Massacre, and it was a turning point.   00:15:15     The African National Congress and black South Africans, in general, were out of patience. They had tried a nonviolent approach for years.   00:15:25     DESMOND TUTU: You kept thinking that our white compatriots would hear — you know, would hear the pleas that were being made, moderate, really, in the kind of demands that they were making, but it was — it kept falling on deaf ears, and increasingly people felt that it was going to be more and more difficult to bring about these changes peacefully.   00:16:01     I mean even people like Nelson Mandela — I mean they were striving to work for those changes nonviolently, and it was 1960 that changed them.   00:16:15     ALICE WINKLER: The African National Congress was banned. The Pan Africanist Congress was banned. Nelson Mandela went to prison, and Desmond Tutu, well, he had gone to London to get a master's in theology, and then eventually he served as an assistant director at the World Council of Churches in London. It was while he was abroad, he says, that his views on religion and on activism began to shift and to align.   00:16:42     DESMOND TUTU: There was an evolution. I — one of my colleagues came from Latin America and espoused liberation theology, and so, one, was beginning to realize that The Scriptures were not as innocuous as people might have thought they were, that they are not meant to turn people into cattle and fodder.   00:17:16     They are not meant to be an opiate for the people.  They are actually dynamite.   00:17:23     ALICE WINKLER: When it was time to return home in 1975, Tutu was, as he says, sufficiently political. Although the church had appointed him dean of St. Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg, he and his wife would have had to ask permission to live in town at the dean's residence. They wouldn't do it.   00:17:42     DESMOND TUTU: We said, "Well, we'll live in Soweto,” so that — we begin always by making a political statement, even without articulating it in words. And when I arrived, I realized that I had been given a platform that was not readily available to many blacks, and most of our leaders were either now in jail or in exile, and I said, "Well, I'm going to use this to seek to try to articulate our aspirations and our — and the anguishes of our people."    00:18:25     ALICE WINKLER: Tutu could see and feel around him that his people had had enough. He took a very risky, very public step that got tremendous press coverage.   00:18:36     DESMOND TUTU: I don't know. I mean I don't know what happened, but it just seemed like God was saying to me, "You've got to write a letter to the prime minister," and the letter wrote itself. I mean normally when you're in retreat, you're not expected to — you should not be doing, well, work. You are meant to be concentrating on God, but I think — I mean yes...   00:19:04     I think somehow God said — and so I sat down, and I wrote the letter, and I wrote the letter to the prime minister, and told him that I was scared. I was scared because the mood in the townships was frightening. If they didn't do something to make our people believe that they cared about our concerns, I feared that we were going to have an eruption.   00:19:44     I sent off the letter. He, the prime minister, dismissed my letter contemptuously. I wrote to him in May of 1976. I said I had a nightmarish fear that there was going to be an explosion. Well, they didn't do anything, and a month later Soweto happened.   00:20:10     And in a way you could say, as they sometimes say, “And the rest is history.” But my new understandings of The Scriptures and, as it were, the ways of God made it clear to me that there was no question at all that we were on the winning side.   00:20:33     ALICE WINKLER: When Tutu says “Soweto,” it's shorthand for the famous uprising there by high school students. Their dignity had already been trampled by Bantu education, but then the government instituted a policy requiring that classes be taught in Afrikaans, the language of the white minority, the language of the oppressors. The imposition of Afrikaans, Tutu explained, was meant to turn the young black population into docile creatures.   00:21:01     They rebelled. It was another turning point for black South Africans and another turning point for Desmond Tutu. He remembers asking students if they knew they might be whipped, detained, tortured, or worse. They knew and kept right on. He was taken aback by their courage, and it emboldened him, even at the risk of his own wellbeing.   