This week, I repeated the routine from last week. Like in the previous journal period, these two weeks were also reading intensive. My language partner sent me articles again and they were very challenging to understand. However, I was able to completely dissect and analyze the articles after spending some time with them. One of the articles I read was about the confirmation of China's cover-up of death tolls in Wuhan. The Wuhan Municipal government stated that the number of deaths was actually 3,869, which is 1,290 deaths higher than what was originally reported. The city authorities gave a reasonable explanation for the gap in the reported numbers and actual numbers. They stated that many of the patients died at home because the hospitals in Wuhan were completely booked and did not have enough medical personnel to look after new patients. However, citizens are not very accepting of this explanation. They accuse the government of displacing the responsibility to the medical professionals and health care providers rather than taking full responsibility. In addition, Chinese media has reported that the number of urns ordered far exceeds the number of deaths reported. While more investigation is needed, we still cannot completely trust the released reports from the Wuhan municipal government.
I thought that this was an interesting article because it confirmed a suspicion that was going on for some time. I also took a questionnaire like last time, except I had to explain the article and answer questions in conversation format. The conversation aspect was different from the one from the last journal period because it was testing different aspects of my Hangul. I'm glad that I was able to talk about the article through conversation because I was able to practice it. Because of the quarantine, I do not have many opportunities to practice conversation. The questionnaire was challenging, but doable. While I was explaining, I would correctly answer the main idea questions, but misinterpret some of the minor details. I received a decent score with some constructive feedback, which made me not only glad, but also motivated and confident in reading more difficult material.
Another article that I read was about the abrupt decline in oil prices due to lack of demand for gasoline. This lack of demand was caused by government lockdown policies that forced citizens to stay indoors. Earlier this year, the price of each oil barrel was around $60, but now it is around $20. Because of this sudden decrease, OPEC announced that they would cut oil drilling by 9.2 million barrels a day in order to combat the sudden decrease in demand. Experts, however, state that this will not be enough to combat the decline of growth in the oil industry. This was an article that I was interested in because it deals with economic issues. Because I was interested, I was more attentive to the words and the interpretation of the article as a whole. I was able to use context clues to define words such as "petroleum", "economic decline", "slash of production", and etc.
Comments