An 1 English Practical Course Workbook Advanced Level

JANETA LUPU

ENGLISH PRACTICAL COURSE WORKBOOK

ADVANCED LEVEL

Third Edition

Universitatea SPIRU HARET

Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României LUPU, JANETA

English practical course workbook /Janeta Lupu. – 3-nd ed. - Bucureşti: Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine, 2006

144 p.; 20,5 cm Bibliogr. ISBN 973-725-528-3

811.111(075.8)

© Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine, 2006

Tehnoredactori: Marcela OLARU, Janeta LUPU Coperta: Marilena Gurlui

Bun de tipar: 20.02.2006; Coli tipar: 9 Format: 16/61×86

Editura şi Tipografia Fundaţiei România de Mâine Splaiul Independenţei, Nr. 313, Bucureşti, S. 6, O. P. 83

Tel./Fax.: 316 97 90; www.spiruharet.ro e-mail: [email protected]


UNIVERSITATEA SPIRU HARET FACULTATEA DE LIMBI ŞI LITERATURI STRĂINE

JANETA LUPU

ENGLISH PRACTICAL COURSE WORKBOOK

ADVANCED LEVEL

Third Edition

EDITURA FUNDAŢIEI ROMÂNIA DE MÂINE Bucureşti, 2006


To my children, Alexandru and Mayada

J.L.


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CONTENTS

Foreword …………………………………………….. 7GLOBAL ISSUES Lesson 1. Globalization …………………………………… 9

The Present Tense ………………………………….. 14Lesson 2. International Crime …………………………….. 19

The Present Perfect Tense ………………………….. 23Lesson 3. Demands of Human Solidarity …………………. 27

The Past Tenses …………………………………….. 29Lesson 4. Communications ……………………………….. 33

The Modal Verbs …………………………………… 37INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS Lesson 1. Education ……………………………………….. 43

The Subjunctive ……………………………………. 46Lesson 2. Career …………………………………………... 49

Direct and Indirect Speech …………………………. 56Lesson 3. Family Life ……………………………………... 59

The Passive Voice ………………………………….. 63Lesson 4. Feminism ……………………………………….. 67

The Sequence of Tenses ……………………………. 71LEISURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Lesson 1. Book review ……………………………………. 73The Infinitive ……………………………………….. 77


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Lesson 2. Sculpture ……………………………………….. 81The Participle ………………………………………. 85

Lesson 3. Music…………………………………………….. 89The Gerund …………………………………………. 93

Lesson 4. Beauty Pageants ………………………………... 97Consolidation Exercises …………………………………… 103Specimen Lesson Plan ……………………………………... 107Punctuation ………………………………………………... 108Teaching English through Games ………………………… 113Translation Corpus ………………………………………... 119

Bibliography ………………………………………………. 144


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FOREWORD

The present workbook for the practical course is devoted to advanced students of English. It deals with some of the most ardent issues of contemporary world and it aims at consolidating the students’ knowledge of the most specific English grammar issues, providing a variety of interesting and complex exercises.

The main chapters are devoted to topics like: global issues, interpersonal relations, leisure and entertainment. The texts have been selected from a wide range of publications, to make the students familiar with the different styles (academic, scientific, journalese, colloquial) of English. The language used is the language of our contemporaries.

The last part is a translation corpus containing fragments from the literary works of the writers the students study according to the syllabus for modern English literature. I have chosen quite extensive fragments to stimulate the students’ curiosity to read the entire work of the respective writers.

There is also a chapter including punctuation rules, lesson plan specimen and a few games to be used in class by the future teachers of English.

The author


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GLOBAL ISSUES Lesson 1 GLOBALIZATION

“We live now – for the first time in human history –- in a new era when our planet is enveloped by a single civilization” Václav Havel

Here is a list of definitions given to this complex phenomenon, so

much debated in our times; read and comment upon them with your colleagues.

