Аракин. Учебник английского языка для студентов языковых специальностей. Аракин. Учебник английского языка для студентов языковых специал. Практический курс английского языка 4 курс Под редакцией В. Д. Аракина
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4. Paraphrase the following sentences using the essential vocabulary: 1. Can you tell me how the accident happened? 2. A good job that you enjoy doing ishard to find. 3. She held a large round thing in her hand. 4. Your suggestion pleases me in everyway. 5. I can't do anything with him. 6. I am against this trip. 7. His first reaction was one of shock and resentment. 8. Are you listening to what is being said? 9. I was relieved to hear his words. 10. What reason do you have for thinking that he is to blame? 5. Answer the following questions. Use the essential vocabulary: 1. What do we say about a patient who is doing well? 2. What do we say about a doctor who gives his attention to the patient? 3. What sort of person tries to be unaffected by personal feelings or prejudices? 4. What is another way of saying that we disapprove of rudeness? 5. What does one say to reassure a person who is frightened? 6. What is another way of saying that people sit facing each other? 7. What do they call a political party opposed to the government? 8. What is the usual affectionate way of referring to a small child or an annnal? 9. What phrase is often used to emphasize an important remark which follows? 10. Is it considered socially correct nowadays to call people by their first names? 11. What do we call capital letters at the beginning of a.name? 12. What do we say about a person who does things according to his own plan and without help? 13. What is the teacher likely to say to an inattentive pupil? 14. How is one likely to feel on hearing that he is out of danger? 15. How can one inquire about the amount of fruit gathered (produced)? 6. Fill in the blanks with prepositions and postlogues: 1. When I lifted the jug up, the handle came... .2. The child loved to watch the stars come... at night. 3. Her hair come ... to her shoulders. 4. Come..., child, or we'll be late! 5.The meaning comes ... as you read further. 6. I've just come... a beautiful poem in this book. 7. How did this dangerous state of affairs come ... ? 8. At this point, the water only comes ... your knees. 9. Can you help me to open this bottle? The cork won't come.... 10.1 came ... an old friend in the library this morning. 11. I'm going away and I may never come .... 12.I hope he came ... all that money honestly. 13. It was a good scheme and it nearly came .... 14. When he came... he could not, for a moment, recognize his surroundings. 15. How's your work coming... ? 16. Will you come... for a walk after tea? 7. Choose the right word: object(s) — subject(s); to object — to oppose; to obtain — to come by; to happen — to come about; to yield — to give in 1. How did you ... that scratch on your cheek? 2. I haven't been able ... that record anywhere; can you... it for me? 3. The accident ...last week. 4. How did it …that you did not report the theft until two days after it occurred? 5. After months of refusing, Irene ... to Soames and agpeed to marry him. 6. Mr Davidson had never been known?... to temptation. 7. He become an … of ridicule among the other children. 8. There were many ... of delight and interest claiming his attention. 9. My favourite ... at school were history and geography. 10. The ... of the painting is the Battle of Waterloo. 11. Ruth had ... his writing because it did not earn money. 12. Like many of the scientists he had been actively ... to the use of the bomb. 13. I... most strongly to this remark. 8. Review the essential vocabulary and translate the following sentences into English: 1.Мы хотели пойти в театр, но из этого ничего не вышло. 2. Как к вам попала эта изумительная картина? 3. Как продвигается ваша работа? 4. Он часто делал свою сестру объектом насмешек. 5. Целью его звонка было пригласить меня в гости. 6. Учитель проработал большой материал за один час. 7. Ваше мнение вполне обоснованное. 8. Американские колонисты выступали против политики британского правительства увеличить налоги. 9. Что бы я ни просил, она делает наоборот. 10. Он имел обыкновение говорить, что первоначальная стадия в работе самая главная. 11. Предварительные переговоры послужили основой последующего соглашения. 12. Президента сопровождали в поездках три секретаря. 13. Именно он обратил мое внимание на эту картину. 14. Не обращайте внимания-на то, что он говорит. 15. Он заверил меня в честности своего приятеля. 16. Его слова были для меня большой поддержкой. 17. Разговор с врачом успокоил меня. 18. Нас заставили уступить. 9. a) Find the Russian equivalents for the following English proverbs: 1. Easy come, easy go. 2. Everything comes to him who waits. 3. A bad penny always comes back. 4. Christmas comes but once a year. 5. Curses, like chickens, come home to roost. 6. Tomorrow never comes. 7. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. 