Inglês para Fins Acadêmicos- IFA Prof.

Climene Arruda

Student: Beatriz__
Group: IFA V Date: 23/08/2018__

On-line Activity
Choose a BIG THINK video related to your topic of interest. Listen first time
without subtitles. You may refer to the transcript after listening.

The Big think video I chose was ”Impressions of Antartica”_

2- Write here the general idea of the TALK you have heard.

The video contains the narrative about an antartic expediction realized by the
photographer Sebastian Copelad, who went to the “frozen continent” prior to
photographing human footsteps in the ice. The main point of the interview is the
photographer’s environmentalist discussion about what his journey can teach about
the human pollution, as a result that Antartica is an almost completely isolated
landscape. This way, Copeland exposes the fact that the deserted and hidden places
are notably less poluted than the common habitation patterns completed with overcrow
in which we, western people, live.
In fact, Copeland describes his travel to Antartica as a sense of intrusion among
so many other species, feeling which reminded him of the irrelevance of the human
being in number compared to all the another species in the planet. Athrough Antartica
do not present native human habitations because of the extreme weather, Copeland
alludes to the historycal human presence in the continent, as a result of the demands
of the world trade over the XIX and XX centuries. Specifically, he discourses about the
Scandinavian peoples who used to hunt whales in Antartica during the invention of the
harpoon, therefore the whale hunt_was exploding as a lucrative process inside the
capitalyst system. After all, althrough Antartica can be considered one of the most
clean spaces in the planet, there can be found vestiges and remnantes from these
times until nowadays, what enables Copeland to confirm how the modern human being
is ontologically dissociated from the environment and how badly this position affects
the planet and our lives as part of it.

3- Register here some words or expressions you’ve learned (meaning or

pronunciation) through this listening. Write the meaning of the words, expressions.
Copy the sentences from the video transcript which contain the word or expression.
Otherwordly: “from another world” – “de outro mundo” in “Well Antarctica yields an
extraordinarily magical and otherworldly landscape.”_;
Accountability (noun): “the state of being accountable, liable, or answerable” – “o
estado de portar responsabilidade sobre os próprios atos e apresentar uma boa razão
para executá-los” in “ So the Scandinavians set their sites to Antarctica and set up what
turned out to be a very productive for them whaling environment. So true to tradition
for the human lack of accountability, when you travel in some of these areas, they are (.
. .) there’s a lot of human waste that has been there for over a century in the form of
barrels – whale oil barrels that have been left over; or (. . .) that have been driven into
the rocks and whatnot.”
Nevertheless (adverb): “is used to contrast something that has been previously said ” –
“é usado para constrastar algo que foi citado anteriormente” in “ You know in its
reaction to manmade activities, that if a climate and whatnot may well be shaking off
what could be seen as a vírus.”
*Meanings were given according to Cambridge Advenced Leaner’s Dictionary

4- What facts have you learned from this listening? Mention if you found anything
interesting.

This TALK mentions a lot of interesting historical facts about Antartica, for example the
scandinavian presence there. I found this fact truly interesting, because I am
researching about Antartica’s first occupations for my monography in my
archaeology_undergraduation, and until now I did not know about scandinavian
peoples habitating Antartica, due to I just work with the material culture from hunter
groups native from the United States that used to travel to Antartica for the same
reasons as the scandinavian ones: gain money with the hard manual work, as the
proletariat class of the capitalist scenario of the time.

5- Make an evaluation:
A- What strategies have you used while listening the video without subtitles to help
you understand the talk? For example: you listened for the main idea, predicted, made
inferences, listened for specific details, took notes, recognized cognates, recognized
word-order patterns, etc
While listening the video, I adopted the technique of listening carefully for every
information at the same time I was trying to capture the main idea of the video, sorting
out the additional ideas from the main data. I am used to do this mentally, but when I
face difficulties to process large amounts of information, I usually take notes, especially
if I do not recognize the most part of the vocabulary. The inferences can be useful while
doing a listening activity, but in this case my inferences were useless, because I was
sure that the subject would be about the whaling groups that used to camp in the South
Shetland Islands, therefore it was about the whaling Scandinavian groups that used to
camp in the South Georgia Islands

B- How did you like doing this activity? Was it useful? Justify your answer.
I certainly enjoyed doing this activity, because I am looking for improvement in my
listening skills, and at the same time the learned content from the TALK was really
useful for enriching my research project about Antartica.