Professor:     Ted, did you get my e-mail?

Student: Umm, no, I, actually I haven’t had a chance to check my e-mail yet today, sorry.

Professor: Well, I just wanted to see if I could have a quick word with you after this class.

Student: Well, the thing is, professor, I’m working on the campus newspaper and . . . and I need to get over there right after class for a meeting . . .

Professor: Well, this won’t take long . . . let’s just chat now before class starts . . .

Student:     Sure, what’s up, Professor Jacobs?

Professor: Well, next week, the students in my graduate Creative Writing seminar are going to be reading aloud from their works at the Student Union . . .

Student: Yeah, I saw a poster about that on the bulletin board down the hall.

Professor: Yes, well, anyway, Ted, I’m also inviting a few stu-dents from my undergraduate class to take part, and I’d like one of them to be you, if you’re willing.

Student:     Me? Seriously? I don’t know what to say . . .

Professor: Well, just say you’ll do it, then. The reading wi be in the ballroom of the Student Union at noon next Friday.

Student: You know . . . I’d really like to read the f r t two or three chapters of this novel I’ve been working on . . .

Professor: I was thinking that you could re d some of your poems. In fact, I didn’t even realize that you were writing a novel. What’s it about?

Student: Umm, well, I . . . it’s about he commercial fishing business, about working on a fi hing boat . . .

Professor:     Really? Do you know a lot about that topic?

Student: Well, I grew up in Ala ka, and my grandfather owned a fishing boat, and I work d on it one summer. Plus my grandfather told me a million stories about fishing. Of course, I’ve changed t stories some and fictionalized all the characters.

Professor: I was oping you’d read that poem about spend-ing the night alone in the forest . . . what was it called? Northern Lights, I think . . .

Student: That poem? Huh! When I read it in class, you didn’t say much about it at all, so I figured . . . I figured you didn’t much like it.

Professor:  Well, I wanted to hear what the other students in class thought of it . . . but, yes, I quite liked it. The language as very strong and in particular I found the imagery . . .

powerful. Almost a little frightening.

Student: How about this, then . . . I’ll read just one chapter from the novel, the first one’s pretty short, and then a couple of poems as well. Will that be okay?

Professor: I think that should work. Drop by my office sometime this week and we’ll figure out which poems you should read.

Student: Okay, and Professor Jacobs, thanks . . . I’m really flattered that you’d ask me to take part.

Narrator: Listen to a conversation between a university administrator and a student.

Administrator: Hell , Financial Aid Office, Connie Fong speaking.

Student: Hi, s. Fong. My name’s Dana Hart and I’m a second-year student. I’m, uh, just calling to see if I can get some information on your . . . on the work-study program?

Administrator: Sure, happy to help you. What would you like to know?

Student: Well, what do you . . . what are the requirements f r . . .

Administrator:      The eligibility requirements? Okay, first off,

are you taking at least 60% of a full-time academic load?

Student: Yeah, a hundred percent—I’m a full-time student.

Administrator: Okay, that’s fine. Then, let me ask you this, are you qualified to receive financial aid?

Student: Ummm, I have no idea. I’m not getting any financial aid now. See, I have a personal bank loan to pay for my tuition, and my parents are helping me out with my room-and-board expenses. But I really have no money for living expenses, so, uh, that’s why I’m hoping to land a part-time job . . .

Administrator: Well, you’d need to fill out some financial aid forms to see if you qualify . . . it depends on your level of income and on your parents’ level of income . . . .

Student: So, if I fill out these forms and . . . and I don’t qual-ify for financial aid, then . . . then there’s no way I could get a work-study job?

Administrator: No, uh, no, that’s not necessarily true. You see, there are two kinds of work-study positions. There are needs-based positions—those are the ones funded by the government, and for those, yes, you have to qualify for financial aid, but there are also what we call merit-based work-study positions. These positions are available regardless, uh, regardless of financial need, as long the financial aid office determines that a work-study position helps you meet your educational goals, if it’s a . . . a . . . you know, useful supplement for your formal classes. It’s even possible that you could earn academic credit for some of these positions.

Student: So, what sorts of positions do you have open right now?

Administrator: Well, it depends on your interests, your experience . . .

Student: The only job I’ve ever had, I worked in a restaurant but . . . I don’t want anything in food service, food preparation . . . no cafeteria job . . .

