#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The international educational campaign Geographical Dictation was held on November 16-17 this year. 18 Nornickel employees tested their knowledge at the underground training ground of the Nornickel corporate university. In total, more than 11 thousand dictation sites were registered in Russia and other countries. And this became the first record of the campaign.
Norilsk also broke all records: this year the dictation was held at 25 sites, last year there were 11. Three locations were the most unusual: on Saturday, the dictation took place on board the Norilsk-Moscow flight of the NopdStar airline and on a tour bus at an observation deck in the Talnah district of Norilsk. On Sunday, the company’s employees wrote the dictation at the underground training ground of the Nornickel corporate university.
“We are Russian people, we do not look for easy ways, so we chose the most unusual locations for writing the dictation. I think that this is a nice approach – to use not only familiar places, such as museums and libraries, but also other diverse and interesting places from a geographical point of view. The underground training ground is one of the popular routes of our industrial tourism, which is jointly developed by the Norilsk Development Agency (NDA) and the Nornickel company”, said Maxim Mironov, chairman of the Norilsk branch of the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) and the NDA head.
Geographically, the training ground is located in the Angidrit mine. Literally underground – on the minus 68 meters horizon. Therefore, the dictation participants were equipped in accordance with the safety regulations provided by the company: they were dressed in special clothing, given helmets with an individual lamp and self-rescuers.
“It is a great honor for us to host the Russian Geographical Society’s international educational campaign – Geographical Dictation – at the company’s production facility. The site where we are holding the dictation today is unique. This is an operating mine”, said Igor Payatelev, Norilsk Support Complex’s general director. “The underground training site is the pride of Nornickel’s Polar Division. It is a modern site for training self-propelled diesel equipment operators and drilling rig operators in conditions as close as possible to real production. It has training underground workings and a metalworking workshop, and uses machines that are actively used at the company’s mining enterprises. The mine extracts and ships anhydrite to Talnah mines for backfilling operations at the Polar Division and the cement plant”.
This year’s educational campaign was different in that most of the questions for it were written not by professionals, but by amateur authors. The Write Your Own Question for the Geographical Dictation contest collected over 1260 puzzles from 18 countries. The organizers selected the best of them and included them in the main test.
The dictation started all over the country at exactly 12:00. It consisted of two parts, differing in difficulty: the first part had ten simpler questions based on well-known facts, while the second part had 30 more difficult questions. However, they were composed in such a way that even without knowing the correct answer, you can come to it by reasoning. The dictation took 45 minutes.
“It was my first time writing a dictation and my first time in a mine! I really liked everything. The questions were interesting. They concerned not only Norilsk, where I live and work, but also Bashkiria, where I come from. I’ve always loved geography, I got excellent marks in this subject at school. Living in Norilsk, I study the region’s features, its attractions, and I really dream of visiting the Putorana plateau”, admitted Marsel Ziyazov, a fitter of the instrumentation and automation department of the Norilskavtomatika measuring equipment operation and repair shop of Norilsknickelremont enterprise.
After writing the dictation, each participant received a certificate from the Russian Geographical Society about participating in the international educational campaign. And as an exclusive gift – a tour around the training ground.
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Text: Maria Ivanova, Photo: Nikolay Shchipko