Globalization is: • a primarily economic phenomenon, involving the increasing interaction, or integration, of national economic systems through the growth in international trade, investment and capital flows; • a rapid increase in cross-border social, cultural and technological exchange, under the conditions of capitalism; • a decoupling of space and time, that, with instantaneous communications, knowledge and culture, can be shared around the world simultaneously; • a process in which geographic distance becomes a factor of diminishing importance in the establishment and maintenance of cross-border economic, political and socio-cultural relations; • a worldwide drive toward a globalized economic system dominated by supranational corporate trade and banking institutions that are not accountable to democratic processes or national governments.


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Challenges and Opportunities Preamble The history of humanity is the history of its progressive liberation

from material deprivation, i.e., of economic development, and it is the history as well of the growth of freedom in the realm of the spirit.We now have a name for the dynamics at work in the present stage in the development of civilization: globalization. Like it or not, globalization is fact (a fact-in-the-making); it is irrelevant whether one “approves” or “disapproves” of it. Like all profound transmutations in history (such as the earlier, and still on-going, phenomenon of modernization), globalization is something that is not a matter of human choosing. We cannot choose the historical situations with which we must contend, but we can do our best to make the best of the opportunities they present us with. Why indeed can we not hope that the emerging global civilization will turn out to be one imbued, in the words of Václav Havel, with “a new spirituality, a new ethos, and a new ethics, values that should be adopted today by all cultures, all nations, as a condition of their very survival” ? (Havel 1998, p.24)

Economic aspects a) What globalization above all signals is a fundamental

transformation in the primary arena of human economic activity, i.e., the “marketplace”

b) Capital is no longer restricted to financing projects in domestic markets with poor returns but can be shifted instantaneously to any country that offers more productive investment opportunities.

c) Financial and currency markets have also become global, with over a trillion dollars moving about the world every day with the speed of electricity.

d) The manufactured goods that are traded in the global market place often no longer “originate” in any one country in particular but are the composite products of an elaborate international web of suppliers and assemblers.


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Social aspects a) The demands of the global economy are bringing about

profound changes in the work habits and lifestyles of people in their own native countries.

b) To meet the challenge of global competition, national economies are obliged, if they are not to fall behind, to “retool” themselves.

c) Competition often entails widespread social transformation and dislocation, something which is naturally disruptive of established social practices, and it is thus negatively viewed by both citizens and governments (people do have a deep-seated craving for stability, a human susceptibility that socialists know well how to play to).

Political aspects a) Globalization poses a serious challenge to the old idea of

“national sovereignty”. b) The new global economic order both requires and calls forth

the ever increasing liberalization of trade and investment, and multilateral trade agreements necessarily restrict the ability of national governments to act unilaterally in their own parochial interests.

Globalization and Culture It does not make sense to talk of a world of 6 billion people

becoming a monoculture. The spread of globalization will undoubtedly bring changes to the

countries it reaches, but change is an essential part of life. It does not mean the abolition of traditional values. Indeed, new global media, such as the internet, have proven a powerful means of projecting traditional culture.

Capitalism is essentially diverse, as the traveller from Tokyo to Hong Kong, Zurich, Buenos Aires and New York will discover. The fact that American cultural products are successful in world markets reflects no more than their popularity. American culture should no more be vilified than should non-American culture be placed on a


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pedestal beyond criticism, for example, cultural practices as female genital mutilation.

To the extent that globalization does imply some integration of culture, this may be no bad thing. Tribalism and fundamentalism have been divisive sources of violent conflict throughout history. Can anyone seriously maintain, for instance, that primitive cultural practices, often defended by religious fundamentalists, that amount to blatant violations of human rights are aspects of cultural “difference” that ought to be cherished and preserved?

Globalization may have as its effect a certain levelling of cultural differences and may make for increasing similarity in lifestyles around the world, but it is difficult to see how this consequence may not actually have decidedly beneficial effects.

If there is anything that threatens to turn the emerging new world order into a world disorder and to turn the world itself into the arena for a global clash of civilizations, a veritable war of all against all, it is the culturalist obsession with “difference” on the part of both national élites and the spiritually down-trodden, materially-deprived masses in their countries. When people are bereft of economic freedom, i.e., the opportunity “to better their condition”, it is natural that they should focus their attention on petty way of aggrandizing their self-esteem. It is natural that they should fall prey to the “narcissism of minor differences” (Michael Ignatieff, 1998).

