How to improve my language skills

Although I have been learning English as my second language for years, a higher level of English language skills is required as I become a student in a university. On the university level, we should not only just understand the grammar and be able to do basic conversations, but also be able to think critically, to communicate efficiently and to write academically. In order to make progress in my English language skills, I think I will try my best to listen more, to speak more, to read more, and to write more.

To listen more is actually very beneficial for developing language skills and it’s easy to be ignored by us. Rather than catching the ideas, we could learn from the speakers by understanding the way they represent and express their ideas.

To speak more is also very important. Since we are trying to improve our language skills and language is “invented” to be spoken by people to communicate, we should practice more on the way we express our ideas in order to make our ideas or arguments clear, impressive and convincible. For instance, when we do a presentation in class, it’s important and necessary for us to speak clearly, organized, and confidently with specific and typical examples, vivid illustrations and solid evidences.

To read more is essential and crucial for us to improve. We obtain most of the information from reading in university. So we should read more to improve the efficiency we retrieve information and the ability to comprehend others and obtain knowledge. It’s also a good way to learn from others. However, if we read something not so good, we should try to figure out the shortcomings and weak points in order not to make the same mistake.

To write more is the last one but also the most important one. We will have to write many essays and our dissertation. Just reading is not enough. In order to write critically and academically, we have to write frequently. Every time we write, try to learn from others’ good writings and try to avoid unnecessary mistakes. Practice makes perfect, the more you write, the better you will be.

In conclusion, in order to develop my language skills, I have to do more exercise and practice more. I believe that my language skills will be improved if I do my best to listen more, to speak more, to read more and to write more.

My common grammar mistakes

Though I have been learning English as a second language for years, I still always make many grammar mistakes in my writings. I’m going to talk about three kinds of my common grammar mistakes.

The first kind of mistakes is mistakes in articles. I often forget to add articles, for example, in the sentence “Many applications have come into our lives like solar water heater.” There should be a definite article “the ” before the noun “solar water heater” as we refer to a particular application, so the correct version is “Many applications have come into our lives like the solar water heater.”

Another kind of my common mistakes is in the use of transition words. Sometimes I use inappropriate or even wrong transition words. Let’s look at a couple of wrong sentences first. “In a word, solar energy is the most ideal renewable energy”, “At last, the opponents may argue that …” In the first sentence, the transition phrase, “in a word ” is wrong and actually rather than a transition, it’s an informal phrase that we use orally. In the other sentence, “at last” is not appropriate, we had better replace it with “lastly” or rephrase the sentence. The correct versions could be, “On the whole, solar energy is the most ideal renewable energy.” and “Lastly, the opponents may argue that …” or “Another issue the opponents could consider is that …”

The last type of my common grammar mistakes is the misuse of prepositions. In the sentence “Compared with running, walking is good for people who have knee problems.” It is better to use “to” rather than “with” because we use “with” for more extended or in-depth comparisons, and “to” for simpler ones. The correct version should be “Compared to running, walking is good for people who have knee problems.” Another example is that “… several independent research groups reported a surge in emissions on methane, …”. I this sentence, we should use emissions “of” methane rather than “on” methane because we are talking about methane’s emissions and it’s methane that is emitted. The correct one should be “… several independent research groups reported a surge in emissions of methane…”.

After identifying three kinds of my common grammar mistakes, I will be more careful when dealing with articles, transitions and prepositions and try my best to avoid grammar mistakes in my future writings.

Summary of roundtable discussions

Last week, we presented our roundtable discussions. There were four topics of technologies that were discussed during the tutorial, the four topics were biofuel, green chemistry, micro-chip, and carbon dioxide capture and storage. I will briefly summarize the roundtable discussions of the other 3 groups.

The first group mainly discussed whether biofuel technologies should be adopted by the world. The proponent side claimed that biofuel is a clean and renewable energy source, it’s an ideal alternative of fossil fuels. By applying biofuel technologies, we could reduce the air pollution, create more job opportunities and mitigate the climate change. However the opponents argued that the technologies were still not mature enough to be adopted vigorously by us. Not only large amount of food crops would be used to generate biofuels, but large area of farm land and a lot of fertilizers are also required for the cultivation of the biofuel crops. In my opinion, as biofuel is a clean and renewable energy source and it’s a good replacement of fossil fuels, in spite of some disadvantages, it should still be adopted by us.

