SECTION 1

(Telephone rings)

John: Hi, Students’ Housing Office, I’m John. Can I help you?

Susan: Hi, I hope so, I need an apartment. The sooner the better. My friends
suggested I try you guys.

John: Well, that’s what we’re here for. The famous Students’ Housing Office. By the
way, we call apartments flats here. Anyway, let’s get started. First, I’ll take down a few
particulars to put in our database. Hopefully, we’ll help you find some digs before term
starts.

Susan: Yes, near the railway station. Far, too far if I have classes every day.

John: So you want somewhere closer.

Susan: Up to half an hour by bike, and with a bus service if the weather is too bad.

John: Yeah, I cycle here, too. Keeps me fit and no hassle trying to find a parking
space. Do you want to share accommodation or live on your own?

Susan: Live alone. I’ll be too busy with my studies to bother with roommates.

John: How much rent do you want to pay?

Susan: Around 500 pounds a month.

Susan: Some what?

John: Some digs. That’s British slang for rented accommodation.

Susan: Oh dear – flats, digs! – and I’m an English major!

John: No problem. But, back to business. OK. Family name?

Susan: Cartier.
John: Cartier? Sounds French.

Susan: Yeah, my ancestors were French,

John: Wow! Do you speak French?

Susan: I was bom and raised in Montreal, so I’m bilingual.

John: That’s great. And your given names?

Susan: Susan Marie, that’s M-A-R-I-E.

John: Got it. Nationality? Canadian, I guess.

Susan: Right.

John: And your student number?

Susan: CA04628.

John: OK. Got a contact number?

Susan: It’s 6534 9087. I’m staying with friends until I find a place of my own.

John: 6534 9187.

Susan: No, 9087.

John: Got it. What about a mobile phone?

Susan: I’ll get one later today and tell you the number.

John: OK. 653 – that’s way over the other side of town, right?

John: That’s about right, but it won’t be very big. Would a bedsitter be OK?

Susan: A bedsitter?

John: More British English for you. It’s a single room with cooking facilities. Some are
quite nice,

Susan: That’ll be OK. But I don’t want to share a bathroom, and it must be clean,
bright, and not by a noisy main road.

John: OK, but you’ve come a bit late, with only four days to go before the term starts,
we’ve only got shared accommodation on our files at the moment. But don’t worry,
we’ll do our best.

Susan: Oh, I forgot. Does the rent here include utilities?

John: Usually no. You have to pay the gas, electricity, and water yourself.

Susan: What about a deposit?

John: Most landlords want three months in advance, which is also a security deposit.
And make sure you read the rental contract carefully, especially the small print.

Susan: Thanks, I’ll do that. Anything else you need to know?

John: Not at the moment. Make sure you let me know your mobile phone number.

Susan: Will do. Anyway, I must go now. I’m meeting some friends in the cafeteria,

John: OK, we’ll be in touch. Bye for now.

Susan: See you.

SECTION 2

Good morning. And welcome to the main library of the University of British Columbia.
My name is George Martin, and I’m the head librarian. I’m happy to give you a brief
introduction to our library. I guess I’m qualified. I’ve been working here since 1961,
back in the days when the only electrical or electronic stuff here was the lights. Oh,
and the phones, of course. Mechanical typewriters and slide rules then, no fancy
laptops and cell phones. Computers? In a library? No way! Everything was on paper.
If you needed to find something, you went to the card index, and if that didn’t help, you
asked one of the staff, and if that didn’t work, you told your professor that you couldn’t
write the essay because the library didn’t have the book you needed.

My, you students have it so easy nowadays. We’ve got about fifteen computer
terminals on each of our four floors. If you know the title or the author, then you can
find out if we’ve got it in seconds, and, if we do, where it is. If we haven’t got it, then
you can find out if the public libraries and other university libraries in Vancouver and
Burnaby have it.

Now, you know that library books are arranged according to the numbers on the back
of each book. Does anyone know the name of this numbering system?

Right, the Dewey Decimal Classification System, which was invented by Melville
Dewey, an American librarian, not John Dewey the philosopher.

In Melville’s day, book classification systems were in a real mess, so he decided to do

something about it, and around 1876 came up with the system we still use today.
Look up there, and you can see a list of basic categories: 000 – Generalities, which
includes all sorts of things: encyclopaedias, news media, etc., etc. Then 100 –
Philosophy & Psychology; 200 – Religion; 300 – Social Sciences; and so on up to 900
– Geography & History. With over four million books, actually, nearer to five million
now, in our library, we have a lot to thank Melville for.

Now, if you look up to your right, you can see the layout of the library. It’s all very
logical. We start down here on the first floor, or the ground floor for our British cousins,
with three zeros – Generalities, and so on up to the fourth floor, with all the 800s and
900s.

By the way, you won’t find books on medicine and dentistry here. They’re all over in
the Med-Medical Library, just to the east of the Medical School.

Now, if you look at the plan of the second floor, you can see we have a CD and DVD
library. The music collection covers just about everything that we call ‘serious’, from
Bach and Beethoven, folk music, blues, early rock and roll, jazz and more. But sorry,
no punk, heavy metal, rap or hip-hop yet.

For oriental music, like Peking opera, you’ll have to go to the Asian Studies Centre or
Chinatown.
A word about taking books out. The usual lending period is two weeks, but a few
books in great demand can only be taken out for two days. And I suggest you try to
return books on time. The fine is a dollar a day for the first week, and a dollar a day
thereafter. That’s a lot of beer money!

One last thing, Your fancy new smart student card is also your library card, and you
can also use it to pay at the student cafeteria. So don’t lose it, or you’ll starve to death
without any library books. OK, I guess that’s enough here. Let’s move up to the
second floor.

