English Language Challenges

Hello, this is the last post of my blog! I really like to write in here, sometimes the subjects were difficult and I had to research a little, but it was nice. I think English Class is very important to me, because I really like languages and I enjoy learning about them, and I think it isn´t very difficult to me to learn a language. Of course, I wish I new more languages, like portuguese and french, but that I´ll do in another time.

I think English is very useful because it´s a universal tongue. Unfortunately, I don´t use it very often, but I wish in the future to travel to Southeast Asia and communicate speaking English, although some cousin told me that people there doesn´t use it a lot, but it will be the only way for me to communicate there. I have spoken English everytime I meet a foreign person, which isn´t very often, and when I went to New York, and it was very very useful.

I like to believe that my English is good, but of course there´s always something to learn. I´m failing in vocabulary and in the connection of phrases I think, and the only way to improve in the language is to speak it, so that´s why I took this course. I think it´s difficult to think in English and to express the words in other tongue that is not your birth tongue, so maybe the solution is to go abroad and learn, and I want to do that, but it´ll have to wait until I make my own money.

So, thanks for reading all the stuff that comes out of my head.  Best wishes :)

Facebook

Hello! Today I want to talk about facebook. You know, the website that everyone uses to communicate with friends and people we once met, but also to spy on others people´s life! I have to admit it, the first years I had my facebook profile, I was very fond of it and used it all the time, reaching a point where I was on the profile of some strange person I hadn´t met or seen in my life!

Why is facebook so addictive? I think the reason is that you can spy on people´s life, see their photos and know what they´re doing. But, let´s be honest, everybody posts what is grate or important for them: they say when they´re in a restaurant, when somebody made a journey, when somebody is really happy... So everybody will think that they are so popular and they do grate stuff all the time. 

But it´s not real, it´s an illusion. I remember reading an article about a girl that pretended she had travelled somewhere. She told her family and friends she´d go for some time, so she dissapeared in her apartment, posted photos of her in the place (just a set in her living room or photoshop) and wrote on facebook whenever she was in some new place. And everybody believed it!! And when she told everybody it was fake, they were all like WTF, I saw the photos! 

Now, I use facebook mostly for university stuff and to talk to my friends, but I have to admit I still log in everytime I´m in a computer. I wish I didn´t need it. I admire my boyfriend, who close it because he realized that it´s just a big waste of time.

How green are you?

I´ve thinking what´s the meaning of being green. Have you ever wondered? It´s a difficult definition because nobody really knows what is the "good" thing to do, but I think that to be green involves being friendly with the environment, doing things like recycling, use your bike instead of motor vehicles, preserv biodiversity, maybe being vegetarian, and having your own orchard, which is the most difficult I think.

So, definitely I´m not green. The only thing I do about it, is recycle, and I don´t do it properly. I think I might be helping to preserv biodiversity by studying something related with environmental practices, but I´m just studying it, I´m not helping it. And I wish I was vegetarian, but It´s really difficult! I admire the ones that can do it. And when I have my own house, I would like to have an orchard and that my work is close to my house, so I can go walking or by bike. But now I´m not green.

I think is difficult to be completely green, because we don´t learn it at school or university. We have a remote idea of what we have to do, like plant a tree or not throwing trash to the street. But let´s be honest, that´s not going to help Earth to recover from all the polution we have done. The thing to be done is teach environmental practices at schools, so they learn and the may teach it to their children when they grow up. We need a change in everybody´s mind and attitude, so...

Trash Management

Well Hello! Holidays were infinite, but here we are again. Today I want to talk about the management of the trash in Chile, or at least, what I know about it, because this is a problem that is affecting us now.

The average weight of trash a person produces in Chile is 1 kilo per day, which means that we all produce 17 million kilograms (or 17.000 tons) of trash per day!! I think that´s too much, because all that volume of trash goes to landfills, and all they do is accumulate. Imagine all the trash Chilean produce per year, and add to it the million tons that were left before. So yes, we produce a lot of trash.

