Listening Practice - Family Planning in South Korea

South Korean family planning

Summary: South Korean government workers are being told to 'go home and multiply'. Tonight the Ministry of Health, concerned about the country's falling birth rate, will force staff to leave the office early and return to their loved ones.

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Forget that still unwritten report or the backlog of paperwork building up on the desk, on this cold and rainy mid-week night there can be no excuses to stay late in the office. South Korea's Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs will be turning off all the lights at 7pm in a bid to force staff to go home to their families and, well, make bigger ones. It will repeat the experiment once a month.

The country now has one of the world's lowest birth rates, lower even than neighbouring Japan, and boosting the number of newborn children is a priority for this government, staring into the abyss of a rapidly ageing society, falling levels of manpower and spiralling health care costs.

The Ministry of Health, now sometimes jokingly referred to as the 'Ministry of Matchmaking', is in charge of spearheading that drive and it clearly believes its staff should lead by example. Generous gift vouchers are on offer for officials who have more than one child and the department organises social gatherings in the hope of fostering love amongst its bureaucrats. But critics say what is really needed is wide-scale reform to tackle the burdensome cost of childcare and education that puts many young people off from starting a family.

John Sudworth, BBC News, Seoul

FURTHER READING (click here): South Koreans told to go home and make babies

Disappearing Languages

NEWS FLASH!




The United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO, says more than a third of the world's six thousand languages are in danger of extinction. Of those two thousand, it says, about two hundred are spoken by only a handful of people.

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Here is the text:

When a language dies, UNESCO says the world loses valuable cultural heritage - a great deal of the legends, poems and the knowledge gathered by generations is simply lost. In 2008, Alaska's last native speaker of Eyak died, taking the language with her.

Chief Marie Smith Jones, praying here for the survival of the Eyaks. She died at the age of eighty-nine, campaigning to save her people's heritage.

UNESCO says government action is needed if the world is to preserve its linguistic diversity. People must be proud to speak their language to ensure it survives.

In the last five years, the governments of Mexico, New Zealand and the United States managed to reverse the trend locally. But UNESCO says the phenomenon of dying languages appears in every region and in very diverse economic conditions.

Here are some of the words and idioms used in the news report:

• UNESCO - short for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

• valuable cultural heritage - features belonging to a particular society, such as traditions, languages, buildings or works of art, which still exist from the past, are unique and therefore have a historical importance

• a great deal of - many, a lot of

• legends - old stories presented as history but unlikely to be true

• native speaker of... - someone whose first language, or mother tongue, is...

• campaigning - taking action aimed at achieving a goal

• to preserve its linguistic diversity - to save the great number of languages currently spoken

• to reverse the trend - to make sure people are encouraged to speak rare languages, so those languages can survive

Any thoughts on this?

There are many problems in this world. Is 'disappearing languages' something for us to worry about?

Do you speak a language that is disappearing?

How many of you will not teach your children the mother tongue your parents spoke and used with you?

Is English your second language? Third language? Fourth language?


Comments, thoughts, opinions in the COMMENTS below please.