Viewing & Listening Task 3

 Listen to 5 installments of “BBC World News” (either radio or online) and do a summary of what you have heard / learnt.

The first installment of ‘BBC World News’ that I watched is ‘Obama: Tragedies must end’. It is about the shooting that occurred in Newtown, where 20 children and 6 women died by a lone man, who then took his life. President Barack Obama has said that the US must do more to protect its children in the wake of Friday’s shootings at the school in Newtown, Connecticut. President Obama also repeated a call for action against gun crime, saying that in coming weeks he would use ‘whatever powers’ his office held ‘in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like these’. I feel that the US needs to put in place gun laws to ensure that these tragedies cannot occur again.

The second installment of ‘BBC World News’ that I watched is ‘Mayan doomsday prophecy a big misunderstanding’. It is about the prediction that the world was going to end on 21/12/12. However, Graham Hancock says that the Mayans believed that the date was going to be ‘the hinge point’ of the emergence of a new and more enlightened age, not an ending point for civilization. The date 21/12/12 marks the Winter Solstice, symbolic in many cultures of the end of darkness, and the renewal of light. The date is to mark the ending of one cycle, and the starting of another.

The third installment of ‘BBC World News’ that I watched is ‘Australian toddler finds deadly snakes in wardrobe’. Kyle Cummings, who is three years old, found the eggs near his home and put them in a plastic container before tucking them away. A few days later, his mother found seven newly hatched eastern brown snakes in the container. The snakes, which are highly venomous, have been released into the wild. The snake’s fangs were only a few millimeters long that young age, so they would not be able to break skin, but they are just as venomous as adult snakes.

The fourth installment of ‘BBC World News’ that I watched is ‘Classical Music’s all in the mind’.  The World at One programme’s reporter, Neil Bowdler, went to meet Eduardo Miranda, professor in computer music at the University of Plymouth, to find out how people have very different reactions to classical music. They hooked up a person to the brain computer music interface with a cap on his head with electrodes plugged into it reading his brainwaves. The systems wired up so that the flashing symbols corresponds to the subject’s brain activity, so that when he is exposed to classical music, his brainwaves reacts in certain ways. This is all part of Mr Miranda’s effort to see how the brain reacts to music.

The fifth installment of “BBC World News’ that I watched is ‘US inventor demonstrates armored backpack shield’. Recent mass killings in the US have prompted one parent and inventor to devise an armoured shield that could fit in a student's backpack.Kerry Clark, who came up with the idea after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, claims that his invention can stop a bullet from 16 feet away. The panel is designed to stop rounds fired by handguns, but not by rifles. However, there are doubts about the effectiveness of his backpack shield and some sceptics argue that it is more likely to cause anxiety than offer comfort.