4.11 Answers to Self-teaching questions


QUESTION 1:
Below are the first few paragraphs of three articles. Decide whether each one of them is a news story, a feature story, a narrative, an investigative report, an interview, an editorial, a blog, or a combination of more than one type of science writing:
  1. Article 1 [ http://www.wfsj.org/course/en/L4/L4Stq-Article01.html ]
  2. Article 2 [ http://www.wfsj.org/course/en/L4/L4Stq-Article02.html ]
  3. Article 3 [ http://www.wfsj.org/course/en/L4/L4Stq-Article03.html ]
Answers:
  1. News.
  2. Editorial.
  3. Feature.
QUESTION 2:
Find creative ways to rewrite some of the terms in the following sentences. For your convenience, terms that might be difficult for the general public have been highlighted in bold:
  1. "Steve Linscombe still isn't quite sure how it happened. The director of the Louisiana State University AgCenter for Rice Research knows that he grew a few lines of transgenic rice in field trials between 2001 and 2003. He also knows that one of those lines, LLRICE601, was grown on less than one acre. What he is not clear on is how the line then wended its way into the food supply. That little mystery is now the subject of an official investigation and a class-action lawsuit."
  2. "There are drugs to treat this early chronic stage, but the parasite also causes a process similar to autoimmunity against which the drugs are not effective."
  3. The development of drug resistance in the parasite that causes river blindness could lead to outbreaks in communities where it has been under control, according to research published last week (16 June) in The Lancet.
  4. Materials scientists from Oxford and Nottingham universities performed chemical reactions inside nanotubes.
Answers:
The following answers may be worded a little differently from your own:
  1. Transgenic plants posses one or more genes that have been transferred to them in the laboratory from other species with the aim at producing plants with special characteristics.
  2. Autoimmunity is a condition where antibodies produced by the patient's own immune system against the parasite begin to attack the body's own tissues.
  3. River blindness (onchocerciasis) is caused by a parasitic worm, Onchocerca volvulus, and is transmitted by black flies breeding along fast-flowing streams. It causes blindness and skin disease in sub-Saharan Africa and some tropical regions of the Americas. Around 37 million people worldwide may be infected.
  4. Nanotubes are tiny tubes of carbon atoms that are essentially sheets of graphite an atom thick and that are folded back on themselves to form cylinders.
QUESTION 3:
Read the following sentences and think of ways to bring the numbers closer to home for your readers:
  1. Patients who inhaled radioactive ultrafine carbon particles displayed traces of it in their bloodstream not long afterwards. These very small pieces of matter are called nanoparticles, defined as anything smaller than 100 nanometres in size.
  2. Chajnantor has been chosen as the site for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (Alma), a major telescope array that aims to illuminate one half of the Universe that has hitherto been shrouded in darkness. It lies at an altitude of 5,300 metres.
  3. An ongoing survey of the heavens has spotted the most distant, and therefore earliest, giant black hole in the universe. The object, a quasar given the catchy name CFHQS J2329-0301, was found with three other extremely distant quasars in the Canada-France High-z Quasar Survey. CFHQS J2329-0301 is about 13 billion light-years away, say the scientists.
Answers:
A number of answers are possible including the following:
  1. A nanometre is one-billionth of a metre, 80,000 times smaller than a human hair.
  2. The location of the telescope is at about half the cruising altitude of a 747.
  3. The light from the quasar has traveled 13 billion years to reach Earth.
QUESTION 4:
With each of the following three news stories, determine what type of news story each is, list which elements of newsworthiness they have, and what categories of news sources were used.

News story Type of news story Elements of newsworthiness Categories of news sources
'Better and cheaper' typhoid treatment found
[ http://www.scidev.net/content/news/eng/better-and-cheaper-typhoid-treatment-found.cfm ] 		Spot news Self-interest Human interest Timeliness Change Impact on our lives Journal Researcher 2 government officials
Science journalists 'need code of ethics'
[ http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=readnews&itemid=3561&language=1 ] 		People talking Prominence (of conference) Timeliness Self-interest (for science journalists) Experts only
Apple's iPhone makes it to stores
[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6250192.stm ] 		Spot news and follow-up Prominence Timeliness Self-interest Human interest Change Impact on our lives Drama Institution (Apple) People involved


QUESTION 5:
What kinds of leads were used in the following three articles?

Article Type of lead
Beauty with a purpose
[ http://www.islamonline.net/English/Science/2004/05/article05.shtml ]		 Proverb lead
Fish farming saves Kenya's wetlands
[ http://www.islamonline.net/English/Science/Nature/Ecology/2006/07/03.shtml ] 		Descriptive lead
Sorting out the junk: Email in a data-congested world
[ http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1168265723518&pagename=Zone-English-HealthScience%2FHSELayout ] 		Question lead



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