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India's luxury airline Vistara flies into the sunset

Indian full-service carrier Vistara will operate its last flight on Monday, after nine years in existence.

A joint venture between Singapore Airlines and the Tata Sons, Vistara will merge with Tata-owned Air India to form a single entity with an expanded network and broader fleet.

This means that all Vistara operations will be transferred to and managed by Air India, including helpdesk kiosks and ticketing offices. The process of migrating passengers with existing Vistara bookings and loyalty programmes to Air India has been under way over thepast few months.

"As part of the merger process, meals, service ware and other soft elements have been upgraded and incorporates aspects of both Vistara and Air India," an Air India spokesperson said in an email response.

Amid concerns that the merger could impact service standards, the Tatas have assured that Vistara's in-flight experience will remain unchanged.

Known for its high ratings in food, service, and cabin quality, Vistara has built a loyal customer base and the decision to retire the Vistara brand has been criticised by fans, branding experts, and aviation analysts.

The consolidation was effectively done to clean up Vistara's books and wipe out its losses, said Mark Martin, an aviation analyst.

Air India has essentially been "suckered into taking a loss-making airline" in a desperate move, he added.

"Mergers are meant to make airlines powerful. Never to wipe out losses or cover them."

To be sure, both Air India and Vistara's annual losses have reduced by more than half over the past year, and other operating metrics have improved too. But the merger process so far has been turbulent.

The exercise has been riddled with problems − from pilot shortages that have led to massive flight cancellations, to Vistara crew going on mass sick leave over plans to align their salary structures with Air India.

There have also been repeated complaints about poor service standards on Air India, including viral videos of broken seats and non-functioning inflight entertainment systems.

The Tatas have announced a $400m (£308m) programme to upgrade and retrofit the interiors of its older aircraft and also a brand-new livery. They've also placed orders for hundreds of new Airbus and Boeing planes worth billions of dollars to augment their offering.

But this "turnaround" is still incomplete and riddled with problems, according to Mr Martin. A merger only complicates matters.

Experts say that the merger strikes a dissonant chord from a branding perspective too.

Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy specialist, told the BBC he was feeling "emotional" that a superior product offering like Vistara which had developed a "gold standard for Indian aviation" was ceasing operations.

"It is a big loss for the industry," said Mr Bijoor, adding it will be a monumental task for the mother brand Air India to simply "copy, paste and exceed" the high standards set by Vistara, given that it's a much smaller airline that's being gobbled up by a much larger one.

Mr Bijoor suggests a better strategy would have been to operate Air India separately for five years, focusing on improving service standards, while maintaining Vistara as a distinct brand with Air India prefixed to it.

"This would have given Air India the time and chance to rectify the mother brand and bring it up to the Vistara level, while maintaining its uniqueness," he adds.

Beyond branding, the merged entity will face a slew of operational challenges.

"Communication will be a major challenge in the early days, with customers arriving at the airport expecting Vistara flights, only to find Air India branding," says Ajay Awtaney, editor of Live From A Lounge, an aviation portal. "Air India will need to maintain clear communication for weeks."

Another key challenge, he notes, is cultural: Vistara's agile employees may struggle to adjust to Air India's complex bureaucracy and systems.

But the biggest task for the merged carrier would be offering customers a uniform flying experience.

These are "two airlines with very different service formats are being integrated into one airline. It is going to be a hotchpotch of service formats, cabin formats, branding, and customer experience. It will involve learning and unlearning, and such a process has rarely worked with airlines and is seldom effective," said Mr Martin.

Still, many believe Vistara had to go − now or some years later.

A legacy brand like Air India, with strong global recognition and 'India' imprinted in its identity, wouldn't have allowed a smaller, more premium subsidiary to overshadow its revival process.

Financially too, it makes little sense for the Tatas to have two loss-making entities compete with one another.

The combined strength of Vistara and Air India could also place the Tatas in a much better position to compete with market leader Indigo.

The unified Air India group (including Air India Express, which completed its merger with the former Air Asia India in October) "will be bigger and better with a fleet size of nearly 300 aircraft, an expanded network and a stronger workforce", an Air India spokesperson said.

