—- **FOR NEW STUDENTS**————————————————

1. 🔊 What industry do you work in and what is your role?
2. 🔊 What are your responsibilities in your role/position?
3. 🔊 Can you describe to me the function of your workplace/company?
4. 🔊 How many departments, how many offices. National or International?
5. 🔊 What is the Minimum requirements for employment i.e Education or Experience?
6. 🔊 How many opportunities are there to ‘move up the ladder’?
7. 🔊 What is the process for changing job roles i.e Interview? Test?

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🔊 General discussion about your workweek:

1. 🔊 Current projects? Deadlines? Opportunities?
2. 🔊 Anything of interest happening?

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Listening

1. 🔊 What is particularly horrible in L.A?
2. 🔊 What is the speed limit inside the tunnel?
3. 🔊 How long is the L.A subway extension?

Script

1. 🔊 Chris Anderson: Elon, hey, welcome back to TED. It’s great to have you here.
2. 🔊 Elon Musk: Thanks for having me.
3. 🔊 CA: So, in the next half hour or so, we’re going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes the first question a little ironic: Why are you boring?
4. 🔊 EM: Yeah. I ask myself that frequently. We’re trying to dig a hole under LA, and this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion. So right now, one of the most soul-destroying things is traffic. It affects people in every part of the world. It takes away so much of your life. It’s horrible. It’s particularly horrible in LA.
5. 🔊 CA: I think you’ve brought with you the first visualisation that’s been shown of this. Can I show this?
6. 🔊 EM: Yeah, absolutely.  Just to show what we’re talking about. So a couple of key things that are important in having a 3D tunnel network. First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city.
7. 🔊 So by having an elevator, sort of a car skate, that’s on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. And then the car gets on a skate. There’s no speed limit here, so we’re designing this to be able to operate at 200 kilometres an hour.
8. 🔊 CA: How much?
9. 🔊 EM: 200 kilometers an hour, or about 130 miles per hour. So you should be able to get from, say, Westwood to LAX in six minutes — five, six minutes.
10. 🔊 CA: So possibly, initially done, it’s like on a sort of toll road-type basis.  Which, I guess, alleviates some traffic from the surface streets as well.
11. 🔊 EM: So, I don’t know if people noticed it in the video, but there’s no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall, so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion with a 3D tunnel network. This is a very important point.
12. 🔊 So a key rebuttal to the tunnels is that if you add one layer of tunnels, that will simply alleviate congestion, it will get used up, and then you’ll be back where you started, back with congestion. But you can go to any arbitrary number of tunnels, any number of levels.
13. 🔊 CA: But people — seen traditionally, it’s incredibly expensive to dig, and that would block this idea.
14. 🔊 EM: Yeah.  Well, they’re right. To give you an example, the LA subway extension, which is — I think it’s a two-and-a-half mile extension that was just completed for two billion dollars. So it’s roughly a billion dollars a mile to do the subway extension in LA. And this is not the highest utility subway in the world.
15. 🔊 So yeah, it’s quite difficult to dig tunnels normally. I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling.

Discussion 

1. 🔊 What are your thoughts on Elon’s idea, could such a project work in Japan?
2. 🔊 What japanese business people / entrepreneurs are well known in Japan? For what reasons?
3. 🔊 What are your thoughts on the businesses and their goals listed below?

About Elon ;

1. 🔊 co-founder of PayPal / X.com
2. 🔊 worldwide online payments system
3. 🔊 founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX
4. 🔊 private aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company.  Goal of reducing space transportation costs and enabling the colonization of Mars
5. 🔊 co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.
6. 🔊 automotive and energy company specialising in electric car manufacturing and solar panel manufacturing.
7. 🔊 co-founder and CEO of Neuralink
8. 🔊 neurotechnology company developing implantable brain–computer interfaces
9. 🔊 co-founder and co-chairman of OpenAI
10. 🔊 non-profit and a for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research organization that aims to promote and develop friendly AI in such a way as to benefit humanity as a whole
11. 🔊 founder of The Boring Company
12. 🔊 infrastructure and tunnel construction company

Key Words and Phrases

1. 🔊 ironic / sarcasm / **george orwell 1984 img.
2. 🔊 boring / digging
3. 🔊 frequently / often
4. 🔊 alleviate / relieve = lessen suffering
5. 🔊 congestion / crowded / restricting movement
6. 🔊 – urban congestion = crowded areas within cities
7. 🔊 soul-destroying = Unbearably monotonous
8. 🔊 Monotonous = same thing everyday, no change
9. 🔊 affects / Effects =  Affect Verb /  Effect Noun
10. 🔊 particularly / especially
11. 🔊 network / system =  system of interconnected people or things.
12. 🔊 networking = meeting people / interracting with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts.
13. 🔊 integrate = Combine one thing into another to form a whole / merge / unite / blend / fuse
14. 🔊 seamlessly = smoothly and continuously, with no gaps or spaces between one part and the next.
15. 🔊 fabric of the city = building types, thoroughfares, open space, frontages, and streetscapes but excluding environmental, functional, economic and sociocultural aspects.
16. 🔊 Fabric of society
17. 🔊 “What social customs, practices, habits, rituals, etiquette, protocols, and similar interactions comprise the core behavior of a particular society.
18. 🔊 These could be formed from religious beliefs, laws, even weather, or “always been that way.” It could be seen in clothing styles, common foods, greetings, sports, music, gestures, phrases and a multitude of other ways which usually go unnoticed. It’s all the things that people accept as being a part of the local community.
19. 🔊 operate / function
20. 🔊 initially / at first / before anything else
21. 🔊 arbitrary = based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.
22. 🔊 rebuttal = refutation, denial.  argue, diasgree, debate antonym : confirmation
23. 🔊 used up / worn out / exhausted
24. 🔊 block  / hurdle / obstacle
25. 🔊 utility = state of being useful. an organization supplying the community with electricity, gas, water, or sewerage.
26. 🔊 tenfold / 10x