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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

O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder à questão.

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

Climate change poses significant challenges to cattle farming, a sector vital to global food security. Among the most pressing concerns is the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts. Reduced rainfall diminishes pasture quality and availability, limiting feed for livestock and increasing water scarcity. This can lead to decreased animal growth rates, reduced milk production, and increased mortality rates. Moreover, prolonged droughts can contribute to desertification, shrinking available grazing land and forcing farmers to adopt costly alternative feeding strategies.

Beyond drought, other climate-related impacts include heat stress, which can significantly impact animal health and productivity. Rising temperatures can exacerbate heat stress, leading to decreased feed intake, reduced fertility, and increased mortality in livestock. Furthermore, extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfall and flooding, can cause infrastructure damage, contaminate water sources, and lead to the loss of livestock.

The cattle farming sector itself contributes to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions, primarily methane produced during animal digestion and nitrous oxide from manure management. Deforestation for pasture expansion also releases significant amounts of carbon dioxide.

To address these challenges, a multi-pronged approach is crucial.

• Genetic selection: Breeding programs focused on developing drought-resistant livestock breeds are vital. and heat-tolerant

• Sustainable feeding strategies: Implementing precision feeding techniques, improving feed efficiency, and exploring alternative drought-resistant forage livestock resilience. feed sources, varieties, such as can enhance

• Integrated farming systems: Integrating crop and livestock production, such as through agroforestry systems, can improve soil health, enhance water retention, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

• Technological innovations: Utilizing technologies such as precision livestock farming, remote sensing for pasture monitoring, and renewable energy sources can improve resource efficiency and reduce the environmental footprint of cattle production.

Furthermore, strong policy support, including incentives for sustainable farming practices, investments in research and development, and improved access to climate information services, are essential for the long-term sustainability of the cattle farming sector.

Addressing the challenges posed by climate change requires a collaborative effort involving farmers, researchers, policymakers, and consumers. By embracing innovative solutions, prioritizing sustainable practices, and fostering a collective understanding of the importance of climate-resilient livestock production, we can ensure a future when this vital sector continues to thrive while minimizing its environmental impact.

Internet:<conafer.org.br> (adapted).

INSTRUCTION: Read the following text to answer question.

Communicative Language Teaching

By Judson Wright

Introduction

The teacher as model

In some approaches to teaching English, the teacher’s main role is to pass on knowledge to students through explanations. In Communicative Language Teaching, the role of the teacher is rather different, although providing clear explanations of language points is still an important part of it. First of all, the teacher acts as a model of good communication skills. This involves asking clear questions, providing clear answers, and giving clear instructions to students. The teacher also models active listening skills, which include making eye contact, listening carefully to what people are saying, checking that listeners understand what’s being said, and responding appropriately. It is the teacher who sets the expectation that these and other communication skills, such as taking turns appropriately in a conversation, are the classroom norm.

Classroom interaction

As in many other classrooms, some of the interaction in the CLT classroom consists of the teacher talking to the whole class while the students listen or respond to the teacher’s questions, particularly when the teacher is explaining a language point. However, CLT is based on the idea that in order to improve students’ communication skills, most of the interaction that teachers need to provide for their students should be classroom tasks that require and develop communication skills. In particular, CLT makes use of roleplays, pair work and group work tasks. These forms of interaction provide some important benefits.

One benefit is that students usually find these forms of interaction motivating and engaging. Pair and group work provide opportunities to focus more on fluency and on content than on accuracy, which often means that students are able to speak more freely than when they are asked to respond to direct questions from the teacher in front of the whole class. These interactions provide a safer space to practise communication skills. The teacher has an important part to play here, ensuring that students avoid focusing on form too much during tasks as well as bringing their students’ focus back onto the content of the interaction rather than correcting each other’s English while carrying out the task

Another benefit is a better use of time. When students are divided into pairs or groups and given a task that each pair or group carries out at the same time, it is a far more efficient and effective use of classroom time than other forms of classroom interaction. It means that all students can be engaged and active at the same time, rather than merely listening to other students respond to the teacher’s questions or prompts, which is a typical interaction in some classrooms. Through pair and group work, each individual student spends far more time using English and practising their communication skills.