Administrator: Well, we try to find you jobs related to your educational goals. Say, for example, if you’re studying biology, we might try to place you as a technician in a biol-ogy lab . . .

Student: I’m an art major, and I was wondering . . . are there any jobs in the art gallery at the Student Union?

Administrator: Hang on a sec. No, no positions at all at the Student Union . . . but, uh, okay, here’s a position at the Metropolitan Art Museum . . . it’s as a tour guide there.

Student: Really? Wow, that sounds fabulous. But, uh, I thought work-study jobs were all on campus.

Administrator: Oh, no, about 25% of all our positions are off-campus . . . they’re positions with foundations or organizations that we think perform some worthwhile community service.

Student:  So, how many hours a week is this job?

Administrator: I’ll check . . . it looks like they want some-one there for around twenty to twenty-five hours a week.

Student: Really? I don’t know if I could put in that much time and still . . . still do okay in my classes.

Administrator: Well, don’t give up on the position for that reason. Y’ know, we really encourage job-sharing—two students working one position. It’s possible that we could arrange something where you’d only work about half that much time.

Student: That sounds more like what I had in mind: ten, twelve hours a week or so. So what do I do to apply for this job?

Professor: Okay, class, we’ve been talking about traditional types of shelters . . . about the, uh, styles of houses used by traditional people, and today . . . today I’d like to talk a bit about the homes of the Inuit people, the Eskimos, the people who live in the far north, in the Arctic regions of North America. Now, all the Inuit used to have two types of houses, summer houses and winter houses. Their summer houses were called tupiq, and they were originally made of animal skins and, later, canvas.

There were various types of winter houses, though. The Inuit who lived in northern Alaska, where there was plenty of driftwood, built their winter houses from wood they found on the shore. The Inuit who lived in Labrador—that’s in Northeastern Canada—now, they built their winter houses from stone and earth and supported them with whale bones. It was only in the north central part of Canada and in one place in Greenland that the Inuit built their winter houses from snow. Oh, and by the way, the Inuit who lived up in Greenland, in a place called Thule, they were some of the most isolated people in the world.

Until sometime in the early nineteenth century, in fact, they thought they were the only people in the world. Imagine how surprised they were the first time they met outsiders!

Anyway, when the first Canadians of European descent arrived in northern Canada, and they saw these houses made of snow, they asked what they were called. The Inuit replied, “Igloos,” and so that’s what we call them now. In English, the word igloo means a dome-shaped house made of snow. However, it turns out, the word igloo in Inuit just means house, any sort of house—a house of wood, a house of snow, whatever.

How did the Inuit make these snow houses? They used knives made of bone or ivory to cut wind-packed snow into blocks. They arranged these in a circle and then kept adding smaller and smaller blocks in a rising spiral until a dome was f rmed. Then they’d pack the cracks between the blocks with l se snow. A skilled igloo-builder could put up a simple igloo in a couple of hours, and you know what? He could do it in a blizzard!

The igloo was the only dome-shaped traditional housing that was built without internal support. It didn’t need any interior support because, well, because it was so strong. The bitter Arctic winds caused the outside of the igloo to freeze solid. Then, the interior was “set” with a seal-oil lamp. What I mean is, they used these lamps to melt a little bit of the snow blocks, and then the water refroze into ice. So you had a layer of ice on the outside of the dome and one on the inside, and like I say, it was strong. In fact, it would support the weight of a man standing on top of it.

Igloos were remarkably warm inside. I mean, given that they were made out of snow, they were surprisingly cozy. Snow is actually a good insulator, believe it or not, and it keeps the intense cold out. Igloos were usually small enough so that body heat warmed them up pretty quickly. The Inuit slept on platforms of packed snow covered with furs. Oh, and the entrance tunnel to the igloo was dug out so that it was lower than the igloo floor, and cold air got trapped in the tunnel. Seal-oil lamps were usually used to heat igloos, so there had to be a hole at the top of the dome to let out stale air and smoke.

If igloos were to be used for a fairly long time, they, uh, they naturally tended to be more elaborate. Sometimes cir-cular walls of snow were built around igloos to shield them from the wind. Sometimes these walls were even built into a second dome around the first one, and the layer of air between the two domes provided even more insulation. These semi-permanent igloos had windows and skylights made of freshwater ice or translucent seal gut. And some-times you’d have clusters of igloos. They were connected by tunnels. Sometimes five or more Inuit families lived in these clusters. And, uh, sometimes the Inuit built larger snow domes that could be used more or less as . . . uh, community centers. You know, the nights are long up there in the Arctic, so they needed some entertainment. They held dances and wrestling matches and their famous singing competitions in these larger igloos.

