audio skills test

Is Preston city Centre as safe as it could be? Following a series of attacks in the city centre and the possible closure of one of its takeaways as a result, do people really feel safe when leaving the bars and clubs in the early hours of he morning?

DATA skills test

GRANT ABUSE

               With the UK government planning to cut tertiary education spending by approximately £4 billion by 2014 is this going to create a struggling financial environment for students with already low incomes? 

               The chart above shows the percentage of undergraduates grants/loans that is spent on alcohol and nights out. 36% spent around 25% of their grants going out rather than spending it aiding their course and future careers. So is this budget cut really that bad? 45% of students asked had financial support from their parents while 27% had part time jobs during term time.

                The lack of care in spending is mainly due to students unable to spread their finances over the course of the term and not caring about their long term financial situation. One way to fix this would be for Student Finance England to supply university students with a weekly allowance similar to that of the EMA (education maintenance allowance) used for college students and 64% of students asked agreed with this.

                 Although 82% of people are happy with the support they have received during their time at university is this cut going to change their attitude and work ethics or will this financial restriction see more and more people opting for full time work over a better educaction.

            

               

Image skills test

Here is the original picture of the Lancashire County Council building with the dimensions of 2560x1698 pixels. I am going to change the aspect ratio to better suite various uses online.

first in 100x100, then by 400x300 and finally 200x500. The left image is cropped and the right is simpley resized.

Here is the second image (aspect ratio of 100x100)

 (cropped) 

 (re-sized)

Here is the third image (aspect ratio of 400x300)

(cropped)

(re-sized)

Here is the 4th image (aspect ratio of 200x500)

(cropped)

(re-sized)

As is evident from the pictures it is important to conserve the aspect ratio of the original image to avoid it distorting  The aspect ratios used differ from my original image and so the other option would be to crop the images instead which would prevent the image distorting at the cost of the some of the image being cut out of frame.

Mapping skills test

KNOW YOUR CITY

Here I have collected a series of news stories from around Preston over the last couple of weeks. I have summarized the stories with link for further information.