The next group talked about the technologies of implanting microchips into human body. The for side said that with a microchip implanted into our bodies, our personal data can be retrieved fast and accurately. It’s quite useful when our profile, identification or personal information was needed especially when there was a medical emergency. In case of that, we can quickly obtain the medical history of the patient and it would be much easier for the doctors to deal with it. However, the against side indicated that, on one hand, we are not sure whether the technologies are safe enough to implant microchips into human body and if it has any side effects to affect our health. On the other hand, our privacy and personal security could be accessible and influenced easily by hackers, thus our privacy would become very vulnerable. So I think the technologies of microchips are not yet that mature to be widely accepted and adopted by us.

The last group focused on carbon capture and storage and talked about carbon filter technologies. The supporters’ idea is that with the help of these technologies, we could reduce the emission of carbon dioxide from large factories by setting up a carbon filter system which obtain carbon dioxide, then recycle them or convert them into methane. Since the emission of carbon dioxide could be significantly reduced by the technologies, the problem of global warming could be mitigated. The opponents pointed out that if this technology is so wonderful, why it is not widely used by factories all around the world. Moreover, they also talked about the efficiency and long-term feasibility of this technology. As my point of view, as this technology really mitigate the problem of global warming, we can still adopt it. But how much we adopt it and apply it in our factories depend on the efficiency and feasibility of the technologies.

I think everyone had done a good job in their presentations and I had a better understanding of the four sets of technologies after the discussions.

Summary of two articles related to the roundtable discussion

In order to prepare for the roundtable discussion and the writing assignment, I read two articles about green chemistry.

The first one is the Kirchhoff’s article, Promoting sustainability through green chemistry. In the article, he claims that a collaborative effort by industry, academia and government is needed to promote the adoption of green chemistry technologies necessary to achieve a sustainable society. After giving us a brief introduction of sustainable development and some background information of green chemistry, he explains the idea from three aspects. First of all, from the academia aspect, academic research in green chemistry is very important and it provides basic knowledge, new products and well-educated manpower. He also talk about the applications of carbon dioxide solvent and catalysts. From the aspect of industry, we will obtain significant benefits from applying green chemistry technologies which reduce or eliminate hazardous substances form products and processes. For example in polymer industry, the use of methylene chloride can be eliminated by a melt polymerization process. Moreover, he mentions the importance of recycling and that green chemistry can also be applied into agriculture and bring us benefits. At last, government also plays an important role in promoting the adoption of green chemistry. Government can provide funds for green chemistry researches and education. Furthermore government could encourage the invention and development of green chemistry technologies.

The other article is Why We Need Green Chemistry. As the title says, the article explains why green chemistry is needed and show us that green chemistry technologies and principles are widely used now. The main ideas of the article are, though chemistry has improved our quality of life, and made thousands of products possible, our collective human health and the global environment are threatened by the hazardous substances of chemical products. Therefore an approach to the design, manufacture and use of chemical products to intentionally reduce or eliminate chemical hazards is needed, and this approach of chemistry is green chemistry. Furthermore, there are twelve principles of green chemistry which aim to prevent waste, design safer products, use renewable feed stocks, maximize efficiency, reduce or eliminate hazardous substances and so on. Because of these, we could get many benefits from green chemistry. Moreover, different kinds of applications of green chemistry are widely used nowadays such as the green paints, green plastic and green carpets. Green chemistry principles and technologies are being adopted by more and more companies, business departments and manufacturers.

After reading these two articles, I have a better understanding of green chemistry, and realize that it really should be adopted by many countries with a collaborative effort by industry, academia and government in order to reduce or eliminate hazardous substances in products, to obtain benefits without harming the environment, and to achieve a sustainable society.


5 relevant vocabulary words/phrases and their definition:

1. Green Chemistry: a chemical philosophy encouraging the design of products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances.
2. Sustainable Development: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
3. Polymerization: a chemical process that combines several monomers to form a polymer or polymeric compound.
4. Catalyst: a substance that makes a chemical reaction happen more quickly without being changed itself
5. Feedstocks: raw material required for an industrial process.