00:21:25     DESMOND TUTU: We received death threats, yes, but you said — you see, when you are in a struggle, there are going to have to be casualties, and why should you be exempt? But I often said, "Look here, God. If I'm doing your work, then you jolly well are going to have to look after me." And, well, God did God stuff.    00:21:57     ALICE WINKLER: He knew there were people who would see him as a politician masquerading as an archbishop, but in his theology, he explained, all of life belongs to God. You don't have compartments for your economic life and your political life and your religious life. But wasn't he sometimes plagued by doubt?   00:22:16     DESMOND TUTU: No, I never doubted. Scared, yeah. Angry, many times.  I really would get mad with God. I would say, I mean, “How in the name of everything that is good can you allow this or that to happen?" But I didn't doubt that ultimately good, right, justice would prevail. That I said — there were times, of course, when you had to almost sort of whistle in the dark, when you wished you could say to God, "God, we know you are running the show, but why don't you make it slightly more obvious that you are doing so?"   00:23:10     ALICE WINKLER: The anti-apartheid movement started picking up speed internationally, and perhaps that was enough of a sign for the archbishop.   00:23:18     DESMOND TUTU: You know, there's a wonderful image in the Book of the Prophet Zachariah, where he speaks about Jerusalem not having conventional walls, and God says to this overpopulated Jerusalem, "I will be like a wall of fire ‘round you." Frequently in the struggle, we experienced a like wall of fire, people all over the world surrounding us with love.   00:23:56     And you know, that image of the Prophet Elijah, he’s surrounded by enemies, and his servant is scared, and Elijah says to God, "Open his eyes so that he should see," and God opens the eyes of the servant, and the servant looks, and he sees hosts and hosts and hosts of angels, and the prophet says to him, "You see? Those who are for us are many times more than those against us."   00:24:38     ALICE WINKLER: We know the end of the story. Ultimately, apartheid crumbled. Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years and spent his first night of freedom at Archbishop Tutu's home. Four years later, Mandela was elected president. He needed someone with complete moral authority, and the respect of the nation, to preside over the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a process begun in the hopes of healing a traumatized and wounded people.   00:25:10     Archbishop Tutu was the obvious choice. He says it was more exhilarating than anything he'd ever experienced. It confirmed what he'd suspected as a boy, when those white people would step around his newspaper rather than trampling it, that human beings are fundamentally good. The archbishop talked about the experience in a speech he gave to the Academy of Achievement in 2006.   00:25:40     DESMOND TUTU: After our first democratic elections in 1994, many people expected that blacks would, as soon as a black-led government was installed, go on an orgy of revenge and retribution, which didn't, in fact, happen.   00:26:10     It was an extraordinary phenomenon because instead of what many feared — they kept saying, "Give them three months, and you're going to see what's going to happen. Give them..." — when three months went past — "Give them some more time."   00:26:35     Instead, we had this extraordinary process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when perpetrators of often the most gruesome, quite awful, awful crimes would confess those to obtain, if they fulfilled all the conditions that the law laid down, being granted amnesty; and on the other hand, you had victims tell their stories.   00:27:28     Now, I wanted to say to you, you know, I had expected that I and all of us would be totally devastated, and indeed we were — devastated by the kinds of stories people were telling, devastated by the revelations of the extent to which we human beings can sink low.   00:28:12     As, for instance, someone would come along and say, "We gave him drugged coffee. We shot him in the head, and then we burned his body, and, because it takes eight, nine hours for a human body to burn, whilst that body was burning there, we were having a barbeque and drinking beer on the side, sort of two kinds of flesh burning."   