News USA (March 2014)

Magma mia!

Yellowstone, Whoming

A supervolcano under Yllowstone national parks is 2.5 times bigger than previously thought and could be "catastrophic" for the planet if were to erupt. With a 90km-long magma chamber, gologists say it could produce an ash cloud that wolud make two-thirds of the US uninhabitable. Luckily, schientist say no eruption is imminent, but they will be keeping close eye on it!

Google robots 

Silocn Vallely, San Francisc

BigDog, a four-legged all-terrain robot developed for tye US military, and Cheetah, a robot that can outrun the fastest human, now belong to Google. The internet giant has just bought Boston Dynamics, a company known for building robots that look like they belong in a science-fiction film. 

The question is, what will it do with tehm?

Space balloon

Mojave desert, New Mexico

A US firm plans to take eight people to the edge of space inside a gondola attached to a helium balloon. Tickets have gone on sale for an eight-hour flight taking off from Richard Brasnon's spaceport in the Mojave desert in 2016. At a maximum cruising height of 31km, passengers will be able to see the Earth's curvature and even beam back "selfies" thanks to the on-board wi-fi. Price: $75,000!

Too rich for jail

Keller, Texas

A rich teenager who killed four people while drink-driving was spared jail on the grouds that he was so spoilt by his parents that he was unable to tell right from wrong. Ethan Couch, 16, faced 20 years in youth detention and jail, but the judge accepted a defence psychologist's argument that Couch was suffering from "affluenza". He is to attend a $450,000-a-year rehab center instead, paid for by his father

Art-sitters

New York

It's the latest must-have among rich New Yorkers: an art-sitter. According to Kristina Wilson, the founder of Sitters Studio, artists make perfect babysitters.

"There is something about having an actor who really commits to a story," she says. Parents can also choose from opera singers, painters and Broadway dancers. According to Wilson, the latter are ideal for looking after hyperactive children as "they are on their feet a lot"!

Fast-food strikes

America

Thousands of fast-food workers held a 24-hour strike in cities across the US to demand that the minimum wage be raised to $14 (11€) an hour. The current minimum wage,set in 2009, is $7.25 (5.30€) an hour. The action came a day after Barack Obama declared taht income equality was "the definding challene of our time". Fast-food staff, he said, "work their tails off and are still living at or barely above poverty."

EMMA WATSON

The magic continues

The actress spent years filming the eight Harry Potter films. Now she has turned the page...

Goodbye Hermione

After the Harry Potter films made her the world's most famous witch, Emma Watson wanted to show she had other talents.

Her next big role, as a cool kid in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), was very different from the studious Hermione. The seven weeks Emma spent filming were the opportunity for her to be a normal teenager for the first time. "We'd just stay up all night playing guitar and running around the hotel", she says.

Designers love her elegance Fashion is also a big part of Emma's life. Fans love her individual, elegant style and so do designers. She has been a model for brands like Burberry and Lancome, and helped design her own range of clothes. But it is not easy to know what to wear when you're famous. "It's stressful knowning that every time you walk out the door, someone is going to be judging everything you wear", says Emma.

Intelligent star

Emma is not just beautiful... she has brains too! She has studied at Brown University, USA, and Oxford University, England, and loves to read and write poetry. She took a break from her studies to concentrate on her films, which is good news for her fans...

A private person

Emma lvoes making films but she does not like celebrity life. She is attached to her privacy, which is ironic because in the film The Bling Ring (2013), she plays a teenager who is obsessed with celebrities and breaks into their houses. It was a challenge for Emma to play a materialsitic, narcisssistic character so different to her!

Diverse new roles to play

This monty Emma Watson is back in the biblical film Noah, where she plays Ila, Noah's adoptive daughter. It's another opportunity for Emma to show that she's one of Hollywood's most talented young actresses!

Topic Oral: my experience living with an american girl

Hi, my name's Anna and today I'll talk about my experience living with an american girl. I chose this topic because I think it's an interesting theme and you don't know much about it.  

So, let's start, Quinn is 16 and she cames from California. She arrived in Catalonia on the 7th of September and she's living on the 27th of June. She came by an organitzation called AFS (American Field Service), who takes care of a lot of exchange students every year.

Now, she's like a sister to me, and when she leaves Banyoles I'll be very sad. I think this experience has changed my mind, I learnt a lot of things and I grew up, I met a lot of exchange students from every part of the world and some host brothers and sisters that are living the same experience as me.

So now it's your turn, I'll try to answer all your questions because its the main reason of this oral presintation. 

3. We don't want any more traffic jams!

I'm writing because I was going to my cousins' house and while we were on the road, a big traffic jam started in just ten minutes, it usually tooks two hours and this day we spent three and a half. And I have to say that it wasn't my only experience, this happened to us like five times in three months.

I think there are one or two reasons for this. Firstly, there's too much traffic for only one road, so perhaps we need one or two new lanes or maybe another road.

Secondly, there aren't enough public buses, people is going to the same place and they are one or maximum two in a five places' car.

We must do something about this situation. A lot of people use the car to go to work, mostly when they work into big cities. If we don't do anything our planet will become a black cloudy Earth because of the contamination of the fuel.

9. A piece of art

The son of man

The son of man was painted by René Magritte in 1964. Its an oil painting and it shows a portrait of himself and a green apple in the middle of his face, the man is in front of a seaside landscape. At the beggining, Margritte painted a portrait, but when he finished it he showed it as an anonymous man; we could recognize him seeing his eyes behind the apple.

This painting belongs to the “surrealism”, a type of art which started in the 1920s and came from de Dada movement. The surrealism tries to represent a fantastic reality and sometimes scenes from the dreams. It's between the reality and the “no reality”.

This painting isn't exhibited in any museums or galleries, it belongs to a private property.

8. A review of a film: NO RESERVATIONS

I'd like to recomend a film which I watch last weekend, called No reservations.The director of the film is Scott Hicks, and it was recorded on 2007.

The film is a romantic comedy recorded in New York. The main characters are a young girl between the age of 8 named Zoe, her aunt Kate, who is a very well known chef, and Nick, a new member Kate's kitchen.

Kate, Nick and Zoe are living separate lifes, until Kate's sister dies in a traffic accident and Zoe, the daughter of her sister who becames orphan. Kate takes care of her niece and during the days she was temporaly off of work, the leader of the restaurant were she works, contracts a new member: Nick.

The things I liked most about the film were the relationship between the main characters. I also liked a lot the mix of love and drama: how the director shows the streght of Zoe, who has lost her parents. Some of the scenes are memorable because they're really sad and hard.

All in all, I really enjoyed the film, I won't change anything about the plot, its just fantastic

6. Write an opinion essay

In our area, mostly anyone does home-schooling, the normal or common way to study in our country is in a school. I know a girl who did home-schooling during 3 or 4 months, she had a traffic accident and she couldn't go to school.

In my opinion, home-schooling is not very common because people who studies at home are usually people that live in the country side, where there aren't schools, or maybe they have problems and they can go to school or also are their fathers who decided it. Any way, mostly all ths students aren't in this situations.

Firstly, I think home-schooling would be an amazing experience. Secondly, I think that if you study at home you would have a completely different live than if you study at school. Finally, I think go to school it's better because you are with other people and different teachers, etc.

So all in all, I've never tried home-schooling and I can compare going to school with studing at home, I can only give one's opinion of it.