SECTION 3

Jack: Hi, Mary, got time for a coffee? I’d love to discuss what courses I should take.
I’m so confused.

Mary: So am I. But maybe we can work something out together, Jack. We should
really talk about this with our academic supervisor, but she’s away until Thursday,
which might make it a bit late to register for some of the more popular courses.

Jack: That’s my worry, It’s lucky we’re doing the same major, so some of our courses
will be the same and we can cycle in together. What did your parents say when you
told them you would be an English major?

Mary: Well, dad thinks I’m crazy. “You’ll never find a decent job when you graduate.
Teacher or secretary, that’s about all you’ll be good fori” But he’s an engineer, so what
would he know?

Jack: What about your mum?

Mary: Oh, she loves reading and has dreams of me becoming a great writer or
something. So she’s all for it, What about your parents?

Jack: Actually, they agree. They’re both teachers, and are always moaning about the
terrible English of most of their students. They blame it on computers, computer
games, to be exact. Very few of their students ever read novels,
Mary: Anyway, let’s have a look at some of these courses. I thought of taking Latin.
People say it’ll train my brain and help with French and Spanish, as well as English.

Jack: I think that’s nonsense. It’s a dead language. If you want to learn Spanish or
Italian or something, then leam it directly. I did Latin at high school, and apart from
helping me guess the meaning of some new words with a Latin root, it was a waste of
time, Leave Latin to archeologists and theologians.

Mary: Guess you’re right. OK. No Latin. Actually, I’m playing with the idea of doing
journalism later. Foreign languages are always useful for a journalist. Maybe I’ll take
oral French,

Jack: That’s exactly what I was thinking. What are the lecture times?

Mary: Let me see. French 100. Nine to twelve Monday mornings in language lab and
two till five Thursday afternoons in lecture hall think they’re both in the Arts Faculty
building.

Jack: They are. I checked the language lab out yesterday. Very modem, and not too
big. Room for about 30, so the teacher will have more time for individuals. Not like that
50-seat place in my old school. OK, French 100 it is. What next? I was thinking about
Creative Writing 201. What do you think?

Mary: That’s one of our set courses, stupid. We have to take it, along with History of
English, Early American Literature and Sociology 100.

Jack: Damnl I forgot. So, including French, we’ll be doing five courses this term. How
many classroom hours is that altogether?

Mary: Let’s see. History of English, three hours every Tuesday morning. American Lit,,
two till five Tuesday afternoons. Creative Writing, nine till twelve Wednesday
mornings. Sociology, two till five Friday afternoons. That makes 18, including three
hours in the language lab.

Jack: Sounds enough to me, especially in our first term. And the times won’t interfere
with mv swimming team training. All work, no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Mary: You certainly need that Creative Writing course! Let’s drink our coffee.
SECTION 4

Good morning, everybody. It’s good to see you all looking so refreshed after
spending the weekend testing the beer in the students’ bar. I wonder If any of you
discovered the library, but I guess it’s far too early for that.

It’s even better to see we have a full house. I hope you are all here for
Environment & Development 101, because if you are not, then you are In the
wrong lecture hall.

By the way, my name is John Robertson, and I’ll be the main lecturer for this
course, but we will have some guest lecturers from time to time.

And nobody has left. Great, I guess that means you all intend to take this course.

OK, as It says on the notice outside, today I’m going to describe the main contents and
purposes of the course, and hopefully, add to the enthusiasm that brought you here
today.

Does anybody know who Howard Odum was? Right, he Is known as the ‘father of
ecology’. He once said, ‘Everything Is connected to everything else.’ And that
statement explains the design of this course. As human knowledge expands, most
courses, even first-year courses, get more and more specialised. You learn more

and more about less and less. This course is quite different. In the 72 hours of this
course – don’t forget you get two credits for It instead of the usual one – we will try
to achieve three main objectives, namely, we will try to get an understanding of
what Is happening to planet earth, why it is happening, and, hopefully, to find
some answers to the many problems that we’ll be talking about.

The first few lectures will be an overview of the more serious current trends that
are of such great concern to not just ‘greenies’, meaning environmentalists like
myself, and organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, but also to
more and more ordinary people, and even a few politicians and corporate leaders.
So we’ll be looking at things like global warming; the loss of, In particular, tropical
forests; persistent organic chemicals, known as ‘gender benders’ because they
can seriously affect the sexual development of animals; desertification; the serious
worldwide problem of overfishing; and the accelerating loss of biodiversity – If
humans carry on as they are, some 50 per cent of the world’s plant and animal
species will be probably extinct by the middle of this century, That’s the
environment bit.

What about development? We’ll be thinking a lot about this issue. If the goal of
development is to Improve the quality of life, which presumably means making
people happier, then we have to think about this thing called ‘happiness’. In
modern times, we have become consumers In the great consumer society. Are we
any hap¬pier than the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert In southern Africa? And If
common sense tells us that rising sea levels, gender benders and all the other
aspects of a worsening environment will sooner or later put a big brake on
consumption, why – given the warnings from the great majority of the world’s
scientists – are things, In general, continuing to get worse?

This brings us on to psychology, sociology, and, of course, politics, economics,

and even philosophy. We won’t have time to go into each of these areas in great
depth. For our immediate purposes, this is not necessary. Because the basic goal
Is to help us develop a model, a dynamic model, that integrates the main forces
lead¬ing to environmental degradation and those opposing forces that promote
environmental stewardship. This is a tall order for us to do as Individuals, so we’ll
be dividing into teams, and each team will focus on one or two particular aspects,
at the same time Integrating the main findings and arguments of the other teams
into their work.

Well, we have a lot of great work to do. which means It’s coffee time. Back In 15
minutes.