8. A little learning is a dangerous thing. b) Explain in English the meaning of each proverb. c) Make up a dialogue to illustrate one of the proverbs. CONVERSATION AND DISCUSSION BOOKS AND READING TOPICAL VOCABULARY 1. Categorisation: Children's and adult's books; travel books and biography; romantic and historical novels; crime/thrillers; detective stories; war/adventure; science fiction/fantasy; literary fiction and genre fiction; feon-fiction; pulp fiction. Absorbing; adult; amusing; controversial; dense; depressing; delightful; dirty; disturbing; dull; fascinating; gripping; moralistic; nasty; obscene; outrageous; profound; whimsical; unput-downable. . 2. Books and their parts: paperback and hardback; binding; cover; spine; jacket; title; epigraph; preface; the contents list; fly leaf; bookplate; blurb; a beautifully printed book; a tome bound in leather/with gilt edges; a volume with a broken binding; a book with dense.print/with loose pages; a well-thumbed book. 3. Reading habits: to form a reading habit early in life; to read silently/incessantly/greedily/laboriously; to read curled up in a chair; to read a child/oneself to sleep; to make good bed-time reading; to be lost/absorbed in a book; to devour books; to dip into/glalice over/pore over/thumb through a book; to browse through newspapers and periodicals; to scan/skim a magazine; a bookworm; an ayid/alert/keen reader. 4. Library facilities: reading rooms and reference sections; the subject/author/title/on-line catalogue; the enquiry desk; computer assisted reference, service; to borrow/renew/loan books, CDs and video tapes; rare books; to keep books that are overdue; books vulnerable to theft; to suspend one's membership; to be banned from the library. . MURIEL SPARK Many professions are associated with a particular stereotype. The classic image of a writer, for instance, is of a slightly demented-looking person, locked in an attic, scribbling away furiously for days on end. Naturally, he has his favourite pen and notepaper, or a beat-up old typewriter, without which he could not produce a readable word. Nowadays we know that such images bear little resemblance to reality. But are they completely false? In the case of at least one writer it would seem not. Dame Muriel Spark, who is 80 this month, in many ways resembles this stereotypical "writer". She is certainly not demented, and she doesn't work in an attic. But she is rather neurotic about the tools of her trade. She insists on writing with a certain type of pen in a certain type of notebook, which she buys from a certain stationer in Edinburgh called James Thin, in fact, so superstitious is she that, if someone uses one of her pens by accident, she immediately throws it away. Aswell as her "fetish" about writing materials, Muriel Spark shares one other characteristic with the stereotypical "writer" — her work is the most important thing in her life. It has stopped her from remarrying; cost her old friends and made her new ones; and driven her from London to New York, to Rome. Today, she lives in the Italian province of Tuscany with a friend. Dame Muriel discovered her gift for writing at school in the Scottish .capital, Edinburgh. "It was a very progressive school," she recalls. "There was complete racial [and] religious tolerance." Last year, she acknowledged the part the school had played in shaping her career by giving it a donation of £10,000. The money was part of the David Cohen British Literature Prize, one of Britain's most prestigious literary awards. Dame Muriel received the award for a lifetime's writing achievement, which really began with her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It was the story of a teacher who encouraged her girls to believe they were the "creme de la creme". Miss Jean Brodie was based on a teacher who had helped Muriel Spark realise her talent. Much of Dame Muriel's writing has been informed by her personal experiences. Catholicism, for instance, has always been a recurring theme in her books — she converted in 1954. Another novel, Loitering with Intent (1981), is set in London just after World War II, when she herself came to live in the capital. How much her writing has been influenced by one part of her life is more difficult to assess. In 1937, at the age of 19, she travelled to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she married a teacher called Sydney Oswald Spark. The couple had a son, Robin, but the marriage didn't last. In 1944, after spending some time in South Africa, she returned to Britain, and got a job with the Foreign Office in London. Her first novel The Comforters (1957) was written with the help of the writer, Graham Greene. He didn't help with the writing, but instead gave her £20 a month to support herself while she wrote it. His only conditions were that she shouldn't meet him or pray for him. Before The Comforters she had concentrated on poems and short stories. Once it was published, she turned her attentions to novels, publishing one a year for the next six years. Real success came with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was published in 1961, and made into a film. By this time she was financially secure and world famous. (from BBC English, February 1998) 1. As you read the text: a) Look for the answers to these questions: 1. What profession stereotypes are there? What is a stereotypical "student"? "lecturer"? "poet"? 2. Is the "classic image of a writer" completely false? Be specific. 3. Would you agree that artistic people are often superstitious? 