The logical consequence of ethnocentric nationalism is ethnic rivalry, internecine warfare, and, ultimately, genocide.

Globalization tends to promote an altogether more desirable state of affairs. The real challenge of globalization is that of exploiting the undeniable opportunities it offers for increasing the general level of civility throughout the world. Civility – as defended by such outstanding individuals as Václav Havel – is the necessary condition for “spiritual civilization” (as the Chinese call it) as well as being, along with democracy, necessarily a condition for genuine world peace.


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Globalization and Democracy Curiously enough, there are those who view the stability brought

about by globalization as a threat to democracy. You might think that anything that promotes world peace and prosperity could hardly be a threat to democracy. And yet the objectors do have a point, in a way. What the loss of national sovereignty entailed by globalization means, they say, is that in many instances individual nation-states will no longer have the independence to act in accordance with the democratically expressed wishes of their citizens; “the will of the people” will inevitably be curtailed, frustrated, by a nation’s international commitments and obligations to the world community. That is undeniably true. Multilateral and transnational ties – designed to promote international cooperation and stability – reduce the scope for unilateral action and “national self-determination” (in a global world, no nation “go it alone”). That notwithstanding, this particular objection to globalization misses the mark.

The only acceptable form of democracy is one based on an entrenched, constitutional respect for human rights, i.e., the rights and liberties of individuals. This is what is called liberal democracy. Perhaps the single most important element in liberal democracy is the rule of law. It is the presence or absence of the rule of law that determines whether a society can be said to be free or not.

(adapted from Globalization by G.B. Madison, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy; McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario)

Bibliography: Albrow, Martin.1997. The Global Age: State and Society beyond

Modernity. Stanford: Calif.: Stanford University Press. Fukuyama, Francis.1992. The End of History and the Last Man.

New York: The Free Press. Havel, Václav.1998. “The Charms of NATO”. New York Review

of Books 45, nr.1 (January 15) Huntington, Samuel P.1997. The Clash of Civilizations and the

Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster.


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Comprehension ● Answer the following questions: a) What is globalization and when did it start? b) Who are the players? c) Why is there global inequality, and why is it getting worse? d) What are the costs and benefits of free trade? e) What is the role of the internet and communications

technology in globalization? f) How does globalization affect culture? g) What is your personal position/attitude toward globalization? ● Divide the text into units and make your own commentaries on

each of the aspects of globalization mentioned in the text. ● The text is adapted from a longer essay. What characteristics of

the academic style can you infer from the text? ● Find the meanings of the words in italics and use them in

sentences of your own. ● Make sure you understand the meanings of the following

phrasal verbs and then make up sentences: to break into, to break off, to break up, to blow off, to knock down, to point out, to hold up, to tell off, to put off, to let down.

Grammar Present Simple for Daily Habits ● Read the sentences of a diary and mind the use of the present

simple for daily habits with the following verbs: give, touch, start, end, do, try, get up, have, collect, sort out, manage, collapse, update, print off, drive, leave, grab, go.

I … at 7.45 am and … a bath. I … home at 9am and …to work.

At 9.30 am I … the voicemails from the previous evening, as we deal


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with different time zones. Then I … the e-mails and either action or file them.

At 10.15 am I … the post for my boss as I try to have everything ready before I speak to him.

At 10.30 am I … my boss a call. He … dictation with me over the phone for letters and e-mails.

At 1 pm I … to get a break and … a sandwich, although I try to take two proper lunch breaks a week. Otherwise my day … and … in one breath.

At 2 pm I … to sort out my calls in between doing the typing, which I try to finish before 4 pm. I usually e-mail, fax or read things over the phone for my boss to proof.

At 5 pm I … base with my boss and … him on what he has asked me to do, then I fax him a list of messages.

At 6 pm I … home and …, although I do go to the gym when I have got the energy.

