In the lecture, the professor talks about the moral suasion, which means trying to get people to stop polluting the environment by appealing to their moral duties. He then uses two examples to better illustrate this. The first example is the “Smokey the Bear” campaign. A character dressed up like a foreign stranger always says “please don’t hurt my animal friends” or “please don’t start a forest fire”. Since this bear looks a little bit childish and cute, people then won’t do harm to the environment because it reminds them of environmental issues and that they should do the right thing to protect the environment. The second example is recycling. The community first promoted voluntary efforts and increased people’s awareness to reduce the amount of the garbage which could be recycled. And then they provided people with containers where they could put their glass and newspaper. At first, a part of people started doing this. Little by little, others followed the herd. And now all the people recycle garbage voluntarily. In short, with these two examples, the professor explains what is meant by moral suasion.

The woman in the conversation planned to take a Russian course online this summer, but the problem is that this course was cancelled since not enough people sign up for the course. And she is required to take a language course in order to graduate next year. The man suggests her to take a Russian class on campus, but the woman wants to be with her family this summer and she hasn’t seen her sister for a year. Another option is that she could take another language course online, a Spanish course. But the woman is not that interested in Spanish. If I were her, I would choose the latter option. Although it seems to be a little boring to learn Spanish, she can fulfill the needs for graduation and have more time to be with her family. And maybe, she may find it is more interested than expected to learn Spanish.