Assignment—Commanding Heights
PBS has produced a six--hour documentary about "The Battle for the World Economy". This website offers an excellent introduction to the central economic issues (if not the central economic issue) facing the world today. Without this background knowledge it might be more difficult to understand the reading and listening parts or to write the essay part of the final, Unicert III exam given at the end of this semester. Furthermore, the background knowledge given is essential to to those who would like to consider themselves as being "educated".
That should be enough incentive to make you want to listen to the entire series on your own. Since however many of you might not think that incentive-based motivational schemes are fair, I've decided to add an element of coercion (necessary for Soziale Gerechtigkeit).
For the next lesson, listen to the first fifteen chapters of Episode one of the series (about an hour and a half ). For each chapter write by hand a short two or three sentence summary.
To find these chapters please link to the following web address, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/ Then click on "Storyline", and then on "watch episode one".