(from The Times, 2000) ● Write a short paragraph describing a typical day's activities. ● Extend upon the following, using the present simple: a) Describe the day-to-day activities at your school or your place

of work. b) Describe how you spend your leisure time in the evenings or

on weekends. c) Describe what happens on Christmas/Easter day, or on some

other important day in the calendar. Present Simple with ‘frequency’ Adverbs ● Answer the following questions using the present simple of the

verbs together with the adverbs given below: often, generally, never, hardly ever, sometimes, usually, nearly always, occasionally, frequently, always.

1. When do you get up? 2. What do you do on weekends? 3. Where do you spend your summer holidays?


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4. What sort of TV programmes do you not watch? 5. Where do you meet your friends? 6. What sort of films do you enjoy? 7. What sort of books do you rarely read? 8. How do you travel to school? 9. What do your parents ask you to do for them? 10.What do you take if you have a stomach pain? Other Uses of Present Simple a) in demonstrations Here is a fine and easy-to-cook recipe: Pesto-glazed chicken with red onions and sunblush tomatoes Serves 4 4 medium red onions, peeled and thickly sliced 3 tbsp balsamic vinegar 4 tbsp olive oil 4 chicken fillets, with or without skin 2 tbsp basil pesto 5oz/150g sunblush tomatoes roughly chopped 2tbsp pine nuts 3 tbsp basil leaves, roughly shredded 275ml/1/2 pint chicken stock salt and pepper Pre-heat the oven to 190C. Place the red onions in a roasting tin

with the balsamic vinegar, 3 tablespoons of olive oil and seasoning. Mix well and roast in the oven for an hour. Seal the chicken breasts on both sides in the remaining olive oil over a medium heat before brushing each one with pesto.

Add the tomatoes, pine nuts and shredded basil to the roasted onions. Pour in the chicken stock and place the pesto-glazed chicken breasts on top of the onion mixture. Return to the oven and roast for


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25 minutes or until chicken breasts are tender. Serve with mash or roast potatoes.

● Now describe the whole process of cooking in front of your

colleagues. ● Give a spoken or written description of how to make one of

your favourite dishes. b) in commentaries on radio or television: Hagi hits the ball off the back front, and it goes straight to the

boundary. Imagine you are asked to report a match between two university

teams on our TVRM station. Note: The speaker may also use the present progressive in his/her

commentary; the chioce will depend either on the duration of the action, or on the speaker's point of view.

c) in announcements: The library opens at 9 am and closes at 6 pm. Make a list of different announcements. d) in headlines: The USA puts forward anti-terrorist attack plan. Choose interesting headlines from a couple of English or

American newspapers on sale in Romania. e) as the ‘historic’ or ‘dramatic’ present, which is used to give

immediacy to past events (real or fictitious):


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I run to the bus stop and find I've just missed the bus! (real event, colloquial usage).

When Hamlet meets his father's ghost, he learns the truth about

his uncle Claudius. (fictitious event) Find more such examples. f) in stage directions: Kent: Go to: have you wisdom? so. (Pushes Oswald out) Lear: Now, my friendly knave, I thank thee: there's earnest of thy

service. (Gives Kent money) Look for more stage directions in three different English plays. Written Assignment Extend upon the following: 1. Those who make difficult choices in life often make lots of

mistakes. But those who avoid difficult choices make the biggest mistake of all.

2. National characteristics. 3. The world as it will be a hundred years from now.


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Lesson 2 INTERNATIONAL CRIME To appreciate the growing phenomenon of globalized crime,

consider the following: • The drug Ecstasy, manufactured primarily in Netherlands, is

trafficked to the United States by, among others, Israeli organized crime groups.

• A computer virus designed and sent from the Philippines caused computers at many U.S. government agencies to be shut down, some for as long as a week.

• A major U.S. bank discovered that it was being used by Russian organized crime to launder money.

• Columbian crime groups reportedly check via computer the bank accounts of drivers stopped at roadblocks to select rich kidnapping victims.

• The September 11th terrorist attack on WTC, the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon building, has resulted in the loss of thousands of human lives.

These examples represent the new face of crime. The extent of

such illegal activity has increased enormously in the wake of globalization. And those involved in it have no respect for, or loyalty to nations, boundaries, or sovereignty.

