11- 01 Lauritz Melchior, the great Wagnerian tenor, was sitting in the garden of his boarding school in Munich, practicing a song. He sang the line, "Come to me, my love, on the wings of light." At that exact moment, a woman literally dropped out of the sky and landed at his feet. Her name was Maria Hacker. She was a Bavarian actress who had been doing a stunt for a movie thriller. Part of her act was to parachute from a plane. The winds had changed and she couldn't land where she was supposed to land. Instead, she landed in the garden of the music school. The couple decided this was more than coincidence; in a short time they were married.

02 We care about the way things look when we set a table for guests, when we arrange our living room furniture, when we pick our clothes. This aesthetics of everyday life is a state of mind that is fundamental to human nature, and lacking in other animals. Birds may sing, but there is nothing in their behavior that allows us to say that the birds are contemplating how the song sounds. Thus, works of art are things that function in certain ways: they are objects to be enjoyed for their appearance and whose appearance is to be interpreted purely for what it means and without reference to some further practical function. This seems to me to be close to the idea of repleteness. And also close to Kant's belief that the aesthetic attitude is one of disinterested pleasure, divorced from practical constraints, divorced from any desire for the object causing the pleasure.

12-02 The Internet has become a major source of speech topic ideas and information, but the quality and credibility of the research and information available online varies widely. If you use the Internet, try to stick with sources you know to be reliable; otherwise, verify the accuracy of the information you use by checking several sources. The subject indexes at your local library are another good starting place for finding a speech topic. You can also find material from which you can quote and come up with more speech ideas there. Another way to find speech topics is to scan the table of contents of a weekly news magazine. The articles are usually of interest to a wide segment of the public and are suitable for a similarly wide range of audiences. To develop your topic-idea list, write down each article title or a phrase that summarizes the theme of the article.

02 Bumble bees are one of the only bees native to the United States and Canada that are truly social, meaning they live in a hive with a single reproductive queen and multiple sterile workers. Unlike honey bee queens, a bumble bee queen lives for only a single year. This annual cycle generally keeps bumble bee hives much smaller than the hives of honey bees. Most mature bumble bee colonies consist of fewer than 200 bees, although some can have as many as 1,000 individuals. For comparison, honey bees may have around 60,000 bees in a single colony. All bumble bee workers are female and perform a variety of duties including foraging for nectar and pollen, feeding the growing young, feeding the queen, cleaning the nest, and defending the hive when needed. Worker bumble bees generally do not lay eggs, either because they have underdeveloped ovaries due to the suppression of a hormone needed for ovary development, or because of physical aggression from the queen. Either way, the queen is the primary reproducer and the workers simply maintain a healthy colony.

13-01 I recently learned from Jeannie Kahwajy, an expert on interpersonal interactions, that her research shows that those who demonstrate that they are willing to learn can turn negative situations around very efficiently. Jeannie ran experiments involving mock interviews by recruiters of job candidates. The recruiter was ready beforehand to have a negative bias toward the candidate. Of the three groups of candidates, one was instructed to prove they should get the job; one was told to learn from the interaction; and the final group, the control, was given no specific instructions. She found that the recruiter's negative bias was reinforced for both the control group and the group that tried to prove they should get the job. However, the candidates who set out to learn from the interaction reversed the recruiter's negative bias. Those who have a learning mindset in any situation can make somebody change his or her negative attitude toward them.

02 We are easily moved, often excited, and occasionally even surprised by the sights, sounds, and smells accompanying ritual spectacles. These events stimulate our senses, enliven our emotions, and captivate our minds. The enthronement of popes, the inauguration of presidents, and the burial of heroes arrest our attention and embed memories that last a lifetime. Everyone loves sensory pageantry. Some rituals focus the attention, feed the imagination, evoke the remembrance of things past as well as the desires of things to come, and inspire dramatic actions that stand out against their everyday background. Yet the feature of such dramatic spectacles should not obscure the fact that "ritual" often refers to the repetition of daily acts. Even though these rituals break with the ordinary world too, they frequently remain thoroughly dull. They trigger automatic responses that appear to be completely mindless. While rituals easily capture our attention and imagination in fancy sensory occasions, they often provoke boredom because they repeat very everyday events.