The Lecture About Global Warming And Technology

The lecture was mainly about global warming and technology. From different points of view, the three lecturers talked about their thoughts and ideas on global warming or science and technology. The first speaker, Prof Andrew Palmer, focused on climate change. He first talked about how did greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide change the climate then he carried on to talk about the policies and technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide. The second speaker, Dr. Sovacool, talked about using STS ( Science & Technology Studies ) method to look at energy and technological problems. At first, he briefly introduce the STS methods to us. And then, he used two examples which are renewable energy and electric vehicles to show us that STS methods provide a useful lens to evaluate new technologies. The last speaker, Dr. Bala talked about the global concerns of global warming, he mentioned the evidences of global warming and greenhouse effects. He also talked about the consequences and effects of global warming. At last, he told us what we can do about global warming and provided some measures and suggestions to reduce the threat of global warming and climate change.

Rather than talking about global warming which the first and last speaker mainly focused on, the second speaker, Dr. Sovacool talked about something different. He mentioned technology can be viewed as part of a social system. He also evaluated technology with politics, economy, and social science approaches. I found it quite interesting since I could hardly think of politics, economy or social science when we talked about technology. I always regarded technology as applications of sciences. In my opinion, science was about why certain things happened and technology was about how they had happened and what could we make use of. Though sometimes I could relate technology to economy, it is still very new and interesting to me to consider technology as a part of social science rather than hard science.

In the speeches of Prof. Palmer and Dr. Bala, they both mentioned the carbon dioxide capture from the atmosphere and Prof. Palmer furthermore talked about the storage of liquid carbon dioxide under the sea. I think, it requires very advanced technology and will encounter many problems when actually implement this method, for example, it’s not that easy to send carbon dioxide deep down under the sea without leak and to make them stable in terms of liquid. Yet, it’s still a quite clever idea to solve global warming.

An Inconvenient Truth

After watching the documentary, I really realize that we, the human beings, are facing a very inconvenient and urgent truth --- global warming. I think it’s a serious issue and a tough problem that we need to deal with right now. Global warming basically means the increase of the Earth’s surface temperature. There are many consequences and influences of global warming such as the disappearances of rainforests, the broken of biodiversity, and the decreases in agricultural productivity. Noticing the importance of the issue, most national governments have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol in order to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gas which is the main cause of global warming.

As the most rapidly developing country, China has to burn great deal of fossil fuel in order to get energy for electricity and industry use. Since the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide mainly come from the burning of fossil fuel, there are huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions in China.

What is China’s policies and response to global warming? As a responsible country, a lot of measures and actions are taken in China. First of all, we try to increase the efficiency of energy use by encouraging and facilitating the development of advanced science and technology. Secondly, we vigorously develop the low-carbon energy and renewable energy and improve the structure of energy use. Furthermore, we carry out forest planting, protect biodiversity, and try our best to preserve and maintain ecological balance. Moreover, we try to control the increase of population, to establish relevant criterions and laws, and to make people be aware of the importance and serious consequences of global warming.

At the end of the documentary, Mr. Al Gore said that it is the time for us to “wake up” now and we shouldn’t leave the issue to the future generations. He is right, actions should be taken right now before it is too late, not only for ourselves but also for future generations.

The expanding world of engineering

In his article, Professor Seeram Ramakrishna has given us his opinions and views on the expanding and importance of engineering in today’s world. A well-trained engineer can systematically analyse complex sets of information and apply systems thinking and holistic approach in designing solutions. Thus engineers play a very important and irreplaceable role in the development of the world and its economy.

The traditional scope of engineers has been broadened and expanded. Rather than the traditional fields like building, engineers are quit common and recognized in manufacturing as well. Even in the service sector, engineers are highly sought after and needed. Engineers are still a kind of people who build high-rise buildings, highways and shopping malls. However nowadays, engineers are quit involved in making different forms of transportation, furthermore, engineers design and manufacture electrical goods and medical devices. As a electrical engineering student, I find that life will be very boring and inconvenience without the electrical devices such as televisions, cellphones, computers. So engineering is also closely related to our daily life. Because of the ability to analyze complex information and systematically design solutions, engineers are hired and recruited by large corporations in banking, finance, logistics and commerce to design manage and manipulate complex systems like data and information management systems.

Now let us focus on the reason why engineering is so important and expanded. Since the last century, science and technology have been developed fast and intensively. Different from scientists who pay more attention on why exactly something happens in a pure academic way, engineers knows not only the science of certain things, but also how to use the science to make applications. So engineers are the kind of people who use science and technology to solve problems and apply science and technology to the real world by building, manufacturing and designing. Since acquired with the ability to apply science and technology, to analyze complex information, and to design solutions with critical and systematical thinking, engineers are very important and highly sought after in today’s world, and moreover, engineers have a very bright future.