Certain types of international crime – terrorism, human trafficking, drug trafficking, and contraband smuggling – involve serious violence and physical harm. Other forms – fraud, extortion, corruption, money laundering, intellectual property theft, and counterfeiting – don’t require guns to cause major damage. Moreover, the spread of information technology has created new categories of cybercrime.


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Terrorism Terrorism is a unique form of crime. Terrorist acts often contain

elements of warfare, politics and propaganda. For security reasons and due to lack of popular support, terrorist organizations are usually small, making detection and infiltration difficult. Although the goals of terrorists are sometimes shared by wider constituencies, their methods are generally abhorred.

While the issues behind terrorism are usually national or regional, the impact of terrorist campaigns is international. Their form of psychological warfare is “propaganda by deed”. It is thus not possible to look at “international terrorism” in complete isolation from domestic terrorism, which is considered an internal matter of sovereign states. Domestic terrorism often has spill-over effects into other countries and linkages with foreign terrorist groups are not uncommon.

Innovations in global communications have given some local groups international standing, while internationally operating groups use today’s rapid international transportation to hit, run and hide. Perpetrators of terrorism in one country frequently use other states as safe havens or for fund-raising. They sometimes receive training abroad and use foreign countries for staging terrorist acts or as launching bases for their operations elsewhere. Victims of domestically oriented acts of terrorism are often foreign business people, diplomats or tourists.

Terrorists sometimes hide among emigrant diasporas and refugee communities. Some terrorist organizations are partly engaged in illicit smuggling of drugs and weapons. Most do not operate in a vacuum, but rather side-by-side with non-violent militant groups pursuing the same objectives but by peaceful means.

Pino Arlacchi, Executive Director of ODCCP says: “Success in combating terrorism requires both strategic insights from research and international cooperation based on best practices and “lessons learned”.


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Money Laundering In recent years, crime has become increasingly international in

scope and the financial aspects of crime are complex due to the rapidly changing advances in technology. International organized crime is an enormous and multifaceted problem. It is not only a law enforcement problem but a national and international security threat as well.

With few exceptions, criminals are motivated by one thing – profit. Greed drives the criminal, and the end result is that illegally-gained money must be introduced into a nation’s legitimate financial system. Money laundering involves disguising assets so they can be used without detection of the illegal activity that produced them.

The success of organized crime is based upon its ability to launder money. Through money laundering, the criminal transforms the monetary proceeds derived from criminal activity into funds with a seemingly legal source.

This process has devastating social consequences. For one thing, money laundering provides the fuel for drug dealers, terrorists, arms dealers, and other criminals to operate and expand their operations. Criminals manipulate financial systems in the United States and abroad to further a wide range of illicit activities. Left unchecked, money laundering can erode the integrity of our nation’s and the world’s financial institutions.

Consider the fact that money laundering extends far beyond hiding narcotics profits to include monies tied to crimes ranging from tax fraud to terrorism and arms smuggling adding many additional billions of dollars to the criminals’ profits. Criminal activities, without restraint, fundamentally destabilize political and economic reform. As history demonstrates again and again, political stability, democracy and free markets depend on solvent, stable, and honest financial, commercial, and trade systems.

There is now worldwide recognition that we must deal firmly and effectively with increasingly elusive, well financed, and technologically adept criminal organizations. These organizations are determined to use every means available to subvert the financial systems that are the cornerstone of legitimate international commerce.


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As organized crime develops economic power, it corrupts democratic institutions and undermines free enterprise. Money laundering is now being viewed as the central dilemma in dealing with all forms of international organized crime because financial gain means power. Organized crime is assuming an increasingly significant role that threatens the safety and security of peoples, states and democratic institutions.

Comprehension

● Answer the following questions:

a) What do we mean by international crime? b) What types of international crime do you know? c) What may the causes of such crimes be? d) What is domestic terrorism? e) Why is it dangerous? f) How do the terrorist organizations operate? g) Who are the victims of the terrorist attacks? h) What is money laundering? i) What is the main motivation for money laundering? j) How does money laundering affect the states? k) How do the international institutions try to prevent international

crime? These texts were adapted from an official report presented by

Ms. Paula Dobriansky, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, and published in Global Issues, August 2001, a month before the tragic events in New York, September 11th.