00:28:46     And you say, "What could possibly have happened to the humanity of anyone that they could sink to such levels of depravity?" But, of course, you see each one of us, in fact, has an extraordinary capacity for evil, because those who perpetrated ghastly deeds such as the one that I have described didn’t walk around with horns protruding from their foreheads and trying very hard to hide the tails that they were dragging behind them.   00:29:41     The perpetrators of those atrocities were people like you and me, people who used to go to church, people who were regarded as respectable. So you and I would have to say, "Ah, indeed. There but for the grace of God go I."   00:30:18     So, I thought, at the end of the TRC process I would have — and many of us would have been going away thoroughly devastated, overwhelmed by the extent of the evil that had been revealed to us. No. I was totally bowled over by the fact that that was not, in fact, what one took away from that process.   00:30:56     What one took away was, “Hey, human beings are incredible,” for you were exhilarated by the incredible magnanimity of people. Someone came, a white woman came to tell us the story of how she had had — she'd been with friends at a Christmas party at a golf club when one of the liberation movements attacked the gathering, and they threw grenades into the room.   00:31:43     Many of her friends were killed. She herself was so badly injured she couldn't feed herself. She couldn’t bathe herself. She couldn't clothe herself. She had to be helped by her children, and you know what she said? She said — of the experience that left her in that condition, she said, "It has enriched my life." What?   00:32:14     "It has enriched my life." And whilst we were trying to make sense of this, and then she says, "I'd like to meet the perpetrator. I'd like to meet him in a spirit of forgiveness. I'd like to forgive him," which is incredible. But you could have blown me over with a feather when she went on to say, "And I hope he forgives me."   00:32:47     And then you said, "Yeah!" We have this incredible capacity for evil, but we have, even more wonderfully, this remarkable capacity for good, and this is what I want to leave you with, that you and I are quite rightly appalled at all of the evil that we often hear about or see on our screens.   00:33:23     And that sometimes we say, "Oh, isn't it awful, awful, awful! Aren't human beings just ghastly creatures?" Mm-hmm.   00:33:39     But, ah, that is not the whole truth. That is not even, in fact, the most important truth about human beings. The most important truth about each one of us is that we are, in fact, created for goodness. That evil is an aberration.   00:34:07     That is precisely why you and I cannot make easy accommodation with it, because if evil was the norm, all you and I would have been able to say is, "It's awful, but tough luck, that's how the cookie crumbles."   00:34:31     You know, we are appalled precisely because you and I, somewhere in us, you see, we are programmed in the kind of way that says, "Uh-uh, that's not how we should be."     00:34:53     ALICE WINKLER: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the man often called the Conscience of South Africa, speaking to students at the Academy of Achievement Summit in 2006. He ended his speech with a parable about a chicken and an eagle, and he implored the young people in the room to be eagles.   00:35:14     DESMOND TUTU: God says to you, to me, "Hey, you're no chicken."   00:35:22     "You are an eagle." And God expects you to shake yourself.   00:35:29     To spread out your pinions and to lift off and soar, so that you fly towards, ah-ha, the rising sun. You fly towards transcendence, fly towards goodness, compassion, gentleness, caring. Fly, eagle, fly! Thank you.   00:36:19     ALICE WINKLER: Archbishop Tutu mostly retired from public life several years ago, saying that at nearly 80 years old, it was time to spend a little less time in airports and a little more time serving his beloved wife, Leah, hot chocolate in bed. I'm Alice Winkler, and this is What It Takes. If you want to learn more about Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his personal journey, you can visit the Academy of Achievement's website, achievement.org.   00:36:47     The Academy also features Archbishop Tutu in its multimedia e-textbook Social Justice. It's free on Apple's iTunes University. Special thanks to the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation, as always, for its support of What It Takes.  

