walks off, returning two minutes later with four empty 1.5 litre PET bottles in a big bag and fills them. The lady I nearly embarrassed is by now even more embarrassed by the inability to multiply CHF 1.20 by anything – she has had time to fill at least twelve bottles. She sees that the boy’s bottles are 1.5 litre ones. “Four times one-and-a-half?” The question goes back and forth. Says I: “Six.” “Six times 1.20?” “Seven francs twenty,” is my contribution. They stare at me as if I were a combination of Einstein and a dead mouse, pay something into the box and go their separate ways. At this moment Mihailovic decides the day’s pressing is done and washes the machine and the floor with a powerful jet of water, which threatens to form a Red Sea between me and undisputed possession of 15 bottles of juice and
my apple box. Wishing I had Moses’ staff to part the waters, I put both hands under the rim of the crate of bottles and drag it across the cobbles to my side of the flood, past all the parked cars and behind a pile of boxes of apples. My back hurts, so I perch on my box, bolt upright with my back against the apples boxes.
ers were lit, and the water got warmer. When it’s as warm as you are (he said), that’s 40° C. If you can rest your hand on the glass but it’s hot, it’s 50°. Three seconds without pain, 60°. One second and ouch! – it’s 70°. I can still do it. So one minute later we have our apple juice pasteurized, re-bottle it, and the saga is ended.
Probably half an hour later my wife returns in the car. I press a five-franc coin into the farmer’s hand and we return home. We now have only one problem: how do you pasteurize apple juice without a thermometer that goes up to 70° C?
William Tell had a more direct and less time-consuming way with apples. But then, he only had to face Gessler and swim across the Lake of Lucerne!
Luckily I once had a physics teacher who, in a last desperate attempt to get the concept of “temperature” into the airy heads of a class of 11-year-olds, placed a beaker of water over a Bunsen burner in front of each of us. The burn-
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Howard Green Yorkshire born, biologist by training and profession, grandfather, naturalist and a few other things by conviction and interest. 45 odd years in Switzerland, long retired.
Bilingual Immersion – International Perspective Winner of the ISMTF Middle School Maths Competition 2011 History of excellence in the International Schools’ Assessment (ISA)
− Kindergarten, Primary, Pre-College, College − International General Certificate of
Secondary Education (IGCSE) − International Baccalaureate Diploma
Programme − Bilingual classes (English, German)
SIS Swiss International School Erlenstrasse 15 CH – 4058 Basel Tel. +41 (0)61 683 71 40 info@sis-basel.ch www.swissinternationalschool.ch Eine Schule der Kalaidos Bildungsgruppe
SWITZERLAND
benchmarking exams