● How would you characterize the style of this official report?

● Explain the meaning of the words in italics and then use them in sentences of your own.

● Find synonyms to the following phrasal verbs and then make up sentences with the respective phrasal verbs: account for, draw up, look into, pick up, pull out, pull down, turn down, turn out, wash out, provide for.


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Grammar Present Perfect ● Match each description of the use of the present perfect with one of the example sentences below: • to talk about an action which started in the past and is still continuing; • to talk about a very recent past action, for which no definite time reference is given; • to talk about an action which is part of a person’s experience, and for which no definite time reference is given; • to talk about a past action which has had a result which can be seen in the present; • to show that one action must be completed before another can happen. a) We’ve just arrived.

b) As she has waited for three months, she can wait another ten minutes.

c) I’ll give you the book after you’ve paid for it.

d) How beautiful you’ve become!

e) Have you ever been to Britain?

● You often use the present perfect with some of the following

time adverbials. Which ones? all my life, ever, just, last month, already, next week, lately, now, for three days, never, so far, since 1989, yesterday, yet, recently.


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● Fill in the blanks using the present perfect of the following verbs: hit, be awash, call in, display, donate.

A drought … the country. Yes I know the news … with bursting

riverbanks, flooded homes and forecasts of more to come. As with all national disasters, the sixth emergency service – celebrities – … . Elizabeth Hurley, Geri Halliwell and Joanna Lumley … all … the appropriate Blitz spirit. What is the disaster, you might well ask. It is nothing less than an image famine.

As we all know, having the right image is important in these troubled times of superficial judgements. Thus the aforementioned ladies … all … designer clothes to unemployed women across the country to help them to impress during job interviews.

● Use the verbs in brackets in the present perfect: a) One thing … (to change) over the years and that is his

attitude to studying. b) Judges … (to become) their latest unwitting victims. c) The company … (to pick up) market share from rivals. d) The IMF and the World Bank … (to have) always their

critics, usually left-leaning academics. e) The Net … (to open) the way for new coalitions of dissidents

– unionists, environmentalists, feminists, human-rights campainers.

f) The anti-globalizers … (to reach) the point where they are an organized association, with their sections, their commissions, and their treasury. They are the rebels of our age.

g) The actors’ union … (to campaign) for casting on the gounds of talent alone.

h) Her family … (to spend) the last few years travelling from country to country.

i) His remarks … (to turn) the spotlight on the most emotive issue within the teaching profession.


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Present Perfect in Future Time Clauses ● Rewrite the following sentences, using the imperative or a

future form in one clause, and the present perfect in the other. a) Please (not smoke) until after the plane (take off). b) I (let) you know as soon as I (get) a letter from her. c) Her daughter (make) a very good translator when she (have)

some more experience. d) (Not start) on Lesson 2 until you (complete) all the questions

in Lesson 1. e) We are going to Thailand next summer. It (be) the first time

we (spend) a holiday in an exotic place. f) (Not make up) your mind until you (have) the opportunity to

talk to him. g) He (be) ready for dinner by the time he (finish) writing the

essay. h) As soon as she (thrash out) this problem she (be able) to

make an appropriate decision. i) You (get) used to our methods when you (understand) the

details of our business. j) The students (start) the second term as soon as the exams (be

over). Written Assignment 1. There is a lot of violence around us today. Extend upon the

causes and possible cures. 2. How do you see a politically united Europe? Write three

paragraphs on this topic.


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Translate into Romanian: All fighting is, of course, a kind of terrorism. There is a fine

distinct dividing-line between out-and-out war – not only sanctioned by governments but, at least in theory, justified – and the secretive, underhanded, somehow much “nastier” acts of terrorists. The difference is an emotional one. Thousands may die in the bombing of a city, but at least we know, have been assured at any rate, that those who are dying and suffering are the enemy, a visible, definable and “justifiably” hated entity. If our own people are killed, we know who to blame because we have been told again and again who – and what– they are. One basic point being, they are not like us: the second, they are anonymous, a seething mass of dehumanised nationality, faceless and voiceless, which is somehow wrong.


