ONLINE Tutors are excellent EFL/ESL teachers from around the world! They can be your private English tutor right on your computer! To send an email message to an ONLINE Tutor, just click on the name and write a short message to introduce yourself!

A I Astrid Manyana (F 46) Chile
Special offer for Spanish speakers: bilingual teaching of English grammar and explanations in Spanish. 25 years’ experience teaching all levels from age 15 to 55. Basics, oral, written, specific interests [eg: tourism] and preparation for Cambridge and IE0S exams. I can make speaking English easy for you!

B John Bennett-Smfth (M 27) Canada
I have been teaching English conversation as a volunteer in a language centre in my city for about one year. I have also been using e-mail. ICQ and NetMeeting to teach grammar, composition and conversation over the Internet to about 20 or so students for about the same length of time. I am willing to teach (free of charge), privately or to groups, and to teach those language skills which are of interest to a paticular student.

C Pamela Arrowsmltfi (F 56) Australia
I have taught English for over 30 years, and have developed a range of classroom materials. I offer tutoring assistance in all areas of English, with an emphasis on Business Writing for EFL adults. I can arrange trips to Australia for business and professional adults, either individuals or groups [maximum of four adults] and these can include English classes. If desired.

D Jean-Ptorre JoyaJ (M 22) France
I really like to create new kinds of teaching materials and I usually create my own activities instead of using the same Kind of exercises and texts we all are used to. Let’s try that in our classes – it will be fun! I have a BA and a Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language and I have been teaching all levels of ESL student for more than 3 years. I offer a complimentary assessment of your skill level.

E Naoe Nagayo (F 36) Japan
I have taught English as a Foreign Language for 6 years. I have a TEFL certificate from the USA and a MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham, UK. My students range from pre-schoolers to adults. With my experience and knowledge, I can help you to target your learning difficulties and Improve your English ability!

Read the information about recycling and answer Questions 8-14.

NO-WASTE RECYCLING GUIDE

No-Waste is a goal and a process that involves individuals, communities, businesses and all levels of government. It leads to a future where trash is a thing of the past. Solid waste isn’t hidden or buried in landfills but fully utilised as the valuable resource that it is. Through redesign, reduction, reuse, repair, recycling, composting and changes in attitude, we aim to create opportunity and wealth instead of garbage.

Introduction

Hotel management provides exciting career opportunities in the dynamic hospitality and tourism industry. Indeed, tourism is the world’s fastest growing industry. Recent figures show tourism enjoying a growth rate 23% higher than that of the global economy, employing some 212 million and earning in the region of $ US 3.4 trillion per annum.

In a year from now, employment figures are predicted to exceed 338 million, with revenue above SUS7.2 trillion. The vast majority of new jobs will be in the Asia-Pacific region, which by the year 2010 will attract 1 in every 5 of the world’s holidaymakers. The employment prospects for the International College of Hospitality Management’s graduates are exciting.

The International College of Hospitality Management

The International College of Hospitality Management provides diploma and degree level hotel management training for the international hospitality and tourism industry. Established in 1993, the International College of Hospitality Management is the Asia-Pacific Basin campus cf the renowned European Hotel Association. It also incorporates the classical French cooking training of Le Gourmet, Paris.

International Hotel Management Diploma

The International College of Hospitality Management course is industry-oriented, balancing operative, supervisory and management level training. The Diploma course is 3 years full time. Semesters 1, 3 and 5 are spent studying on campus, and Semesters 2, 4 and 6 are spent in industry on undergraduate placements, called ‘stages’. One stage may be taken up with language studies.

Bachelor of Business (Hotel Management) Degree

Students who graduate with the International Hotel Management Diploma are assured of a further year of Degree Study at the University of the Antipodes. Studies will focus on such areas as: Global Marketing, Strategic Management, Total Quality Management, Cross-Cultural Communications, Developing Organisations and Management of Change, Global Development in Hospitality and Tourism, Intercultural Relations. Under certain circumstances the final year of study can be conducted on a part-time basis and by distance education mode, enabling students to study while maintaining a full-time career in the hospitality industry, either here or in their home country.

Read the passage below and answer Questions 19-23.

Look at the passage below and answer Questions 24-27 on the previous page.

INTERNATIONAL HOTEL
MANAGEMENT DIPLOMA

Short Courses

A

B

C

D

Not long ago, if you were a young, brash technologist with a world-conquering start-up idea, there was a good chance you spent much of your waking life working toward a single business milestone: taking your company public.

  Though luminaries of the tech industry have always expressed skepticism and even hostility toward the finance industry, tech’s dirty secret was that it looked to Wall Street and the ritual of a public offering for affirmation — not to mention wealth.

  But something strange has happened in the last couple of years: The initial public offering of stock has become déclassé. For start-up entrepreneurs and their employees across Silicon Valley, an initial public offering is no longer a main goal. Instead, many founders talk about going public as a necessary evil to be postponed as long as possible because it comes with more problems than benefits.

  “If you can get $200 million from private sources, then yeah, I don’t want my company under the scrutiny of the unwashed masses who don’t understand my business,” said Danielle Morrill, the chief executive of Mattermark, a start-up that organizes and sells information about the start-up market. “That’s actually terrifying to me.