In the early 1950’s, the Inuit began living in permanent, year-round housing. They only used igloos when they went on overnight hunting trips. Today, they don’t use these wonderful snow-domes for shelter at all, not even as tem-porary housing. But, uh, sometimes they’ll build igloos for special exhibits, and sometimes you’ll see little igloos in their yards that they build as playhouses for their children.

Student B: Professor, I read an article about a space ship that used sails to propel itself through space.

Student A:    You couldn’t use sails in space, it’s a vacuum . . .

no air . . .

Professor: No, Liza’s right. These aren’t conventional sails, of course. A scientist named Robert Forward came up with this idea. He said you could launch a ship with rockets, and then unfurl these giant sails made of thin plastic—I mean, many square kilometers of thin plastic sails. Then you fire intense bursts of laser beams at the sails, and since lasers travel at light speed, pretty soon, you’re scooting along at close to the speed of light.

Student B:    I thought it was a brilliant idea . . .

Professor:     There’s a catch, though . . .

Student A:    What’s the catch?

Professor: Well, you’d still need huge amounts of fuel to power the lasers—more than you could carry. No, to reach the stars, you need some revolutionary drive system that requires little or no fuel.

Student B:    Is anyone even working on something like that?

Professor: As a matter of fact, yeah, there are teams of some cutting-edge physicists who are looking at things like anti-gravity, anti-matter, artificial wormholes, things called nega-tive mass and zero-p int energy—as possible ways to power ships. But these c ncepts are all in the speculation phase . . .

Student B: What do you mean, they’re in the speculation phase?

Professor: Well, any workable technology goes through at least four phases of development. There’s the speculation phase—that’s where you figure out what your need is and dream up a system or a device that can fill that need. Next is the science phase, where you basically do experiments and see if the technology you dreamed up might possibly work. After this comes the technology phase. You bring in the engineers, tell them what you need, and they build it for you. Finally, you put the technology to work. That’s the application phase. But all these technologies that I men-tioned, they’re just in the speculation phase.

Student A: Okay, professor, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that scientists dream up a way to travel half as fast as light, and engineers manage to build it . . . then it would only take about eight years to get to the nearest star and eight years to get back That’s . . . isn’t that just a sixteen-year trip?

Professor: Well, possibly. But 4.2 light years is the distance to the nearest star, not to the nearest star with planets. We don’t know if any of the stars in our immediate neighbor-hood have planets. Suppose you went all that way and just found empty space! The closest star with planets—at least with earthlike planets—may be much farther away.

Student B: Professor, I thought you said that, these days, scientists could detect planets around other stars.

Professor: Well, yes, that’s true, I did say that . . . there have been hundreds of what are called “extra-solar” planets dis-covered, but if you remember, I said that almost all of them are huge planets, gas giants, a lot like Jupiter, probably. And a few that were discovered recently are smaller, rocky plan-ets but they are very close to their stars, closer than the planet Mercury. We still don’t have the know-how to detect earth-like planets. Maybe the closest earth-like planet is dozens, even hundred of light years away.

Student A: Well, professor, I guess you’re saying that we’ll never be able to visit other stars. I just think that’s too bad. I love science fiction books and movies, and I always hoped that people would one day be able to whiz around the galaxy the way people travel around our planet today.

Professor: You know, Mark, I don’t think that trips to the stars will be practical unless we develop a way to travel faster than light, or close to that, and I don’t think that will ever happen. So . . . I don’t want to rule out anything . . .

who knows what kind of scientific breakthroughs we might have in the future. But Mark, I don’t think I’d pack my bags and head for the spaceport any time soon.

Narrator:    Listen to a lecture in an art class.

Professor: Morning, class. Okay, so today we’re gonna continue our study of twentieth-century art with a discussion of photorealism. This, ah, style of art—it was also ca ed hyperrealism or superrealism—it was popular in the late 1960’s and the 1970’s. Painters who worked n th s style, they . . . they portrayed their subjects down to the smallest detail, and so their paintings look like photographs, they resemble photographs in many respects.

