Gaelic Athletic Association GAA

The Gaelic Athletic Association / Cumann Lúthchleas Gael is a 32 county sporting and cultural organisation that has a presence on all five continents.

It is Ireland's largest sporting organisation and is celebrated as one of the great amateur sporting associations in the world today.

The GAA is a volunteer led, community based organisation that promotes Gaelic games such as Hurling, Football, Handball and Rounders and works with sister organisations to promote Ladies Football and Camogie. It is part of the Irish consciousness and plays an influential role in Irish society that extends far beyond the basic aim of promoting Gaelic games.

There are a range of sports among the Gaelic Games family including
Football, Hurling, Ladies Football, Camogie, Handball and Rounders. To see wat the Irish games look like go to GAA TV

Personality adjectives

Here is a handout containing personality adjectives with their translations a student has shared with the class. I hope you find it useful to review vocabulary. Also, there is this link where you can find additional adjectives for basic personality traits and this one with more nuanced ones.

You've your writing task for the weekend here.

Corrections on proposals

Further to your handing in the proposals you wrote last week, here's a document commenting on the most prevailing mistakes found in them them.

Social Media: The First 2,000 Years - Tom Standage

The author of this book argues social media is much older than we believe. Listen to this extract in which Tom Standage talks with Steve Paulson about his book, "Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years." which you can find here and answer the following questions:

 

1. What was the main content of the Martin Luther’s 'Ninety-Five Theses'?

2. What triggers him to follow up with a series of pamphlets in German?

     3. Did the Roman Church have any means of broadcast?

     4. What, according to the interviewee, is the difference between social media and broadcasting?

     5. What has been the effect of the role of the internet in this development?

     6. What’s the interface between broadcasting and social media?

     7. Explain the meaning of following phrases in bold uttered during the interview:

a.       They were masters of social media long before Mark Zuckerberg was a in twinkle in his mother’s eye there was media and it was social.

b.      It’s an incredibly effective way for him to galvanize support for his idea that the catholic church needed to be reformed

c.       My tongue is somewhat in my cheek

d.      I've actually plotted Luther's traffic stats.

e.      This is what modern scholars call synchronization of opinion.

f.        You are not describing the mass media here as the institutions we tend to know as the major newspapers, as television networks, where the news has gatekeepers and it's centralized and there are professional journalists.

g.       So we end up with this very centralized media system which has, yes, this small priesthood of journalists and politicians and businessmen that have access to it.

h.      The mass media era is the anomaly, a blip that has now come to an end.

Doubts Shed on Benefits of Knee Surgery

Around 700,000 people in the U.S. undergo knee surgery each year. But a new study finds no significant difference in improvement between patients who had one common knee surgery - arthroscopy - and those who underwent a fake surgery. We'll discuss the effectiveness of knee surgery and how to keep your knees healthy. Listen to the interview up to minute 8:06 where the study is discussed here and answer the following questions:

1. Have a look at this language and expressions which are used in this section of the interview:

A new study has called into question its value

The meniscus is a type of fibrocartilage which is a type of cartilage we distinguish the cartilage found on the ends of bones called hyaline cartilage

It can be thought of as a shock absorber

To prevent the ends of the bone from coming into contact during weight-bearing

There are different types of tears, there is an acute tear (runners or athletes) and a degenerative tear (traumatic episodes that occur over time)

A sham or fake surgery

They only trimmed the meniscus after an envelope was opened in the operating room to determine which group the patients would fall under

There was an out for those who had the fake surgery

2. What do the doctors interviewed conclude from the results of the study?

Christopher McDougall: Are we born to run?

Christopher McDougall explores the mysteries of the human desire to run. How did running help early humans survive - and what urges from our ancient ancestors spur us on today? McDougall tells the story of the marathoner with a heart of gold, the unlikely ultra-runner, and the hidden tribe in Mexico that runs to live.

Listen to this talk here and answer these questions as you go along:
 

      1. Complete these sentences with the word(s) you hear:

a.       She decided she’d ..................................and try for one last big payday in the marquee event, the New York City marathon.

b.      They are free from all of these modern ................................

c.       The only problem is, the first ................................ only appeared 200,000 years ago.

d.      Now we’re not using our strength because we’re the biggest .............................. in the jungle

e.      And then after that, you ............................... to the rigors of time.

f.        You can’t be bearing ............................. .

            g.       The benefits, social and physical and political and mental, could be ..............................