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English @ the Movies: 'A Little Off'

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November 2, 2017

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Verbs and Gerunds in Speech and Fiction Writing

  The American rock group Journey released the song "Don't Stop Believin'" in 1981. This song, still popular in karaoke music bars, can help you learn about English grammar. Let's listen to some words from the song: Don't stop believing Hold on to that feeling Today, we are going to examine the grammar behind the song's famous words. Specifically, we will talk about verb + gerund structures. "Stop believing" is one example of this kind of structure. Gerunds and Infinitives Let us begin with a few definitions. A gerund is the form of a verb that ends with the letters “ing”. Such words act like a noun. For example, in the sentence "I love learning," the word "learning" is a gerund. An infinitive is the basic, or simplest form of the verb. Sometimes it has the word "to" in front of it. In the sentence "I like to read books," the words "to read" are an infinitive. Some verbs can be followed by an infinitive or a gerund. Knowing when to use an infinitive and when to use a gerund is difficult. The good news is this: only a few verbs commonly appear with gerunds. Verb + gerund structures are less common than verb + infinitive structures. When English speakers use verb + gerund structures, the verbs often come from one of three groups. The groups have meanings that suggest beginnings and ends, thoughts and memories, and sights and sounds. These three groups are common in everyday speech and fiction writing, but rare in school-related or academic writing. We will now look closer at each of the groups. #1 Begin, continue Here is our first meaning group: beginnings and ends. Gerunds often follow verbs that suggest a beginning or ending. The most common examples include the verbs begin, start, and stop. Famous works of American fiction have examples of this structure. The 1988 novel Tracks, written by Louise Erdrich, begins with the following words: "We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall." In the example, the gerund "dying" follows the verb "started" - a verb that suggests a beginning. The words from Journey's song show how speakers use verbs that suggest an ending: "Don't stop believing." Here, the gerund "believing" follows the verb "stop." Now, we will begin exploring our second meaning group. #2 Remember, think about, think of The second group is thoughts and memories. Gerunds often follow verbs that suggest that the mind is at work. The most common examples include the verbs remember, think about, and think of. Consider this example: "Do you remember playing at that park when we were young?" In the example, the gerund "playing" follows the verb "remember" – a verb that suggests the mind is working. Let's consider another example. Imagine you see a car that has been severely damaged. The owner might say: "Well, maybe I should think about buying a new car." Here, the gerund "buying" follows the verb structure "think about." Think about means to consider something. It suggests that a person will examine different possibilities and make a decision. Perhaps we should think about exploring one more meaning group… #3 Hear, see Our final meaning group is this: senses. Gerunds often follow verbs that suggest sights and sounds. Common examples include the structures see + a noun phrase + a gerund and hear + a noun phrase + a gerund. A noun phrase is a group of words that acts like a noun in a sentence. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury gives you one example of these grammatical structures. "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting." Here, the verb "see" is followed by a pronoun: the word “them”. The gerund, "hitting", comes after the pronoun. Here is another example. Imagine you are reading a crime novel and you see the following words: "He could see a large man waiting in the alley." Here, the noun phrase "a large man" comes between the verb "see" and the gerund "waiting." What can you do? The next time you are reading fiction in English or speaking to an American, try to find examples of verb + a gerund. Ask yourself why the speaker may have used the gerund instead of the infinitive. Does the verb relate to one of the groups we talked about today? Gerunds can be hard to master. It takes time to become skilled in their use. But the most important thing is that you do not stop trying to use them. I'm Jill Robbins. And I'm John Russell.   John Russell wrote this story for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section. _______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   grammar – n. the set of rules that explain how words are used in a language karaoke bar – n. a place of business where a device plays the music of popular songs and people sing the words to the songs they choose specifically – adv. used to show the exact purpose or use of something curling – adj. twisted or formed into a round or curved shape novel – n. a written work, often long and complex, that deals human experiences fiction – n. stories about people and events that are not real

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Report: Asia Now Has More Billionaires than US

  A new report finds that for the first time, Asian billionaires outnumber those in the United States. The number of Asian billionaires rose by nearly one quarter in 2016 to 637, according to the report published by UBS Group AG and PricewaterhouseCoopers. UBS is a financial advisory company that serves wealthy people around the world. PricewaterhouseCoopers is an international company providing accounting and tax services. The report counted 563 billionaires in America and 342 in Europe. It found that while the U.S. no longer has the most billionaires, it still has the most overall billionaire wealth. This is because more of the world’s wealthiest individuals live in the United States. The increase in Asia was due to a sharp rise in self-made billionaires. About 75 percent of new billionaires came from Asia’s two biggest economies, China and India. China by far had the highest number of new billionaires, 67, while India added 16. The combined wealth of Asian billionaires grew by almost a third in 2016 to $2 trillion, from $1.5 trillion in 2015. The total wealth of U.S. billionaires rose to $2.8 trillion in 2016, compared to $2.4 trillion the previous year. Most of the increase in wealth came from technological innovation, followed by financial services and materials, according to the report. If the current trend continues, the total wealth of Asian billionaires is expected to be higher than all U.S. billionaires in about four years. Worldwide, the report said total billionaire wealth rose 17 percent in 2016 to $6 trillion. This was largely fueled by the increase in Asian billionaires. It also came from strong economic growth in materials, industrial production, financial services and technology. In Europe, billionaire wealth remained largely unchanged from 2015 to 2016. Overall wealth grew just 5 percent to $1.3 trillion. Europe added 24 new billionaires in 2016, while 21 dropped off the list, a third of them due to death. The report estimated that the 1,542 billionaires studied either owned or partly owned companies that employ at least 27.7 million people worldwide. ​ Billionaires in various countries are increasingly putting more of their money into philanthropy, art and sports. Many invested in major sports clubs, including soccer, baseball and basketball. “According to our analysis, more than 140 of the top sports clubs globally are owned by just 109 billionaires,” the report said. Overall, the average billionaire’s age is 63. In America it is 67 years old, while the average in Asia is 59. Chinese billionaires averaged 55 years old. Among all billionaires, the report found those involved in technology were the youngest. On average, they became billionaires at age 47.    I’m Bryan Lynn.   Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on a study from UBS Group AG and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Kelly Jean Kelly was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story accounting – n. system of keeping financial records for a business or person innovation – n. new idea or method philanthropy – n. the practice of giving money and time to help make life better for other people  