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Lesson 3 DEMANDS OF HUMAN SOLIDARITY Human solidarity demands all the issues of a changing world be

dealt with and, where necessary, transformed for the common good of all, beginning at the local level.

Human fellowship demands a provision of the urgent needs of all human beings before the luxuries of a few. This entails a more equitable distribution of resources such as land, physical resources, capital, skills, knowledge and technology. Humanity must work out means for ensuring a genuine and effective concern for the needs of all, irrespective of prevailing distribution of power, wealth and incomes which is grossly unjust and unsustainable.

Human solidarity in the context of present day globalization necessitates a radical transformation of the world order and relationships among peoples in the direction of sharing of resources and caring for all. In addition to changes at the national and regional levels, there has to be transformations at the world level too.

Role and Responsibility of the Religions Religions are considered the principal agents of promoting

spirituality and that is why it is important that they pay attention to the global dimension of spirituality. Spirituality is a human quest for self-realization of the noblest aspirations, for holiness and perfection in union with the Transcendent, the Divine, to the extent possible in our earthly existence. It engages a person and a community in the effort to overcome selfishness, to care for others, to share with others what each one has so that the human happiness and fulfillment of all may be increasingly realized. The world’s religions and the best humanistic thinking indicate that human happiness depends on the striving for love, sharing and understanding among persons and in society.


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The teachings of the religions have often been adjusted to suit the dominant social order as of male domination, slavery, the class and caste system and not contested their evils over long periods of time.

Though their messages are universal and open to all persons and times, they have not generally been concerned with their application to global realities, especially in relation to the worldwide organization of socio-economic life. While religious funadamentalisms lead to unfortunate social conflicts, religious values can be the underpinning base for coalitions for world justice and peace.

World religions, as international agencies with a message of justice and good-will to all, have the opportunity and obligation to face this crisis of humanity. Religions, led by persons of good-will and generosity can be bases for global networking of the people of good-will. They must endeavour to work together for the realization of their core values and thus give meaning to the present search for human solidarity and the safeguarding of nature for future generations.

Comprehension ● Answer the following questions: a) What does human solidarity demand? b) What should humanity work out? c) What does human solidarity need? d) How would you define spirituality? e) What does human happiness depend on? f) What should we put against selfishness? g) What are religions considered? h) What are the messages of most religions in the world? i) What are the values of religions? j) What should the aim of religious leaders be?


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● Read the text attentively and consider its style; can you realize what is the profession of its author?

● Congratulations! The text is indeed written by a specialist in

religions. He is Fr. Tissa Balasurija from Sri Lanka, a leading spokesperson of Third World Theologies. How would you characterize his style and attitude toward the global issues?

What is your personal opinion on the role of religions in our changing world?

● Look up the meanings of the following phrasal verbs and then make up sentences: to pay back, to pay down, to pay for, to pay off, to pay out, to pay up.

Grammar The Past Tenses Past Simple (‘narrative’) for past events ● Complete the following newspaper report using the past simple

of the verbs in brackets: For the past three years, Lindita Rexhepi, an ethnic Albanian high

school student from the mining city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo, has not been able to go home. She … (be) 14 when Serb troops … (expel) her and her family from their cement-block home and … (force) them across the border into Montenegro. When the war … (end) in 1999, they … (return) to find the narrow road into their hillside neighbourhood blocked by Serbs. The last time Lindita … (try) to visit … (be) nearly a year ago. Riding in a police car under the protection of French troops from the NATO-led peace-keeping force KFOR, she and her family …(attack - passive) by a gang of men who …(lob) a tear-gas canister through the front window. “I … (freeze)”, Lindita says of the incident. “I … (can) not even move my legs. Now, we don’t even try anymore.”

(TIME, February, 2002)


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Past events (Situations) ● Ask your colleagues to answer each of the following questions: 1. Where did you spend your winter holiday last year? 2. Who did you go with? 3. How did you travel? 4. What other people did you meet there? 5. How did you enjoy your stay? 6. What sort of weather did you have? 7. What sort of food did you eat? 8. What did you bring home as souvenirs? 9. How much did the holiday cost altogether?