      2. What are the three mysteries Mr. McDougall presents in relation to humans?

          3.  What explanation does McDougall put forward in order to account for the three mysteries he has previously laid out?

      4. Which are the two times he mentions in which humans benefit most from animal protein?

            5.  In what way does McDougall say we have spoiled our natural ability?

      6. What is McDougall’s proposal at the end of the talk? Does it have other implications?

      7. The following phrases contain words in bold uttered throughout the talk, can you explain what they mean?

a.       But the under-underdog hangs tough

b.      Deratu Tulu ruins the script again

c.       It’s a heartwarming story

d.      Outliers

e.      Scientists at Harvard and Utah University are bending their brains to try to figure out what the Tarahumara have known forever.

f.        They have fangs, they have claws, they have nimbleness, they have speed.

g.       In that very short learning curve, you have gone from broken organs up to the fact that you’re only 10 minutes off the male world record.

h.      …you put them in a race 50 or 100 miles against anybody in the world and it’s a coin toss  who’s going to win.

i.         It being prehistory, you can say whatever the hell you want and get away with it.

j.        It’s us in modern times who have sort of gone off the path.

k.       I need to cross-train. I didn’t do yoga. I’m not ready.

Andre Agassi on 'Open'

Andre Agassi retired from tennis in 2006 and has published his memoir, "Open." He tells Steve Paulson about his father who was driven to make him a champion, but whom he does not consider to have been abusive, and says he's ultimately a different sort of person than his great rival Pete Sampras. You can listen to the excerpt here.

The danger of a single story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice - and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature. Listen to the talk and answer the following questions:

1. Complete these sentences as you listen:

a. Her ............................... position towards me, as an African, was a .............................. well meaning pity.
b. This story about Africa ................................. comes, I think, from western literature.
c. My chracters drove cars, they were not .................................., therefore, they were not authentically African.
d. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were ........................ the health care system, ..................... across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.
e. I had ................................. the single story of Mexicans.
f. What if my roommate knew about Nollywood? Full of innovative people making films despite great technical ..........................
g. People who .................... despite the government, rather than because of it.

2. Can you find an example of a cleft sentence in this talk?

3. What impression do John Locke and Rudyard Kipling contribute to create of the Africans?

4. In what way does she confess the media influenced her view of Mexicans? How is a single story of a people created by the media?

5. What is the relation between storytelling and power?

6. What examples does she provide to exemplify how different peoples have been dispossed by the white people?

7. In what way does the speaker say reclaiming stories is important?

The Search for the Perfect Office

More and more of us work in open plan offices, which can be noisy and lead to strife between those staff who are tidy and their neighbours who like to leave papers and dirty plates on their desks and between those who are quiet and their colleagues who talk loudly on the phone.

Claudia Hammond explores what the perfect office would look like if the latest psychological research was applied. She discovers that it is possible to work in open plan spaces and be able to concentrate, be creative and communicate well with colleagues. And she asks why many architects aren't aware of the research of psychologists or ignore it. You can listen to it through this link.

As you listen notice the use of the following phrases. What is the overall conclusion of what people value in the workplace?

The Search for the Perfect Office

A vast desk for my mess

Retractable roof and windows

Pretty grim to work in

Bundled up in the other side of the office

Open plan is the way forward

Non-territorial office spaces

Hot desks where the early birds get the best desks

Efficiency diminishes by about 10-20%

This very subject; organizational psychology

Employers are often under enormous pressure to make offices cheaper

A false economy

Lack of privacy

Sitting in close proximity to others

It’s not conducive to being able to concentrate

Supervisors are less willing to give feedback

Architects favour certain kinds of materials

It gets a little bit jumbled in the middle

Interference from that sound doesn’t diminish

If you happen to sit next to someone with a loud telephone voice

If you have a pin quiet office it is absolutely intimidating

What people use for masking sound is pink noise

One size does not fit all

The more wacky offices

Move from individual to open plan offices

Rules: no bins, no pictures on the walls, plants in drawers

Hot desking

A free for all

No space personalizing

No personal effects

Personalizing space helps people cope with stress

Owner occupied offices or speculative developers

You have to future gaze

Acoustics is a rather difficult science

Activity based working

National Association of Pension Funds

It was masterminded by Alex…