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iCUSU English class for 12 October
Diagnostic listening comprehension: Five Minutes with Brian Cox
URL http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8522608.stm if you want further run-throughs
The questions will both test your general comprehension and your ability to catch and
understand every word. If you can follow the interview pretty much word-for-word, then
simply write down what the interviewee and interviewer say to each other.
There are thirty notional points available. By the third listen, I would expect someone
who speaks a language close to English or who has lived in England to have over 25
points and anyone taking up a place in Cambridge to have over half the total points
available.
Questions:
1. From what is Prof. Cox taking time out from doing? (2 key words)
2. What did Prof. Cox do before he became a scientist? (3 facts)
3. What kind of music does Brian Cox listen to now? (3)
4. Which question does Brian Cox demur at and not give a straight answer
to, and why? (1& 2)
5. What is particle physics, for Cox? (3)
6. What is particularly difficult to understand, for particle physics? (1)
7. What happened 13.7 billion years ago? (3)
8. What is the most exciting scientific experiment of recent times for Cox,
and why? (1&3)
9. What did Richard Feynman get a Nobel Prize for? What is this field? (2)
10. What was the first universal law of nature to be discovered, for Cox? (1)
11. In what way has our picture of the universe changed recently? (2)
12. Does Cox think that scientific knowledge can go dangerously too far? (2)
13. What expression means both ‘relax’ and ‘come to an end’ and is the
subject of a pun by Cox as the interview finishes? (1)
Answers:
1. From ‘high-powered science’
2. He was a pop star, specifically a keyboard player with D:Ream.
3. He is going backwards in time in his tastes—he listens to Billie Holliday and Bessie
Smith-age blues.
4. ‘Which is the most important science?’ Cox feels that science is a single endeavour
which is damaged by being split up.
5. The study of the fundamental building blocks of matter and the four fundamental
forces that determine their behaviour
6. Gravity
7. The Big Bang, when everything started to move away from everything else. This could
have been the origin of space and time or it could have been an occurrence in another
universe that’s been here forever.
8. The Large Hadron Collider, because it promises to tell us more about what we don’t
understand about the universe by smashing sub-atomic particles together at a higher
energy.
9. Quantum electrodynamics, which is our best theory of electromagnetism.
10. The law of gravity, as discovered by Newton.
11. We’ve decided that 96% of the universe is made of something we haven’t discovered;
either that’s wrong, and there’s something we don’t understand about our observations of
the universe, or it’s right and we don’t understand the constituency of the universe.
12. No; he feels that science is necessary to understand the world so that we can survive,
and that certain scientific discoveries such as the atom bomb are problems for politics and
social organization, not science proper.
13. ‘To wind down’.