Author: GpAdmin

Points for and against health warnings are everywhere and their effectiveness.

• The authorities have a statutory duty to inform the public about dangers to health
• It is the responsibility of professionals to alert both the public and government; scientists, researchers and so on
• Irrespective of GDP and profit multinationals have a duty of care
• Dramatic decrease in smoking at least in the developed world
• Growing public concern about sugar intake
• Target groups need to be identified and where addressed effectively things have improved.
• Pregnant women and mothers are more aware
• Why are health warnings not so effective in some places?
• Pricing is more important than anything else
• Danger of people becoming immune to horrific depictions of consequences of addiction
• Resentment of the “nanny state”
• Better to address root causes; stress, poverty etc.
• Confusion as to what is good or bad
• Alternative strategies; use of role models, promotion of sport and exercise, self-help groups, making therapeutic intervention widely available at no cost

Points for how and where we live is as important for our well-being as the genes we were born with

• Various genetic claims
• Gene variants, alleles, affect hair colour and certain disease states
• Height – genetic but also environmental
• The role of birth order
• Grandparents’ experiences can be passed on to later generations – e.g. the experience of hunger
• Genetically innate potential is not always realised … why?
• The obvious danger of “labelling”
• The treatment of those suffering from mental illness may be improved with more understanding of genes
• Questions surrounding personal responsibility and genetic disposition
• The debate around obesity
• The importance of nurture/environmental influences as well as nature
• What the future might hold … e.g. gene adjustment and physical traits
• Understanding of the prenatal environment
• Tackling the various forms of social injustice of how and where we live is at least as important as genetic research

How can the rule of law might be applied in the modern world.

• A definition is required
• Democracies and the rule of law
• United Nations and human rights
• Law and religious belief
• International courts
• Protest and representatives of the law
• The fairness or otherwise of individual laws
• The limits of legislation
• Situations that call into question the legitimacy of legal systems or individual laws
• Dictatorship and the law
• Forms of codification

Points for many of the world’s languages face extinction.

• For historical reasons to prevent loss of heritage
• world’s languages face extinction because oral history can easily be forgotten
• Helps us to evaluate how languages work, not, for example, ‘I am
reading’ but ‘I sit reading’ or ‘I stand reading’
• Education entirely in a dominant language makes it difficult for
speakers of indigenous languages to become literate
• Dual naming develops respect and awareness
• Uniqueness – endangered languages promote community cohesion
• They reflect attitudes to the social and natural worlds
• They are the storehouse of a community’s cultural, intellectual, and
artistic life
• Loss of languages affects us all – we lose ways of seeing the world
• Making physical records is maybe all that linguists can do

Points for and against the claim that clothes we wear express our personality

• Fashion and image
• Cultural identity
• Extrovert/introvert
• Some can easily be forgotten
• Clothes create meaning for us
• They can act as memory prompts
• Gender differences
• Clothes and class
• Objects of beauty and part of our quotidian experience
• Utilitarian functions and social expectation