"Getting done with the merger means that Air India grows overnight, and the two teams start cooperating instead of competing. There will never be one right day to merge. Somewhere, a line had to be drawn," said Mr Awtaney.

But for many Vistara loyalists, its demise leaves a void in India's skies for a premium, full-service carrier - marking the third such gap after the collapse of Kingfisher Airlines and Jet Airways.

It's still too early to say if Air India, which often ranks at the bottom of airline surveys, can successfully fill that void.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ygp1w5eq7o

TEXT:

Making homework count

By Stephanie Hirschman

October 8, 2024

Homework and independent study can make a massive contribution to students’ progress, particularly when classes don’t meet daily, or students aren’t living, working or studying in anglophone environments. There are several issues to consider when setting homework.

Why students are doing homework is a fundamental question which can cover a wide spectrum of reasons. The most obvious is that it offers both teachers and students a chance to check on learning and identify areas for further review and consolidation. Exam preparation courses make use of homework to consolidate and accelerate learning and deliver results. Finally, some institutions require teachers to set homework and some clients, for example parents, believe that a course with homework offers better value for money.

Whatever the reason behind setting homework, be clear with students about how they’ll benefit from the assignment, how to do it effectively, how long they should spend on it and how it will be marked.

The homework that many people expect from a language course is “more of the same” exercises, that is, those that offer extra opportunities to practice grammar or vocabulary from the lesson.

It is also possible to bring in practice from other online or print sources, but this can sometimes be problematic, especially for lower levels. Make sure that the resource you choose maps onto the lesson content without placing extra demands on students, for example, by introducing a completely different context or topic with unfamiliar vocabulary to practice a grammar point. You also need to make sure that terminology is consistent – students who are expecting to practice present continuous may not recognize that it is also called present progressive. With lower levels, go over the instructions and/or demonstrate one of the exercises so they know how to get started.

It's worth mentioning here that flipped learning may also be a useful approach to homework. This is where students preview part of the lesson plan (like a reading or listening task) or research a general topic independently before class in order to maximize opportunities for communicative activities during the lesson.

Other types of homework include semi-controlled practice of target language. Students could write personal sentences including vocabulary items or grammatical structures from the class – note that they may need training to do this. A sentence like, “The milk went off,” is not as effective for learning as, “We had no milk for the coffee this morning – it went off because we didn’t put it in the fridge last night.” You may wish to provide some question or example prompts as support.

An unusual and motivating type of speaking homework is a personalized bingo game. Students create their own bingo card, which might be a 4x4 grid. In each cell, they write a key word or structure from the lesson that they wish to practice during the next few days. They carry the card around in their pocket, and every time they use an item of target language, they can tick it off, aiming to complete a line. This is especially suitable for students who are living, working or studying in anglophone environments. Teachers can monitor progress regularly and even offer small prizes.

The question of what teachers actually do with homework also has multiple possible responses, which will depend on the teaching context. At one end of the spectrum, if there is good buy-in from the students, teachers may only need to point them towards a selected set of “more of the same” exercises and make sure the answers are accessible for self-checking. Make it clear that you welcome questions if anything isn’t clear and test regularly to check understanding.

Whatever choices you make about homework, here’s one final tip. It’s best to complete assignments the day after receiving them and not on the same day. Research on spaced repetition shows that reviewing information after around 24 hours, “just before you forget it,” is the most effective way to boost retention.

Adapted from: https://www.linguahouse.com/blog/post/makinghomework-count

Acesso em 25/10/2024

TEXT 1

Anxiety has kept 28% of UK children away from school

Many children in the UK are missing school because they feel too anxious, according to a new survey. Research by stem4, a mental health charity for young people, found that 28% of children aged between 12 and 18 had missed school in the last year because of anxiety. The charity is asking the government, the health service and schools to do more to help pupils with their mental health.

More than 1,000 young people were surveyed, and almost half said that they were suffering from a mental health difficulty. Experts say that the problems have gotten worse since the coronavirus pandemic. At the moment, 38%of schools in England have a mental health support team. But the government has said that it wants to increase that to at least 50% by the end of March 2025, as well as training teachers and giving more money to the health service.

