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Answer key
have qualifications or a particular skill. 
If you don’t have these, it’s crucial to 
consider what sort of impact you can have 
as a volunteer. It’s also important to bear 
in mind that there are age requirements in 
certain countries. 
 
My first volunteer experience was at a 
safari park in Thailand. It was rescue work 
taking care of birds that had been injured. 
Besides learning a lot about the bird’s 
names and habits as well as all the various 
diseases they get, I also got to know more 
about wild cats, as there was a section of 
the park dedicated to them. 
 
Teamwork’s vital for all projects, and 
working on the project taught me an 
invaluable amount about this. I really 
developed my abilities in that respect. 
I guess it was the biggest takeaway 
thing for me.
 
Basically, when you volunteer you’re there 
to get involved, and you’ll have a lot of 
fun doing that. You might also pick up 
odd things like how to make a fire without 
matches, or how to build a hut with the 
most basic equipment. I’d built one before 
back home with my dad using screws 
and nails, so it was a real eye-opener for 
me when I was instructed in how to make 
one stay up using just string to keep it 
together. Volunteer work’s as tiring as any 
job, but it can turn out to be a thoroughly 
enlightening experience. 
 
With so many organisations offering 
volunteering placements abroad, it’s not 
easy to determine which project might be 
the most ethical, sustainable, or beneficial. 
Generally speaking, the longer you stay 
the better. Short-term volunteering can 
be damaging to communities and it’s 
generally advised that it’s not appropriate 
to stay less than a month. It’s often said 
that a commitment of around 12 weeks 
allows enough time for you to integrate 
with the local community and deliver useful 
work, so bear that in mind.
 
Your commitment also depends on what 
the organisation needs – it might need 
help delivering a specific project, such 
as reviewing the organisation’s accounts 
or budgets, for example. Make sure 
you’re working to their time frame, and 
not forcing them to adapt to your travel 
schedule.
 
Volunteer work abroad is sometimes 
offered by for-profit agencies based 
outside the country where the volunteer 
work takes place. They can allocate you to
crucial to use as little fuel as possible 
out in the depths of space, and there is a 
constant search for new types of energy. 
But efficiency is important too, and Jenny’s 
ingenious software enables vehicles in 
space travel at accelerated speeds more 
economically, by navigating the obstacles 
in space more efficiently.
 
Some meteorology students have 
produced a balloon that’s out of this 
world. They’ve created a camera-operated 
weather balloon and sent it over 30 km
into the Earth’s atmosphere. The 
readings they’ve got so far are incredibly 
detailed and could be helpful for weather 
forecasting and many other uses. The 
photographs taken by the balloon’s 
camera are stunning too.
 
Something that’s attracted media attention 
is another type of vehicle – an underwater 
rover that can operate in the harshest 
conditions. It can explore the ocean depths 
where there’s absolutely no light, and it’s 
being used to learn about the behaviour 
of the most difficult to reach marine life. 
There are hopes of taking it to the polar 
regions, where scientists hope to find out 
more about what might be living there.
 
It’s been a privilege to chat to scientists 
exhibiting here. Their ambitions to find 
solutions to the problems on this planet 
are wonderful to see. The originality is 
extraordinary, though what shines through, 
above all, is their attitude. If something 
goes wrong, they work on it till they find 
an answer.