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Their T-shirts said it all :"We're floating."
Virgin Blue president for life Sir Richard Branson, chief executive Brett Godfrey and major shareholder Chris Corrigan of Patrick Corporation on Tuesday kicked off one of the year's biggest Australian share market floats.
With optimism and a few well aimed swipes at Qantas, the trio, who halfway through the media briefing took off their shirts to reveal their "we're floating" slogans, outlined the $A500 million-plus float.
Virgin Blue is the owner of Pacific Blue which set up base in Christchurch in September and will start flights to Brisbane on January 29 and to Melbourne on March 4.
On a podium surrounded by six Virgin Blue hostesses, Branson confessed "it seems a little unreal".
"Three years ago in August 2000, Virgin Blue had 300 start-up staff, two red jets and it was one exciting moment in Australian aviation history," he said.
"Three years ago Geoff Dixon of Qantas publicly warned us to keep out, saying— 'there are no rivers of gold in Australia'."
The Brisbane-based airline now employs around 3,000 people; the Company has 28% of the total domestic market share and 40 new aircraft, operating 37 routes.
The carrier has also seen off rivals Ansett and Impulse, the effects of September 11 and a rising Australian dollar and yet still managed to make a profit.
Branson said he was pleased the Australian traveling public and employees will now have the chance to build the airline.
"We're delighted to have them sailing with us in Australia's golden rivers," he said.
The airline will be valued at $A2.3 billion when it's floated, making the major shareholders and many of the senior management at Virgin Blue multi-millionaires.
While the trio were understandably shy in putting a figure on their wealth, Branson will get tens of millions for the sale of his shares and still have a $A730 million stake in the company.
Godfrey's share holdings when the company is floated will be worth around $A78 million.
But as Branson said: "Without Brett there wouldn't be an airline."
"Yes, he will do well out of it. He deserves it." Characteristically while Branson and Godfrey took centre stage Corrigan, looking the least comfortable of the trio in a T-shirt, kept a low profile.
"I didn't expect to get any questions," he said smiling. "I'm just here for my good looks." After toughing it out in negotiations with Branson on share holding restrictions, Patrick Corporation will sit on a paper profit of $A780 million from a $A260 million investment.
What is implied about the scope of business of Qantas？
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Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged？ Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick II in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent.
All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.
Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.
Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1, 000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style. rather than grammar.
Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man's brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern "toy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain's ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.
But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child's babbling, grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child's non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.
The purpose of Frederick II's experiment was ______.
编制工程建设竣工决算报告的主要内容由竣工决算报表、竣工决算报告说明书、竣工工程平面示意图和工程造价比较分析四部分组成。 ()
"You know so much about literature. It's a pity you failed your degree," Harry said, "You
Because some teachers believe that memorization and learning are ______, they may tell you
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