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ask at the needs analysis meeting using the following ideas.
• type of scientific equipment
• size/weight of equipment
• solidity/fragility of equipment
• surface conditions at landing site

II Suggesting ideas and solutions

5 In pairs, discuss the following questions
about creative thinking.
• What are the most effective ways of
coming up with ideas and finding ingenious
solutions to technical problems?
• What do you think of brainstorming -
generating lots of ideas randomly in a group
session, without analysis initially, then subjecting
each idea to analysis and criticism as a second
phase?
• What do you think of evaluating ideas
progressively - continually subjecting them to
analysis and criticism?
• When creative thinking is required to solve problems, what are the pros and cons of
working individually, in small groups, or in large groups?

6a Read the newspaper article and answer the following questions.
1 How is the statue being made, and what is it being made from?
2 What is Rick Gilliam’s role?
3 What will the statue be placed on in its final position in front of the museum?
4 What technical problem did they have to solve?

MAMMOTH PROBLEM BAFFLES ENGINEERS, SOLVED BY CAVEMEN
The new statue outside the Museum of Natural History has been a mammoth project, literally.
The soon-to-be-completed sculpture portrays a life-sized woolly mammoth, carved from a single
block of sandstone. Initially, one aspect of the project had engineers baffled. Rick Gilliam, the
engineer overseeing the logistics, admitted that he and his colleagues had fried their brains trying
to figure out how the 36-tonne monster could be lowered onto the stone plinth that will support
it.
‘We knew that we could put slings under the base of the statue, and pick it up with a crane,’ he
explained, and that transporting it from the stonemason’s yard on a low-loader wouldn’t be a
problem. ‘The problem is placing it on the flat plinth that supports it. How do you prevent the
crane’s slings from getting trapped between the base and the plinth, so that they can be
withdrawn? We couldn’t think of an easy way to do it.’ The creative answer eventually came,
not from the engineers, but from the stonemasons, who had affectionately been nicknamed the
‘cavemen’.

b Rick is talking to Gabriella, an engineering colleague, about the problem of placing the
statue. Before you listen, explain what is meant by the following terms and try to guess
what the three possible solutions are.
bar; drill; friction; a grab (on the end of a crane jib); horizontal;

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