But, for the purposes of audience question time it’s best to just launch straight into the question. It’s very tempting to give context: context is key, context is great. You’re a conduit for curiosity: use it wisely. Public speaking can be terrifying but in this case it’s not about you, it’s about the person/people on the stage and the insights they are offering. Keeping this in mind can take the pressure off and calm the nerves if you consider that you’re taking one for the team. Remember, chances are that a lot of others in the audience are wondering the same thing you are Be like a kid: find the essence of your query and voice it, directly (and succinctly). They’re direct, they’re curious, they’re fearless. Channel your inner child – don’t overthink itĬhildren are the best at asking questions. Or if you think the chair has missed a trick by not raising a topic… 3. But this number one rule is often eschewed for an obscure thought that may have been lingering in the back of the speaker’s head since high school. Relate your question to what has actually been said on stage And under no circumstances is it both “a statement and a question”. So, with the intention of alleviating stress and bolstering confidence, I’ve rounded up advice – from seasoned festival attendees, interviewers and festival organisers – on how to ask a great and useful audience question. Far from it.Īudience question time at a writers festival can be fraught, it can get ugly and it can get weird: a seemingly eternal 10 minutes of angst and hope and crushing disappointment. But you know the gentleman who wants to talk about Lacan won’t be shy. Questions are tumbling inside your head like clothes in a dryer: Will whoever stands up ask an actual question? Or are they going to start with “this is more of a comment than a question, really”? Will they start on about Sartre or Lacan or some other obscure old fella in a manner wholly unconnected with the conversation we’ve all just heard?Īll of this anxiety overshadows the genuine queries: the ones that probably heaps of people in the audience also have, but are too afraid to ask. Or perhaps a mic on a stand has silently appeared in the aisle just along from where you’re sitting. Out of the corner of your eye you’ve spied volunteers circling the room with microphones in their hands. Using a nuclear weapon to destroy an asteroid may have worked for Bruce Willis, but some experts fear explosives could break an asteroid into fragments that are still large enough to hit Earth, and NASA says asteroids move far too quickly to destroy minutes or hours before crashing into the planet.Books editor and former festival organiser Claire Mabey offers advice on what to do – and perhaps more importantly, what not do to – at audience question time.Īpproximately 50 minutes into a session at the writers festival, you might start to feel a little tense. In particular, a spacecraft could fly alongside an asteroid and use its gravity to gently nudge the rock onto a different trajectory. Johns Hopkins says kinetic impact deflection is the most well-developed known method for diverting asteroids from Earth, but scientists have offered up a few other strategies that could save us from going the way of the dinosaurs. The agency says no known asteroids that are larger than 140 meters-which is large enough to cause mass casualties-pose a significant threat to the planet over the next century, though even a smaller asteroid could cause injuries and destruction. NASA is currently tracking some 1,419 near-earth asteroids that have a nonzero chance of hitting Earth, though in some cases, these asteroids are decades or even a century away from the planet. DART tested a technique known as “kinetic impact deflection,” in which the course of an asteroid is altered through a fast collision with a human-produced object, redirecting it away from the planet. If $330 million seems like a lot to burn on a spacecraft that’s designed to crash into a space rock, NASA and Johns Hopkins say the mission is designed to help prevent potentially catastrophic asteroids from careening toward Earth.
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