1.

Local environment
Pollution: causes & solutions
Causes:
A. Industrial activities (factories) => CO2 emissions => Greenhouse effects
B. Transportation (vehicles)
C. Deforestation => greenhouse effect => global warming
D. Littering randomly/ without awareness => dirty environment => Pollute soil and
rivers => badly affect the habitats of local animals and the health of inhabitants.
E. Poaching wild animals => wild animal extinction => ecological imbalance
Solutions:
A. Governments enact strict laws on protecting the environment (limit the carbon
footprint exhausted from factories, punishment on poaching)
B. Afforestation (People + subsidy from Government)
C. Schools: educate and raise awareness of students as well as local people on how to
keep the env clean.
What are the causes of air/soil/water pollution? Suggest some solutions?
Protecting the environment should be the responsibility of the government or of
the people? Give your explanation.

2. City life
City or country, where would you prefer to live?
Pros and cons of city life?
Major problems of city life? Solutions to those problems
Problems: noise, pollution, traffic jam, accommodation (expensive, inadequate)
Benefits: employment (easier to find, higher paid jobs), better entertainment,
better education
Solutions for city life: encourage public transport, provide more affordable
accommodation for people (apartments in building blocks)
3. Teen stress and pressure
Causes & solutions to teen stress and pressure
Causes: schooling (grades, academic performance); parents’ over-expectation;
competiveness in modern society (peer competition); lack of soft skills to deal with
problems in life (spend too much time in class instead of in the society + technology
=> communication, empathy reduced)
Solutions:
Provide soft skills courses to upgrade their life skills (problem solving, time
management, critical thinking) – What soft skills do teenagers need in the modern
time?
 Alleviate the curriculum by omitting unnecessary subjects. (Why? Result?
Example)
Engage more interest from parents to their teenagers. => understand and relieve
the pressure on their children
4. Life in the past
How many changes have been brought to life since the advent of the
Internet/computer?
It is a truism that computing continues to change our world. It shapes how objects are
designed, what information we receive, how and where we work, and who we meet and
do business with. And computing changes our understanding of the world around us and
the universe beyond.
For example, while computers were initially used in weather forecasting as no more
than an efficient way to assemble observations and do calculations, today our
understanding of weather is almost entirely mediated by computational models.
Another example is biology. Where once research was done entirely in the lab (or in the
wild) and then captured in a model, it often now begins in a predictive model, which
then determines what might be explored in the real world.
The transformation that is due to computation is often described as digital disruption.
But an aspect of this transformation that can easily be overlooked is that computing has
been disrupting itself.
Evolution and revolution
Each wave of new computational technology has tended to lead to new kinds of
systems, new ways of creating tools, new forms of data, and so on, which have often
overturned their predecessors. What has seemed to be evolution is, in some ways, a
series of revolutions.
But the development of computing technologies is more than a chain of innovation – a
process that’s been a hallmark of the physical technologies that shape our world.
For example, there is a chain of inspiration from waterwheel, to steam engine, to
internal combustion engine. Underlying this is a process of enablement. The industry of
steam engine construction yielded the skills, materials and tools used in construction of
the first internal combustion engines.
In computing, something richer is happening where new technologies emerge, not only
by replacing predecessors, but also by enveloping them. Computing is creating
platforms on which it reinvents itself, reaching up to the next platform.
Getting connected
Arguably, the most dramatic of these innovations is the web. During the 1970s and
1980s, there were independent advances in the availability of cheap, fast computing, of
affordable disk storage and of networking.
Compute and storage were taken up in personal computers, which at that stage were
standalone, used almost entirely for gaming and word processing. At the same time,
networking technologies became pervasive in university computer science departments,
where they enabled, for the first time, the collaborative development of software.
This was the emergence of a culture of open-source development, in which widely
spread communities not only used common operating systems, programming languages
and tools, but collaboratively contributed to them.
As networks spread, tools developed in one place could be rapidly promoted, shared
and deployed elsewhere. This dramatically changed the notion of software ownership,
of how software was designed and created, and of who controlled the environments we
use.
The networks themselves became more uniform and interlinked, creating the global
internet, a digital traffic infrastructure. Increases in computing power meant there was
spare capacity for providing services remotely.
The falling cost of disk meant that system administrators could set aside storage to host
repositories that could be accessed globally. The internet was thus used not just for
email and chat forums (known then as news groups) but, increasingly, as an exchange
mechanism for data and code.
This was in strong contrast to the systems used in business at that time, which were
customised, isolated, and rigid.
With hindsight, the confluence of networking, compute and storage at the start of the
1990s, coupled with the open-source culture of sharing, seems almost miraculous. An
environment ready for something remarkable, but without even a hint of what that thing
might be.
The ‘superhighway’
It was to enhance this environment that then US Vice President Al Gore proposed in
1992 the “information superhighway”, before any major commercial or social uses of
the internet had appeared.
Meanwhile, in 1990, researchers at CERN, including Tim Berners-Lee, created a
system for storing documents and publishing them to the internet, which they called
the world wide web.
As knowledge of this system spread on the internet (transmitted by the new model of
open-source software systems), people began using it via increasingly sophisticated
browsers. They also began to write documents specifically for online publication – that
is, web pages.
As web pages became interactive and resources moved online, the web became a
platform that has transformed society. But it also transformed computing.
With the emergence of the web came the decline of the importance of the standalone
computer, dependent on local storage.
We all connect
 The value of these systems is due to another confluence: the arrival on the web of vast
numbers of users. For example, without behaviours to learn from, search engines would
not work well, so human actions have become part of the system.
There are (contentious) narratives of ever-improving technology, but also an entirely
unarguable narrative of computing itself being transformed by becoming so deeply
embedded in our daily lives.
This is, in many ways, the essence of big data. Computing is being fed by human data
streams: traffic data, airline trips, banking transactions, social media and so on.
The challenges of the discipline have been dramatically changed by this data, and also
by the fact that the products of the data (such as traffic control and targeted marketing)
have immediate impacts on people.
Software that runs robustly on a single computer is very different from that with a high
degree of rapid interaction with the human world, giving rise to needs for new kinds of
technologies and experts, in ways not evenly remotely anticipated by the researchers
who created the technologies that led to this transformation.
Decisions that were once made by hand-coded algorithms are now made entirely by
learning from data. Whole fields of study may become obsolete.
The discipline does indeed disrupt itself. And as the next wave of technology arrives
(immersive environments? digital implants? aware homes?), it will happen again.
Compare life in the past and in the modern day.
If you lived in the old days, what would you do when you had no electricity?
5. Wonders in Vietnam
List some of the wonders in Vietnam that you think the world know.
What should you, as a student, do to protect the wonders of Vietnam from being
overused or damaged?
What are the tourist attractions in Quangtri province?
https://www.travalour.com/destination/1396-qu-ng-tr-province
6. Vietnam, then and now
What are the biggest changes that Vietnam has achieved in the past 20 years?
What changes would Vietnam expect in the next 20 years?
Compare Vietnam in 1975 and VN in 2021?