Meaningful communication

In order for the interactions to be effective, we need to ensure that successfully completing a task depends on meaningful communication. In other words, each pair and group work task are designed so that there is a real purpose for the interaction, mirroring communicative interactions in the real world. This real purpose might involve a student communicating something about their own life which another student doesn’t know, such as information about their family, or their own opinions on a subject. It might also involve creating an information gap between the students which requires the use of different communication skills. Let’s consider a couple of examples at different levels of English ability that illustrate the idea of meaningful communication.

Imagine a teacher is working with students at an elementary level of English who are learning or practising the names of colours. The teacher produces sheets of paper with perhaps four or five coloured circles on them. Most sheets are different from each other, but each sheet has at least one other that matches it exactly. Each student receives a sheet and is asked not to let other people see their sheet. The task is for each student to find another student whose sheet exactly matches their own. Armed with a simple structure, such as Do you have a … circle?, students mingle around the classroom, asking and answering each other’s questions, until they have each found a matching partner. This type of task can be easily adapted to focus on shapes, body parts, and a range of other lexical sets. Contrast this with a situation where a teacher indicates different objects that the whole class can see and asks questions such as What colour is this? and expects students to respond with the correct colour. In that case, no meaningful communication takes place since all students already know the answer.

[…]

Assessment and correction

During the task, the students’ focus should be on achieving the communicative aim, whether that’s finding someone in the class with matching information, reconstructing a text, or successfully completing a roleplay. The teacher’s role is to employ ongoing informal assessment by monitoring the interactions and making sure that each pair and group stays on task and does not get distracted by trying to correct each other’s use of language. It’s worth making the importance of completing the task explicit at the start of any communicative task. As teachers monitor the students, they should make a note of any errors that they want to focus on after the activity. This is usually most effective when the teacher selects errors that more than one student makes since focusing on these is likely to be of use to more students. While the teacher may choose to ignore most other errors, it is sometimes worth using ‘hot correction’ with individual students. With hot correction, the teacher quickly makes a note of the correct form on a slip of paper and simply places it on the table in front of the student, without interrupting the interaction.

Conclusion

Communicative Language Teaching prepares students for communicative demands outside the classroom using techniques that develop communication skills. In its pure form, some teachers may feel that there is not enough focus on accuracy and language structure to meet their needs and the needs of their students. However, introducing elements of the approach into your classroom and reconsidering your role as a teacher and the types of tasks you ask your students to take part in will motivate and engage your students while developing their communication skills.

Available at: https://www.onestopenglish.com/methodology-theworld-of-elt/communicative-language-teaching/1000116.article. Accessed on: Jan 23rd, 2024.

READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER THE QUESTION:

Chatbots could be used to steal data, says cybersecurity agency

The UK’s cybersecurity agency has warned that there is an increasing risk that chatbots could be manipulated by hackers.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said that individuals could manipulate the prompts of chatbots, which run on artificial intelligence by creating a language model and give answers to questions by users, through “prompt injection” attacks that would make them behave in an unintended manner.

The point of a chatbot is to mimic human-like conversations, which it has been trained to do through scraping large amounts of data. Commonly used in online banking or online shopping, chatbots are generally designed to handle simple requests.

Large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI chatbot Bard, are trained using data that generates human-like responses to user prompts. Since chatbots are used to pass data to third-party applications and services, the NCSC has said that risks from malicious “prompt injection” will grow.

For instance, if a user inputs a statement or question that a language model is not familiar with, or if they find a combination of words to override the model’s original script or prompts, the user can cause the model to perform unintended actions.

Such inputs could cause a chatbot to generate offensive content or reveal confidential information in a system that accepts unchecked input.

According to the NCSC, prompt injection attacks can also cause real world consequences, if systems are not designed with security. The vulnerability of chatbots and the ease with which prompts can be manipulated could cause attacks, scams and data theft. The large language models are increasingly used to pass data to third-party applications and services, meaning the risks from malicious prompt injection will grow.

The NCSC said: “Prompt injection and data poisoning attacks can be extremely difficult to detect and mitigate. However, no model exists in isolation, so what we can do is design the whole system with security in mind.”

The NCSC said that cyber-attacks caused by artificial intelligence and machine learning that leaves systems vulnerable can be mitigated through designing for security and understanding the attack techniques that exploit “inherent vulnerabilities” in machine learning algorithm.

Adapted from: The Guardian, Wednesday 30 August 2023, page 4.