Part 3: A Project on Mushroom Foraging
You will hear two environmental science students, Amira and Callum, discussing their project on wild mushroom foraging with their tutor.
Lời thoại bài nghe (transcript)
Dr Whitlow: Come in, both of you. So, I've read the draft of your project on mushroom foraging in Ashcombe Wood. Before we go through it, remind me why you chose this topic.
Callum: Well, everyone assumes it's because my grandfather has been picking mushrooms there for fifty years, and he did help us find some of the sites.
Amira: But that wasn't really the reason. When we looked for previous studies, we found hardly anything on how much is collected from woods like Ashcombe, so we felt we could actually contribute something new.
Dr Whitlow: Good, that's a much stronger justification. Now, your questionnaire. How did that go?
Amira: Better than we expected in terms of numbers. We had over ninety responses online. The first version was far too long, but we cut it down to twelve questions after the pilot, and that solved the problem.
Callum: The real difficulty was that when we asked where people found their mushrooms, most of them simply refused to say. Foragers are very protective of their best spots, apparently.
Dr Whitlow: That's quite common in this kind of research. You'll need to mention it as a limitation. What about the results? Anything that surprised you?
Callum: We'd assumed foraging was mainly something older people did, but almost sixty per cent of our respondents were under thirty-five. A lot of them said they'd got into it through social media.
Amira: We also thought identification might be a problem, that people would struggle to tell edible species from poisonous ones. But almost all of them recognised the dangerous species in our photo test, which is more or less what we'd predicted.
Dr Whitlow: Interesting. Speaking of photographs, I've looked at the ones in your draft. They're good quality and I'd certainly keep them, but at the moment a reader has no idea how big the mushrooms are or when the pictures were taken. Add a scale and a date to each label.
Amira: OK, that's easy enough to do.
Dr Whitlow: Now, let's go through the report section by section. The introduction?
Callum: I thought it was fine, but reading it again, it takes a page and a half to get to the point.
Dr Whitlow: Yes, I'd cut it down to half a page.
Amira: Right. Then the methods section. Should we take some of that out as well?
Dr Whitlow: No, quite the opposite. You don't say how you recruited people for the survey or how many you approached. That needs expanding.
Callum: And the interview quotations? We've got about four pages of them.
Dr Whitlow: They're useful evidence, but they interrupt the flow. Keep two or three short ones in the main text and put the full versions in an appendix.
Amira: What about the map of the collection sites? I wondered whether to drop it altogether, since people wouldn't tell us exact locations.
Dr Whitlow: I wouldn't remove it. But it's rather lost on a page by itself. It would work better if you merged it with your description of the woodland, so readers can see the habitats and the map together.
Callum: OK. And finally, the recommendations.
Dr Whitlow: The content is fine, but the style is very chatty. 'People really ought to relax about picking a few mushrooms' isn't how a report should sound. Rewrite it in a more academic tone.
Callum: Fair enough. That was my sentence!
Dr Whitlow: So, what's your next step?
Amira: We'd thought about running the survey again in the autumn, when more people are out foraging, but the deadline doesn't allow that.
Callum: And we've already read quite a lot about the rules on picking in public woods. So instead we've arranged to interview one of the rangers who manages Ashcombe Wood next week, to get the landowner's point of view.
Dr Whitlow: Excellent. That should balance the report nicely.