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'Human Flow' Film Documents Refugees' Troubles

  Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has produced a film documentary about refugees around the world. He filmed a total of 40 refugee camps in 23 countries. The documentary tells about people who fled war and environmental crises. Others left their home country for religious reasons. The goal of the new film is to show how the refugee crisis affects everyone. This is just one of the many voices heard in the film: “Being a refugee is much more than a political status. It is the most pervasive kind of cruelty that can be exercised against a human being. You are forcibly robbing this human being of all aspects that would make human life not just tolerable but meaningful in many ways.” The documentary is called “Human Flow.” It says over 65 million people in the world today have been forced to leave their homes. Ai Weiwei used drone aircraft to film the movement of refugees. He and his crew equipped the drones with cameras to get pictures of those displaced from up high. ​Ai spoke with VOA about his project. “Human flow has always happens in human history. It’s in many cases, it's part of our humanity and our civilization.” But things are different now, he notes. Ai Weiwei says countries are working to stop the flow of people by preventing refugees from crossing borders. After a very difficult trip by sea and days of walking, many refugees from the Middle East made their way to northern Greece. But then they were stopped at the border with Macedonia. “Over 70 borders have built up their fences and walls and have forbidden any refugee to pass through. So, by doing that, they really not only stopped the life line of those refugees to try to find a safe place, even just temporarily across the border and go to another location, but also putting them in extreme dangerous conditions." In part of the film, a doctor examines a baby. He says it is a bad situation. “Two months old, and born here but he didn’t have any vaccination. No showering facilities. The hygienic situation is very bad.” The documentary looks at the refugee crisis in some areas, as well as the personal stories of those suffering. Like one man who holds up photographs of family members who died at sea. “They all died at sea. His wife is buried here. His son is buried here. And his daughter too. His son also drowned at sea. This is my brother Sakhi Ahmad.” “Human Flow” shows large numbers of people fleeing wars, religious persecution, and environmental disasters. Ai Weiwei says we need to save those people from displacement. If we do not, he warns, generations will be born without identity, or the possibility of a better life. He believes that will make them targets for extremists. "And those people, those child[ren}, when they grow up they only see how their parents being badly treated, unfairly treated, the world watching but doing nothing. They see people being killed, homes being burned, the drones throw the bombs and kill, blindly kill all the people. And what kind of image would remain in their mind?" The Chinese activist is critical of Europe and the United States for lacking empathy, leadership and ideas about the refugee issue. He warns that if this does not change, no one’s future will be safe. I’m Anne Ball.   Penelope Poulou wrote this story for VOANews.com. Anne Ball adapted her story for Learning English. George Grow was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section and visit us on our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   persecution – n. the act of continually treating in a cruel and harmful way pervasive – adj. existing in every part of something : spreading to all parts of something aspect – n. a part of something tolerable – adj. good enough to be accepted but not very good hygienic – adj. relating to being clean and to the things that are done to maintain good health empathy – n. the feeling that you understand and share another person's experiences and emotions

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Trump Calls on US Congress to Change Immigration Policy