14- [4~5] As everyone knows, people are social animals who enjoy and need human interaction. Running surely is one of such human interactions. Running can greatly improve your social life and make you feel better about yourself. It can provide a noticeable boost to your self-esteem and confidence. By setting and achieving goals of running, you can give yourself a greater sense of self-confidence. Don't be surprised if you feel a bit more outgoing and sociable after beginning your running program; this is another training effect of exercise. Opportunities for social interaction present themselves indirectly as well as directly. You might directly choose to run with others. But even if you prefer running as a time for yourself, you can still indirectly use the subject as a conversation piece in other social situations. Your loved ones will be proud of you for your commitment to running. Suppose someone special says to you, "I started a running program a month ago." Do you reply, "Oh, no, how could you do such a thing?" or "Oh, I'm so sorry."? Of course not. You probably congratulate him or her and offer support. Others will have the same reaction toward you, helping to reinforce your motivation

mimi- 1- 01 Everyone lives with risk, every day. In the United States, more than 100,000 persons die from accidents every year, nearly half of them on the country's roads. Worldwide, an average of more than 5,000 coal miners perish underground annually, a toll often forgotten by those who oppose nuclear power generation on grounds of safety. From insect bites to poisoned foods and from smoking to travel, risk is unavoidable. Certain risks can be mitigated through behavior (not smoking, wearing seat belts), but others are routinely accepted as inescapable. A half century ago, long before hijackings and airport security programs, the number of airline travelers continued to increase sharply even as airplanes crashed with considerable frequency. Today, few drivers or passengers are deterred by the carnage on the world's roads, aware of it though they may be.

Beginning in the late 1970 s and continuing throughout the 1980 s and 1990 s, many critics both at home and abroad maintained that the US system of education was inadequate for meeting the challenges of competing in a global economy. The system was considered so inadequate that this warning was issued: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre education performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Many employers claimed that they were unable to find enough workers with the level of reading, writing, mathematical, and critical thinking skills needed to function adequately in the workplace. Reform efforts focused on increasing "seat time," the amount of time students devoted to academic activities, either in school or at home. The rationale came from findings that US students devoted considerably less time to their academic activities than did their foreign counterparts.

"05 The definitions of art proposed by great philosophical minds have themselves all been disputed by other great philosophical minds. What makes art impossible to define conclusively is that artists are always widening the boundaries. Artists intentionally set out to confuse us about our definition of art, to make us question our definition, and to make us expand our definition. In contrast, as my philosopher friend Naomi Scheman said, elephants do not intentionally set out to mess with our concept of the species elephant. In addition, as the American philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë says, art makes us think about ourselves and art makes us think about art — what it is and what it is doing to us and how it is doing this to us. Artists like to come up with new ways to do these things to us."

mimi- 2- 01 Before the arrival of trains, the clock tower in one village might register a time that differed significantly from that in a neighboring town. Railroad schedules imposed a compelling reason to coordinate timekeeping. The standardization of time illustrates one of many secondary and tertiary societal impacts accompanying the introduction of a technology directed at reshaping transportation. Cities connected by railroads grew rapidly and new towns sprouted up along the tracks. Railways hauled in the raw materials needed to feed the continual appetite of growing industries and, in turn, delivered finished goods to ever-expanding markets. Large farms able to convey produce quickly to population centers triggered the development of cities and industries along the Midwest."

04 Scholars have started to focus on network structure and how it affects information flow. In one study, researchers carefully examined the word-of-mouth network of recommendations for three piano teachers in Tempe, Arizona. The teachers did not advertise and therefore relied on their social networks to keep them in business. Most of the recommendations occurred between close friends who were directly connected, but the positive references would spread, often to people the original recommender did not know. In fact, fully 38 percent of the recommendations came from people who were three degrees removed from the piano teacher they were recommending (the teacher's friend's friend's friend). However, the paths tended to fizzle out after that, with less than 1 percent of the recommendations reaching people who were six degrees removed. The great majority of pupils came from within three degrees of the teachers.

06 One of the great ironies in soccer history is that the country that codified the rules and first developed organized soccer then isolated themselves from many international soccer developments before 1950. After all, soccer had "originated" in England, and the English were quite certain they possessed the best team in the world, and until 1950, England had not even bothered to enter the first three soccer World Cup tournaments (1930, 1934, and 1938). But in their first World Cup in 1950, the "colonies across the pond" gave them a big surprise, as the USA beat England 1-0. There in Brazil, England was effectively eliminated by their former colonies in what is still the greatest upset in soccer history. And in 1953, the hammer blow came, when the superb "Magical Magyars" Hungary team soundly defeated England 6-3 in London, and again 7-1 in the return match in Budapest. - England's arrogance as the birthplace of soccer brought disgrace on England in the World Cup in the 1950's.