Now, you have to keep in mind that in this time, in the 60’s and 70’s, art was dominated by Minimalism and Conceptual Art, which were very non-representational types of art, very abstract, and o his was . . . this incredible realism was kind of a r action to that.

Okay, I’m going o show you a slide of a painting by the photorealist Audry Flack. It’s called The Farb Family Portrait. When s painted this, she used the same techniques that a lot of Photorealists used. First, she took a photo of the family. Next she drew a grid on her canvas, dividing the whole surface of the canvas into little squares. Then she made a slide from the photo and projected the picture onto her canvas. One by one, she systematically painted what was projected onto each of the little squares. Each square was really its own tiny work of art. Audrey worked with an airbrush, and she used acrylic paints. The acrylic paints account for the bright, luminous colors that you see in most of her works. In fact, most Photorealist paintings tend to be bright and colorful.

So, ah, where did this style of painting come from? You might say, what’s the big deal, people have been painting realistically for hundreds of years. The Dutch Masters were obsessed with getting details right. And in the eighteenth century there was a European school of painting called trompe l’oeil, and painters who worked in this style were as interested as Photorealists in . . . in capturing every detail of what they saw, in . . . ah, making their subjects look real. However, these painters were . . . they were also interested in creating optical illusions, three-dimensional optical illusions—the phrase trompe l’oeil means “trick of the eye.” For example, one of the paintings from this school pictures a boy who appears to be climbing out of the painting, climbing right out of the frame. That’s not . . . not one of the interests of Photorealism, creating optical illusions.

Anyway. What sort of subjects did the Photorealists paint? Photorealists painted still-lifes, portraits, landscapes—although there are not many paintings of rural scenes, mostly they show urban scenes. The subjects of Photorealist paintings are interesting only because they are so . . . just so ordinary. One Photorealist, the painter Chuck Close, once said the subjects of his paintings were “so normal that they are shocking.” Another one, a painter named Richard Estes, said, “I don’t enjoy looking at the things I paint, so why should you enjoy it?” What he meant there, I think, is that the technique of painting is the important thing, that the subject itself means little. How one painted was much more important than what one painted. In a little while, when we look at some more of the slides I brought, y u’ll see typical Photorealist subjects. There’s one of a gas station . . .one of an elderly man waiting at a bus stop . . . let’s see, there’s one of an old, closed-down drive-in movie. Weeds are growing up between the speaker stands and the screen is practically falling down.

Some painters specialized in painting one type of sub-ject. Richard Estes, for example, liked to paint urban scenes, ordinary city sights, reflected in sheets of window glass. For example, he might paint a parking lot reflected in glass, or a drug store reflected in big plate-glass windows. There was one Photorealist who only painted neon signs and one who painted only trucks. The point is, Photorealists never chose grand, inspiring subjects to paint. They always painted ordinary, everyday, banal subjects.

Now I’m going to show you another slide. This picture was taken at the museum where Duane Hanson’s works were on display. Looks like a photo of the museum security guard, doesn’t it? That’s ah, what a lot of the visitors to the museum thought too. They would come up to the “guard” and ask him questions. But this isn’t a photo of a flesh-and-blood person; it’s a photo of one of Hanson’s sculptures.

Hanson was a Photorealist sculptor. He fashioned human-size statues of people from plastic. He then painted them to make the plastic look like human skin, and he added hair, clothing, shoes, jewelry, sometimes props—one of his sculptures features a man riding on a lawn mower. Again, his subjects were ordinary people—a car salesman, a homeless person, a student, a child putting together a puzzle. As you’ll see in a couple of minutes, all of these statues are as realistic as this one of the security guard.

Okay, as promised, I’m, uh, going to have a little slide show for you. While you’re viewing these works of Photorealistic art, I’d like you to take notes on what you think of them. Then, over the weekend, I’d like you to write a short paper—really short, just a page or two—that describes your reactions to these works.

Narrator:    Listen to a discussion in a meteorology class.

Professor: Afternoon, everyone. So, um, in our last class, we talked about thunderstorms. Today, I want to talk about a similar phenomenon: hailstorms. Anyone here ever been caught in a hailstorm?

Student A: As a matter of fact, last year, I was driving home from the university one weekend—my parents live about seventy miles from here—and the sky got really dark, and it started to rain. And then, all of a sudden—it, well, it was like . . . like little pebbles were pounding on the car, and there were balls of ice as big as marbles bouncing around on the highway.

Student B:    So what did you do, Mike?

