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Task 3

The proposal is that the university should make community service, such as working with the

local children in town, a mandatory activity for all students before they graduate. There are two

reasons.

First, it would strengthen the relationship between the university and the town.

Second, during that process, many students would discover a love of service that would inspire

them to a lifetime of volunteer work in their future communities.

The man disagrees with the proposal for two reasons.

First, it will hurt the relationship between students and the town. Forcing students to volunteer

will make them see it as a chore or a nuisance. So, they are not going to put their hearts into it and

this will make the university look bad.

second, many students are likely to come away from the experience with negative feelings about

it. A lot of students already complain about not having enough time. So, this extra work will be a

bad experience for them. It will not inspire them to pursue more volunteer work after they

graduate.

Task 4

Systems thinking is an approach used by company to solve problem via considering how the

interaction of many different parts of a large system may contribute to a problem. Even though it

may produce complex solutions that take a long time to implement, it is an effective way to solve

problems and has a greater long-term benefit to the company.

The professor gives us an example about himself.

He used to work for a corporation. Workers of that corporation were absent a lot. To address this

problem, they hired a consultant who began by interviewing a lot of the workers, and getting to

know more about them. She also researched other aspects of the company, such as the types of

eating facilities and health services. And what the consultant discovered was that many of the

employees were missing work because of health problems. Health problems caused by a

combination of factors such as poor eating habits and lack of exercise. The consultant concluded

that lack of exercise opportunities or healthy meals indirectly contributed to the workers’ poor

health. So she proposed building a gym within the company office building for employees to use

and exercise, and also offering more nutritious menu in the cafeteria, which the company did, but

it took a while. After a year or so, after the company had time to construct a gym and revise its

cafeteria menu, attendance began to improve and continued to improve until it was no longer a

problem.

Task 6

The 24-hour activity cycle of animal will be determined by the internal clock and external cues

together. Animals do have an internal clock, but external cues are also important.

Take flying squirrels for example. Flying squirrels are nocturnal. They are active during the night

and sleep during the day. But in the experiment, some of these squirrels were kept in constant

darkness. They were not exposed to any daylight for about a month, but they still continue to

follow regular cycles of activity and have regular patterns of sleeping and waking. This indicates

that animals do having an internal clock which regulates their activity cycles. But the internal

clock is not precisely 24 hours long. Instead of following 24-hour cycles, the squirrels followed

cycles that were about half an hour shorter. So, every day they woke up a little bit earlier. Without external cues, without sunlight to fine-tune their internal clocks, the squirrels’ biological

cycles drifted.

What happened when the squirrels were exposed to daylight again is that their schedules did not

match up with the normal day. They were not active during the nighttime as flying squirrels

usually are. Instead, they were waking up in the middle of the day. But after a while, the squirrel

cycles began to change. Gradually, external cues, the cycle of light and darkness adjusted their

internal clocks. Eventually, they were brought back into a normal 24-hour schedule.