4. Who is given the title of "Dame" in Britain? 5. What suggests that Dame Muriel Spark is rather neurotic about the tools of her trade? 6. What part did the school play in shaping her career? 7. How did Graham Green help the young writer? 8.What are the scanty biographical details given in the profile? b) Find in the text the facts to illustrate the following: 1. For Muriel Spark writing is the most important thing in her life. 2. Dame Muriel Spark is a stereotypical writer. 3. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" is a great novel. c) Summarize the text in three paragraphs. 2. In spite of the Russian proverb one can argue about taste: everybody does, and one result is that tastes change. If given a choice what would you rather read a novel or short stories in book form? Why? Try to substantiate your point of view. Use some of the ideas listed below. "A novel appeals in the same way that a portrait does — through the richness of its human content." "It is not only an author's characters that endear him to the public: it is also his ethical outlook that appears with greater or less distinctness in everything he writes." "A volume of short stories contains more ideas, since each story is based on an idea; it has much greater variety of mood, scene, character and plot." 3. a) What do children want to read about? This is a question that teachers and parents have been asking for a long time. Read the texts below and prepare to give your view on the problem. One person who had no doubts about what youngsters wanted to read was the children's author Enid Blyton. Although she died in 1968, and many of her stories are today rather dated, her books continue to be hugely popular with children. They have been translated into 27 languages, and they still sell over eight million copies a year, despite tough competition from television and computer games. Blyton. was not only a gifted children's author, she was also incredibly prolific. During her lifetime, she wrote over 700 books for children of all ages. Her best-known creations are the The Famous Five series, about a group of teenagers who share exciting adventures, and the Noddy books, about a little boy who lives in a world where toys come to life. But if chidren love Blyton's books, the same cannot be said for adults. All her stories have one thing in common: a happy ending. And this, combined with predictable plots, has led many grown-ups to dismiss Blyton's stories as boring. After her death, her critics went further and accused her of racism and of negative stereotyping — the villains in her Noddy books were "golliwogs", children's dolls representing black people. Many of her books were also denounced as sexist because of the way she treated female characters — girls were usually given a secondary role, while the boys had the real adventures. Enid Blyton firmly believed in the innocence of childhood. She offered her young readers imaginary worlds, which were an escape from harsh realities of life. In Blyton's books, baddies were always defeated and the children who defeated them were always good. (BBC English, August 1997) Once many years ago, in anticipation of the children we would one day have, a relative of my wife's gave us a box of Ladybird Books from the 1950s and 60s. They all had titles like Out in the Sun and Sunny Days at the Seaside, and contained meticulously drafted, richly coloured illustrations of a prosperous, contented, litter-free Britain in which the sun always shone, shopkeepers smiled, and children in freshly pressed clothes derived happiness and pleasure from innocent pastimes — riding a bus to the shops, floating a model boat on a park pond, chatting to a kindly policeman. My favourite was a book called Adventure on the Island. There was, in fact, precious little adventure in the book — the high point, I recall, was finding a starfish suckered to a rock — but I loved it because of the illustrations (by the gifted and much-missed J.H. Wingfield). Lyras strangely influenced by this book and for some years agreed to take our family holidays at the British seaside on the assumption that one day we would find this magic place where summer days were forever sunny, the water as warm as a sitz-bath, and commercial blight unknown. When at last we began to accumulate children, it turned out that they didn't like these books at all because the characters in them-never did anything more lively than visit a pet shop or watch a fisherman paint his boat. I tried to explain that this was sound preparation for life in Britain, but they wouldn't have it and instead, to my dismay, attached their affections to a pair of irksome little clots called Topsy and Tim. (Bill Bryson "Notes From a Small Island", 1997) b) Use the topical vocabulary in answering the questions: 1. Can you remember at all the first books you had? 2. Did anyone read bedtime stories to you? 3. You formed the reading habit early in life, didn't you? What sorts of books did you prefer? 4. What English and American children's books can you name? Have you got any favourites? 5. Is it good for children to read fanciful stories which are an escape from the harsh realities of life? Should they be encouraged to read more serious stuffs as "sound preparation for life"? 