The Uzbek man who killed eight people in New York City came to the United States on a diversity immigrant visa.   After the attack, President Donald Trump announced he wants to work with U.S. lawmakers to end the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. Trump said, “I am going to ask Congress to immediately initiate work to get rid of this program – diversity, diversity lottery. Sounds nice; it’s not nice. It’s not good. It’s not good. It hasn’t been good. We’ve been against it.” The diversity visa program is known as the green card lottery. It is the only hope for some would-be Americans to live in the United States. The program is open to non-refugees, individuals with no family members in the U.S. and those lacking an employer willing to guarantee them a job. To be considered for the program, a person must have a high school education or a few years of work experience. Natives of most countries can qualify, but there are exceptions, such as Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. The list also includes El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Also included are Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, the United Kingdom and its territories except Northern Ireland, and Vietnam. People born in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan qualify for the diversity lottery program. Between September 2015 and September 2016, the U.S. government approved 45,664 diversity visas. More than 2,300 of them were given to Uzbeks.   Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer helped to create the legislation for the program in the 1990s. Schumer is a leading member of the Democratic Party. Trump has blamed Schumer and the Democrats for the terror attack in New York. In a statement, Schumer said “I have always believed and continue to believe that immigration is good for America.” He also asked the president to support the “real solution” of anti-terrorism financing, which would be cut under the most recent budget proposed by the Trump administration. Schumer was also one of eight lawmakers who wrote the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill in 2013. The bill would have ended the green card lottery. The measure passed the Senate, but the House of Representatives did not vote on it. Leon Fresco formerly served in the Office of Immigration Litigation at the U.S. Department of Justice. He worked there during the presidency of Barack Obama. Fresco developed the legislation in 2013. He noted that cutting the lottery program was part of a compromise between the two main political parties. Family-based system President Trump has called for a new immigration system, one that is based on merit, not family ties. The United States currently has a family-based immigration policy. The immigration system is based on sponsorship. A U.S. citizen or green card holder can offer to accept responsibility for family members who leave their home country to move to the U.S. Partners and young children qualify as immediate relatives and do not need to wait for a visa number. But for brothers, sisters and adult children, the process can be long and difficult. “It's extremely difficult…brothers and sisters are at the very end," said Naomi Tsu, deputy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center. Tsu said it is even harder if they live in countries that have a lot of immigrants coming to the United States. The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute reports that in 2015, more than 1 million permanent residents were admitted to the United States. Of that number, 44 percent were immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, and 20 percent entered through a family-sponsored preference. Only 14 percent entered on job-based visas. Merit-based immigration Merit-based immigration would give preference to non-citizens with high-paying job offers, past successes, English-language skills and education. All of those would be considered under the proposed green card system.   Tsu explained that the system would give points for “age, the salary you are able to command, and how much money you are going to invest in the U.S. economy.” The higher the rating, the more likely an immigrant would be admitted to the United States. This system would be similar to merit-based immigration systems used by Canada and Australia. Pros and cons Supporters of a merit-based system say it would help lower immigration rates. And they say it will ensure that the immigrants who do get accepted are highly skilled and less likely to need public assistance. In August, Trump said that the United States has “operated a very low-skill immigration system.” He was speaking in support for a bill known as the RAISE, Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy, Act. It aims to cut legal immigration from 1 million to 500,000 each year, in part by moving to a merit-based system. “This [family-based] policy has placed substantial pressure on American workers, taxpayers and community resources,” Trump said. But critics say the U.S. economy also needs low-skilled workers, and a merit-based system would hurt industries that depend on them. Critics also see the merit-based system as un-American. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, said Wednesday that the proposed system “abandons the fundamental respect for family, at the heart of our faith, at the heart of who we are as Americans.”   VOA News reported this story. Ashley Thompson adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   diversity - n. the quality or state of having many different forms, types, ideas, etc. initiate - v. to cause the beginning of (something) : to start or begin (something) lottery - n. a system used to decide who will get or be given something by choosing names or numbers by chance qualify - v. to have the necessary skill or knowledge to do a particular job or activity : to have the qualifications to do something merit - n. the quality of being good, important, or useful: value or worth preference - n.  an advantage that is given to some people or things and not to others salary - n. an amount of money that an employee is paid each year substantial - adj. large in amount, size, or number abandon - v. to stop supporting or helping (someone or something)