In some countries, the trash is recycled so people do all the job of separating it, and there are companies that collect it by its interest and industries that process all kinds of waste. I think this is the solution, not just for Chile, but for the world: recycling trash.

The first thing that needs to be done, is change people´s mind, which is the most difficult part. I think there are 3 Rs that can help about this fact: we could reduce the amount of trash we produce by choosing less packed products, buying in bulk and using rechargeable batteries. We can reuse some waste by, for example buying returnable caontainers and not throwing away old clothes. We can recycle not just by separating the glass and plastics, but doing recycled paper in our house or composted plant residues.

So, let´s apply this and tell our friends and family, so we can reduce trash and help our world a little bit. Best wishes! Bye

My future job

Hello! So, today I´m gonna talk about the dream job I´d like to have when I get my degree. It´s really difficult choosing THE job, because my career (Renewable Natural Resources Engineering) is so wide and unspecific and it has so many points of view and topics. I think I´d like to work doing projects about one of the topics I most like, which are: Global Warming, Transgenics and Recycling, and the job would be so much better if I could work with those three themes. Maybe a Municipality would do fine, or I could also work in a private company, but I´d prefer to do good and help people rather than working for a private that the only thing that cares is money.

The job I´m thinking would be a mix of indoor and outdoor job, working in the office to make the projects, but also going out to study the places (for example, for Recycling), the crops and orchards (for the Transgenics study) and the entire World and its diverse ecosystems for the treatment of Global Warming; and I would like to travel a lot with my job. So, my dream job would have the best of both worlds. 

I haven´t thought already about studying a major. I actually haven´t thought about the thesis I wanna do, but it would be about one of the topics I mentioned before, mostly about Global Warming, because it envolves the other two.

Thanks for reading! Best wishes :)

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

Hi! Have you ever heard about GMOs? I don´t know much about it myself, but in my career its a widely used topic. A Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) is a living animal or plant that has been modified by inserting a gen or several genes from different species by using genetic engineering; these genes have the important characteristics that modify the species into GMOs. As far as I know, GMOs are widely used, from improving some plant characteristics to make them resistant to plagues, to produce pharmaceutical drugs and (somo teacher told me this) to produce polymers. 

In my opinion, transgenics are bad, they are not natural. Some causes to produce them were that GMOs were going to cure hunger and help poor people, but the producers are obviously not giving the GMO food to poor people and the prices did not decline. On the other hand, I know that in our planet now live 7.000 million people and we all eat, drink, consume and use up the goods the Earth gives us, so -wrongly thought- there had to be an improvement in food to feed everybody. But this is not the way. We throw food to the garbage, we are using up the soil, we are exploiting other people to make cheaper clothes, we are thirsty for money, we are not seeing that our Earth -our home- is in danger.

I really like the theme of GMO´s, specially when there´s a debate about it, so everybody can understand the good and the bad side of them. I really don´t know whether they improve or destroy life, but that´s the only thing we are sure of: WE DON´T KNOW. So why are we using them like if there´s no harm in it?

Food and Sustainability

Hi! Today I´m gonna talk about Permaculture. This is a science that imitates natural ecosystems, so it can be sustainable farming. To learn more about this science, I watched a video called "7 Food Forests in 7 Minutes with Geoff Lawton" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG_vRG66wkA); in this video he shows the different stages of a crop, but the interesting part is that he uses permaculture to grow it, so at the beginning he has to move the soil and control the crop, but when the crop has grown, he hardly makes effort, because it  selfmaintains except for some soil moving.

This is a very good kind of farming, because it strengthens the growth of the plant itself, without using chemical substances that kill the plagues and exhaust the soil, that the only thing they do is interrupt the natural cycle of the ecosystem.

In Chile, this kind of farming would be so useful to improve the soil and to stop pollution from chemicals like fertilizers and fumigations. But, of course, it would be so difficult to convince the farmers that permaculture is better than agriculture currently used. As Tommy Douglas said: "Courage, my friends; it`s not too late to build a better world".