6. How do you select books to read for pleasure? Do you listen to advice? Do the physical characteristics matter? Such as bulky size, dense print, loose pages, notations on the margins, beautiful/gaudy illustrations etc.? 7. Do you agree with the view that television is gradually replacing reading? 8. Is it possible for television watching not only to discourage but actually to inspire reading? 9. Some teachers say it is possible to discern among the young an in-sensitivity to nuances of language and an inability to perceive more than just a story? Do you think it's a great loss? 10. What do you think of the educational benefits of "scratch and sniff” books that make it possible for young readers to experience the fragrance of the garden and the atmosphere of a zoo? 11. What kind of literacy will be required of the global village citizens of the 21st century? c) There is some evidence to suggest that the concentration of young children today is greatly reduced compared with that of similar children only 20 years ago. Do yon agree with the view that unwillingness to tackle printed texts that offer a challenge through length and complexity has worked its way up through schools into universities? Discuss in pairs. 4. Read the interview with Martin Amis (MA.), one of the most successful writers in Britain today. He talks to a BBC English reporter (R) about his work. R: Asthe son of a famous writer, how did your own writing style develop? MA.: People say, you know, "How do you go about getting: your style?" and it's almost as if people imagine you kick off by writing a completely ordinary paragraph of straightforward, declarative sentences, then you reach for your style pen — your style highlighting pen — and jazz it all up. But in fact it comes in that form and I like to think that it's your talent doing that. R: In your life and in your fiction you move between Britain and America and you have imported American English into your writing. Why? What does it help you do? MA: I suppose what I'm looking for are new rhythms of thought. You know, I'm as responsive as many people are to street words and nicknames and new words; And when I use street language, I never put it down as it is, because it will look like a three-month-old newspaper when it comes out. Phrases like "No way, Jose" and "Free lunch" and tilings like that, they're dead in a few months. So what you've got to do is come up with an equivalent which isn't going to have its street life exhausted. I'm never going to duplicate these rhythms because I read and I studied English literature and thaf s all there too. But perhaps where the two things meet something original can be created. That's where originality, if it's there, would be, in my view. R: You have said that it's no longer possible to write in a wide range of forms — that nowadays we can't really write tragedy, we can't write satire, we can't write romance, and that comedy the only form left. MA: I think satire's still alive. Tragedy is about failed heroes and epic is, on the whole, about triumphant or redeemed heroes. So comedy, it seems to me, is the only thing left. As illusion after illusion has besen cast aside, we no longer believe in these big figures — Macbeth, Hamlet, Tamburlaine — these big, struggling, tortured heroes. Where are they in the modern world? So comedy's having to do it all. And what you get, certainly in my case, is an odd kind of comedy, full of things that shouldn't be in comedy. R: What is it that creates the comedy in your novels? M.A: Well, I think the body, for instance, is screamingly funny as a subject. I mean, if you live in your mind, as everyone does but writers do particularly, the body is a sort of disgraceful joke. You can get everything sort of nice and crisp and clear in your mind, but the body is a chaotic slobber of disobedience and decrepitude. And think that is hysterically funny myself because it undercuts us. It undercuts our pomposities and our ambitions. R: Your latest book The Information is about two very different writers, one of whom, Gywn, has become enormously successful and the other one, Richard, who has had a tiny bit of success but is no longer popular. One of the theories which emerges is that it's very difficult to say precisely that someone's writing is better by so much than someone else's. It's not like running a race when somebody comes first and somebody comes second. MA: No, human beings have not evolved a way of separating the good from the bad when it comes to literature or art in general. All we have is history of taste. No one knows if they're any good — no worldly prize or advance or sales sheet is ever going to tell you whether you're any good. That's all going to be sorted out when you're gone. R: Is this an increasing preoccupation of yours? MA.: No, because there's nothing I can do about it. My father said. "That's no bloody use to me, is it, if I'm good, because I won't be around." R: Have you thought about where you might go from here? MA: I've got a wait-and-see feeling about where I go next. One day a sentence or a situation appears in your head and you just recognise it as your next novel and you have no control over it. There's nothing you can do about it. That is your next novel and I'm waiting for that feeling. (BBC English, August 1995) |