  Silicon Valley’s sudden distaste for the I.P.O. — rooted in part in Wall Street’s skepticism of new tech stocks — may be the single most important psychological shift underlying the current tech boom. Staying private affords start-up executives the luxury of not worrying what outsiders think and helps them avoid the quarterly earnings treadmill.

  It also means Wall Street is doing what it failed to do in the last tech boom: using traditional metrics like growth and profitability to price companies. Investors have been tough on Twitter, for example, because its user growth has slowed. They have been tough on Box, the cloud-storage company that went public last year, because it remains unprofitable. And the e-commerce company Zulily, which went public last year, was likewise punished when it cut its guidance for future sales.

  Scott Kupor, the managing partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and his colleagues said in a recent report that despite all the attention start-ups have received in recent years, tech stocks are not seeing unusually high valuations. In fact, their share of the overall market has remained stable for 14 years, and far off the peak of the late 1990s.

  That unwillingness to cut much slack to young tech companies limits risk for regular investors. If the bubble pops, the unwashed masses, if that’s what we are, aren’t as likely to get washed out.

  Private investors, on the other hand, are making big bets on so-called unicorns — the Silicon Valley jargon for start-up companies valued at more than a billion dollars. If many of those unicorns flop, most Americans will escape unharmed, because losses will be confined to venture capitalists and hedge funds that have begun to buy into tech start-ups, as well as tech founders and their employees.

  The reluctance — and sometimes inability — to go public is spurring the unicorns. By relying on private investors for a longer period of time, start-ups get more runway to figure out sustainable business models. To delay their entrance into the public markets, firms like Airbnb, Dropbox, Palantir, Pinterest, Uber and several other large start-ups are raising hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions, that they would otherwise have gained through an initial public offering.

  “These companies are going public, just in the private market,” Dan Levitan, the managing partner of the venture capital firm Maveron, told me recently. He means that in many cases, hedge funds and other global investors that would have bought shares in these firms after an I.P.O. are deciding to go into late-stage private rounds. There is even an oxymoronic term for the act of obtaining private money in place of a public offering: It’s called a “private I.P.O.”

  The delay in I.P.O.s has altered how some venture capital firms do business. Rather than waiting for an initial offering, Maveron, for instance, says it now sells its stake in a start-up to other, larger private investors once it has made about 100 times its initial investment. It is the sort of return that once was only possible after an I.P.O.

  But there is also a downside to the new aversion to initial offerings. When the unicorns do eventually go public and begin to soar — or whatever it is that fantastical horned beasts tend to do when they’re healthy — the biggest winners will be the private investors that are now bearing most of the risk.

  It used to be that public investors who got in on the ground floor of an initial offering could earn historic gains. If you invested $1,000 in Amazon at its I.P.O. in 1997, you would now have nearly $250,000. If you had invested $1,000 in Microsoft in 1986, you would have close to half a million. Public investors today are unlikely to get anywhere near such gains from tech I.P.O.s. By the time tech companies come to the market, the biggest gains have already been extracted by private backers.

  Just 53 technology companies went public in 2014, which is around the median since 1980, but far fewer than during the boom of the late 1990s and 2000, when hundreds of tech companies went public annually, according to statistics maintained by Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida. Today’s companies are also waiting longer. In 2014, the typical tech company hitting the markets was 11 years old, compared with a median age of seven years for tech I.P.O.s since 1980.

  Over the last few weeks, I’ve asked several founders and investors why they’re waiting; few were willing to speak on the record about their own companies, but their answers all amounted to “What’s the point?”

  Initial public offerings were also ways to compensate employees and founders who owned lots of stock, but there are now novel mechanisms — such as selling shares on a secondary market — for insiders to cash in on some of their shares in private companies. Still, some observers cautioned that the new trend may be a bad deal for employees who aren’t given much information about the company’s performance.

  “One thing employees may be confused about is when companies tell them, ‘We’re basically doing a private I.P.O.,’ it might make them feel like there’s less risk than there really is,” said Ms. Morrill of Mattermark. But she said it was hard to persuade people that their paper gains may never materialize. “The Kool-Aid is really strong,” she said.

  If the delay in I.P.O.s becomes a normal condition for Silicon Valley, some observers say tech companies may need to consider new forms of compensation for workers. “We probably need to fundamentally rethink how do private companies compensate employees, because that’s going to be an issue,” said Mr. Kupor, of Andreessen Horowitz.

  During a recent presentation for Andreessen Horowitz’s limited partners — the institutions that give money to the venture firm — Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder, told the journalist Dan Primack that he had never seen a sharper divergence in how investors treat public- and private-company chief executives. “They tell the public C.E.O., ‘Give us the money back this quarter,’ and they tell the private C.E.O., ‘No problem, go for 10 years,’ ” Mr. Andreessen said.

  At some point this tension will be resolved. “Private valuations will not forever be higher than public valuations,” said Mr. Levitan, of Maveron. “So the question is, Will private markets capitulate and go down or will public markets go up?”

  If the private investors are wrong, employees, founders and a lot of hedge funds could be in for a reckoning. But if they’re right, it will be you and me wearing the frown — the public investors who missed out on the next big thing.