However, the survey also found that it is not only mental health that is keeping children away from school. Almost a quarter of children aged between 12 and 18 have missed school because of family problems, while 18% have stayed away because of problems with friends or other pupils. The stress of exams was also given as a reason for missing school.

Nihara Krause, the founder of stem4, said that spending a lot of time away from school can have long-lasting negative effects on children.

Adapted from: https://engoo.com.br/app/daily-news/article/anxiety-has-kept-28- of-uk-children-away-from-school/LY6CWsQ1Ee6_G7_OKvNYDg

Text

Reading skill will help you to improve your understanding of the language and build your vocabulary.

Read the text below carefully.

Social media, magazines and shop windows bombard people daily with things to buy, and British consumers are buying more clothes and shoes than ever before. Online shopping means it is easy for customers to buy without thinking, while major brands offer such cheap clothes that they can be treated like disposable items – worn two or three times and then thrown away

In Britain, the average person spends more than £1,000 on new clothes a year, which is around four per cent of their income. That might not sound like much, but that figure hides two far more worrying trends for society and for the environment. First, a lot of that consumer spending is via credit cards. British people currently owe approximately £670 per adult to credit card companies. That’s 66 per cent of the average wardrobe budget. Also, not only are people spending money they don’t have, they’re using it to buy things they don’t need. Britain throws away 300,000 tons of clothing a year, most of which goes into landfill sites.

People might not realize they are part of the disposable clothing problem because they donate their unwanted clothes to charities. But charity shops can’t sell all those unwanted clothes. Fast fashion goes out of fashion as quickly as it came in and is often too poor quality to recycle; people don’t want to buy it second-hand. Huge quantities end up being thrown away, and a lot of clothes that charities can’t sell are sent abroad, causing even more economic and environmental problems.

However, a different trend is springing up in opposition to consumerism – the ‘buy nothing’ trend. The idea originated in Canada in the early 1990s and then moved to the US, where it became a rejection of the overspending and overconsumption of Black Friday and Cyber Monday during Thanksgiving weekend. On Buy Nothing Day people organize various types of protests and cut up their credit cards. Throughout the year, Buy Nothing groups organize the exchange and repair of items they already own.

The trend has now reached influencers on social media who usually share posts of clothing and make- -up that they recommend for people to buy. Some YouTube stars now encourage their viewers not to buy anything at all for periods as long as a year. Two friends in Canada spent a year working towards buying only food. For the first three months they learned how to live without buying electrical goods, clothes or things for the house. For the next stage, they gave up services, for example haircuts, eating out at restaurants or buying petrol for their cars. In one year, they’d saved $55,000.

The changes they made meant two fewer cars on the roads, a reduction in plastic and paper packaging and a positive impact on the environment from all the energy saved. If everyone followed a similar plan, the results would be impressive. But even if you can’t manage a full year without going shopping, you can participate in the anti-consumerist movement by refusing to buy things you don’t need. Buy Nothing groups send a clear message to companies that people are no longer willing to accept the environmental and human cost of overconsumption.

source: learnenglish.britishcouncil.org

Read Text I and answer question.

Text I: The speed of sound

Some music fans now know 15-second sped up snippets of songs better than the real thing. It’s thanks to an emerging trend on social media, particularly TikTok, of creators changing the tempo of popular songs by 25-30%, to accompany short viral videos of dances or other themes. This phenomenon presents a very modern challenge – how can singers create the next hit tune when the one people actually listen to might sound so different?

Sped-up listening emerged in the early 2000s as “Nightcore”, launched by a Norwegian DJ duo of the same name, who sped up a song’s pitch and speed. This is now commonplace on social media apps, where the speed of podcasts, voice notes, movies and more can be increased so that people can consume them in less time. But what people might not know is that unofficial sped-up or slowed down tunes are different to a professional remix because they are far shorter and can be easily made by anyone, including on TikTok, Instagram Reels and other apps.