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Magazine Predicted Astros Would Win World Series

This is What’s Trending Today… The Houston Astros baseball team won the World Series Wednesday night. It beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-1 in the final game of the series.  Houston had never won the baseball championship since entering the major leagues in 1962. That is a 55-year wait for a title! The Astros came close a few times. In 2005, the team made it to the World Series but lost four straight games. The championship went to the White Sox of Chicago. After that, things went from bad to worse. The team lost nearly twice as often as they won during the following seasons. In 2011, the team lost 106 games. In 2012, it lost 107 games. And in 2013, the team lost a record 111 games. Some sports observers called the Astros the “laughingstock” of baseball. In other words, people often made fun of the team’s poor results. This season, the city of Houston was badly damaged by flooding from Hurricane Harvey. The Astros returned home from a road trip to find their city underwater. Few picked the Astros to win the series over the Dodgers. But for writers and editors of Sports Illustrated magazine, the Astros’ victory did not come as a surprise. In 2014, the magazine published a cover that predicted the Astros would win the 2017 World Series. It shows a young player named George Springer with the headline “Baseball’s Great Experiment.” Ben Reiter is a writer for Sports Illustrated. He visited the team in 2014. Reiter wrote that the Astros were run by “know-it-all baseball outsiders,” – including a former management consultant and a former NASA engineer. Jeff Luhnow is the general manager for the Astros. He is the so-called “know-it-all” former management consultant. In 2014, he told Reiter about his plan to rebuild the team using scientific data. “When you’re in 2017, you don’t really care that much about whether you lost 98 or 107 in 2012,” Luhnow said. “You care about how close we are to winning a championship in 2017.” Three years later, the Astros did just that. And George Springer, named the series’ most valuable player, is back on the cover of Sports Illustrated. This time, the headline reads: “Baseball’s Great Prophecy.” And the magazine predicts that the Astros will repeat as the World Series champions next year. Hai Do wrote this story for Learning English with information from Sports Illustarted. Ashley Thompson was the editor. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   laughingstock - n. a person or thing that is regarded as very foolish or rediculous cover - n. the outer part of a magazine prophecy - n. a statement that something will happen in the future  

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Magazine Predicts Astros Would Win World Series

This is What’s Trending Today… The Houston Astros baseball team won the World Series Wednesday night. It beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-1 in the final game of the series.  Houston had never won the baseball championship since entering the major leagues in 1962. That is a 55-year wait for a title! The Astros came close a few times. In 2005, the team made it to the World Series but lost four straight games. The championship went to the White Sox of Chicago. After that, things went from bad to worse. The team lost nearly twice as often as they won during the following seasons. In 2011, the team lost 106 games. In 2012, it lost 107 games. And in 2013, the team lost a record 111 games. Some sports observers called the Astros the “laughingstock” of baseball. In other words, people often made fun of the team’s poor results. This season, the city of Houston was badly damaged by flooding from Hurricane Harvey. The Astros returned home from a road trip to find their city underwater. Few picked the Astros to win the series over the Dodgers. But for writers and editors of Sports Illustrated magazine, the Astros’ victory did not come as a surprise. In 2014, the magazine published a cover that predicted the Astros would win the 2017 World Series. It shows a young player named George Springer with the headline “Baseball’s Great Experiment.” Ben Reiter is a writer for Sports Illustrated. He visited the team in 2014. Reiter wrote that the Astros were run by “know-it-all baseball outsiders,” – including a former management consultant and a former NASA engineer. Jeff Luhnow is the general manager for the Astros. He is the so-called “know-it-all” former management consultant. In 2014, he told the Reiter about his plan to rebuild the team using scientific data. “When you’re in 2017, you don’t really care that much about whether you lost 98 or 107 in 2012,” Luhnow said. “You care about how close we are to winning a championship in 2017.” Three years later, the Astros did just that. And George Springer, named the series’ most valuable player, is back on the cover of Sports Illustrated. This time, the headline reads: “Baseball’s Great Prophecy.” Hai Do wrote this story for Learning English with information from Sports Illustarted. Ashley Thompson was the editor. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story        

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