Student A: Well, as soon as I could, I pulled off the road and parked under a highway bridge until the storm was over. But it was too late—I had lots of little dents in my car.

Student B: I remember when I was in high school, there was a bad hailstorm, and it wiped out my parents’ garden. They were really upset, because they love gardening.

Professor: Well, that’s interesting, those two examples you gave—because every year, hailstorms cause more than a billion dollars worth of damage, and you know what? By far the most damage is done to vehicles and plants—not gar-dens, really, but farmers’ crops.

Student A: There’s nothing farmers can do? Can’t they cover their crops with plastic sheets or . . .

Professor: No, there’s no . . . no practical way to protect crops, although farmers can buy insurance against hail damage. Now, back in the fourteenth century in Europe, farmers tried to ward off hail by ringing church bell , anging on pots and pans, and firing cannons. Hail cannons were common in wine-producing regions, t le st through the nineteenth century. And . . . uh, in the Soviet Union, as late as the 1950’s, the government used cannons to shoot silver iodide crystals into clouds. This               uh, was supposed to make the hailstones smaller  o hey wouldn’t do as much

damage, but it didn’t really work too well.

Student B:    Professor, are people . . . do they get hurt by hailstorms very often?

Professor:     Hurt? Hmmm, w ll, it doesn’t . . . it doesn’t really

seem like it to me. Sometimes you’ll hear about a person stuck up in a Ferris w eel or some other ride at an amusement park being injured, or something like that, but . . . uh, it doesn’t seem to happen very often, does it? And that’s . . .

well, it’s kind of surprising, isn’t it, considering that hail-stones can be as big as baseballs—sometimes even bigger— and can travel like, a hundred miles an hour. So, uh, I don’t really have any statistics about that, but I’ll try to get some information. Okay, now, another question—has anyone ever cut a hailstone in half to see what it looks like? No? No one? Well, hat do you think it would look like? Penny?

Student B: Well, I dunno. I suppose . . . it must look like a little snowball cut in half . . .

Professor: No, as a matter of fact, it looks more like an onion cut in half—lots of layers. And what does it usually mean when you find layers in something? Mike?

Student A: Um, well . . . I guess that it wasn’t formed all at once.

Professor: Exactly. Here’s how you get hailstones. A hail-stone starts off as a droplet of water in a cumulonimbus cloud—that’s a thundercloud. Then—remember, last class, we said there were a lot of strong updrafts of warm air and strong downdrafts of cold air inside a thunderstorm? Well, one of these updrafts picks up the droplet and lifts it high into the cloud, where the air is cold, and it freezes. Then, because of gravity and cold downdrafts, it falls.

Student B: Professor? Wouldn’t it melt when it falls . . . I mean when it gets into the warmer air?

Professor: Yeah, when it hits the warmer air at the bottom of the thundercloud, it might start to thaw—but then, our little half-frozen droplet gets picked up by another updraft, carrying it back into very cold air and refreezing it. This happens again and again. With each trip above and below the freezing level, the hailstone adds another layer of ice. Eventually, the hailstone gets so heavy that the updrafts can’t lift it anymore, so it drops out of the cloud and . . . bingo, you’ve got hail!

Student A: So, Professor, you said that you only get hail when there’s a thunderstorm—is that right?

Professor: Well, hail only forms in cumulonimbus clouds, which are the only kind of clouds that generate thunderstorms—though you don’t always get thunder and lightning when you have hail.

Student B: Sometimes, I’ve seen on weather reports, you get a lot of hail just before tornadoes.

Professor: Well, that’s true. But hail isn’t always associated with tornadoes, and . . . uh, not all tornadoes are accompanied by hail.

Student A: So if you just look at a thundercloud from the ground, can you tell if you’re going to have hail?

Professor: No, not just by looking. But a meteorologist can tell by using Doppler radar. Doppler radar can “look” inside a cloud. Okay, we said thunderstorms are most common in summer. How about hailstorms? When are they most common?

Student B:    I’d guess in the winter.

Professor:     Nope, afraid not.

Student A: The hailstorm I was caught in was in April, maybe early May, so I’d guess spring.

Professor: You’re right. And the part of the United States where they’re most common is along the Rocky Mountains

. . . in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana . . . . In fact, the most costly hailstorm in U.S. history was in Denver, Colorado. Just that one storm caused over . . . I believe it was about $750 million dollars’ worth of damage.