In 2023, more than a third of Spotify listeners in the US sped up podcasts and nearly two-thirds played songs at a quicker tempo. The streaming service recently confirmed to the BBC that it was testing a new and more widespread feature that could potentially allow its customers to remix the tempo of songs and share them. In addition, some popstars are embracing this phenomenon. In November 2022, for example, fan-made sped-up versions of RAYE’s single “Escapism” helped the artist to achieve her first ever number one on the UK Official Singles Chart, nearly three months after its original release. Furthermore, Billie Eilish has also released official fast and slow versions of songs and Sabrina Carpenter’s hits “Please Please Please” and “Espresso” received similar treatment.

Dr Mary Beth Ray, an author focused on digital music culture, says short-form video platforms like TikTok “constrain our ways of listening into snippets, but those constraints also let you experience a track in a new way”. She also said that “short clips provide a quicker line to that dopamine rush social media wants us to feel – so there is an addictive element which we’re pushed towards.”

BBC Radio 1 DJ Maia Beth feels it's now getting hard for established labels and musicians to ignore this trend because it can sometimes feel like if they don't release the sped up version, then someone else will. Beth, who admits she can't imagine sitting and listening to a sped-up version of a song the whole way through, believes the trend shouldn't necessarily be a major distraction for musicians though. “Sped-up versions of tracks can help artists break through or go viral, although that initial success may not last,” she added.

TikTok says it has noticed an increase in the number of sped-up and slowed down versions of catalogue tracks taken off the platform, then become officially released. These official changed-tempo releases are now grouped together with the original song in the UK Official Singles Chart, along with remixes, acoustic and live versions, helping artists to climb the ranks.

That said, not everyone is happy with the trend. The popularity of speed-altered versions can make it harder to distinguish original from remix while altering an artist'sintended pacing, mood and tone. However, while some artists like them and others less so, it seems they are here to stay.

Adapted from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqv5x2qe8q6o Published: August 17, 2024

Businesses are starting to introduce new options for tipping at self-checkout machines, putting even more pressure on customers amid rising inflation costs. Despite having zero interaction with employees during transactions, self-checkout machines at places such as coffee shops, bakeries, airports, and sports stadiums are giving customers the option to leave the typical 20% tip, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Business owners believe that the prompt for a tip can boost staff pay and increase gratuities — but customers are questioning where and to whom the extra cash is going, considering self-checkout is done by the customers themselves. “They’re cutting labor costs by doing self-checkout. So what’s the point of asking for a tip? And where is it going?” are some of the questions customers ask. But tipping researchers claim this is a way for companies to put the responsibility of paying employees on the customer rather than increasing employee salaries themselves. Self-tipping is viewed by many customers as a way to guilt-trip the person into tipping on something when they typically wouldn’t.

Many companies told the Journal that these tipping prompts are optional, and the extra gratuity is split between all employees. However, experts say that tips at a self-checkout machine might never even get to an actual employee since protections for tipped workers in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act don’t extend to machines.

Internet: <https://nypost.com> (adapted).

Read text IV to answer question.

TEXT IV

Generation Z News - Latest Characteristics, Research, and Facts

Generation Z (aka Gen Z, iGen, or centennials}, refers to the generation that was born between 1996-2010, following millennials. This generation has been raised on the internet and social media, with some the oldest finishing college by 2020 and entering the workforce. Generation Z is the youngest, most ethnically-diverse, and largest generation in American history, comprising 27% of the US population. Pew Research recently defined Gen Z as anyone born after 1997. Gen Z 1______ up with technology, the internet, and social media, which sometimes causes them to be stereotyped as techaddicted, anti-social, or "social justice warriors." The average Gen Z got their first smart phone just before their twelfth birthday. They communicate primarily through social media and texts, and spend as much time on their phones as older generations do watching television. The majority of Gen Zs prefer streaming services to traditional cable, as well as getting snackable content they can get on their phones and computers. Gen Z is the most ethnically diverse and largest generation in American history, and eclipses all other generations before it in embracing diversity and inclusion.

Adapted from https:/twww.businessinsider.com/generation-z