Past Progressive ● Read the sentences and explain the use of the past progressive in each situation: a) I asked my children not to make a noise. I was trying to

understand what the newsreport was saying. b) They called in without notice. We were all having dinner. c) At 4 pm my husband was reading the newspaper. d) When it started to snow I was looking for my woollen gloves. e) Thomas, my best friend, was working all day last Sunday. f) We were watching television all evening. g) When my daughter arrived home I was baking an apple pie. h) My friend was giving her course of lectures between 11 am

and 3 pm. i) I thought she looked fatter. Apparently, she was putting on

weight. j) They had moved the TV set into their bedroom – they were

watching television there during the cold weather.


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Past Simple and Past Perfect ● Explain the time distinctions expressed by the past tense and

past perfect of the verbs in italics: a) Bob left as soon as the concert ended/had ended. b) They stopped talking as soon as mother entered/had entered

the room. c) When Miriam arrived at her office, her boss had gone home. d) After he had given the receptionist his passport, he was led to

his room. e) I knew I had acted stupidly when I told him the truth. f) He realized he had discovered the best solution. g) My friend apologized for any trouble he had caused. h) We all knew he had been drinking heavily since his wife

died. i) They hardly recognized each other, because they hadn’t met

since they were in high school. j) The divers came across the Titanic wreck that had lain on the

sea bed for over 90 years. k) When I got there, the concert had already begun. l) He particularly wanted to visit Scotland because he had never

been there before.

● Fill in the blanks in the following newspaper article paying attention to the use of tenses:

Ex-FBI agent and confessed Russian spy Robert Hanssen …

(admit) his guilt last July under a plea bargain that … (enable) him to escape the death penalty if he … (tell) the whole truth about his spying activities. The FBI … (finish) six months of questioning of Hanssen under a polygraph, but some counterintelligence hands … (be) not happy with the results: they … (think) Hanssen … (be) still not … (come) clean. Sources tell TIME the poligraph … (indicate) possible deception when Hanssen … (deny) stripper Priscilla Galey’s claim that he … (try) to recruit her as a spy. He … (say) the attraction …


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(be) purely physical and … (explain) the needle’s jitters as the nervousness of a conservative Catholic when asked about his extramarital affair.

(TIME, February, 2002)

Written Assignment 1. Use the sentence below as the last sentence of an explanatory

paragraph, taking care to ensure that your use of tenses is correct: He began to wish he had never come to the party. 2. Extend upon the following:

My greatest disappointment in life. 3. Translate into English: Impresia pe care am avut-o adesea că unei valoroase bucăţi

literare un comentariu bine conceput îi sporeşte parcă şi mai mult valoarea, e cu atât mai puternică atunci când aud sau citesc un asemenea comentariu privitor la o bucată muzicală sau la un tablou, domenii în care sunt cât se poate de profan. Ceea ce-mi spusese Vlad despre imaginea care reprezenta câteva mobile din secolul al 18-lea m-a făcut să mă uit şi mai atent la acel fotoliu pe care stătea o femeie şi la masa în jurul căreia mâncau câţiva aristocraţi. Ţin minte că m-a întrebat ce mai observ eu acolo şi i-am răspuns foarte cinstit că eu, cu slabele mele mijloace, n-aş mai avea ceva de adăugat …

– S-ar părea că ai mai văzut imaginea asta! – Ei, când am văzut-o prima oară nu ştiu, dar pot să-ţi spun

când am văzut-o aievea, căci cu ochii minţii am mai mângâiat-o de multe ori de atunci, de când am văzut-o ultima oară.


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Lesson 4 COMMUNICATIONS IT – an indispensable tool in communications Human beings have various ways of communicating to each

other, such as music, art, dance, and facial expressions, but some of these are more amendable than others to being expressed as strings of symbols. Written language is the easiest of all, because, of course, it consists of strings of symbols to begin with. If the symbols happen to belong to a phonetic alphabet (as opposed to, say, ideograms), converting them into bits is a trivial procedure, and one that was nailed, technologically, in the early nineteenth century, with the introduction of Morse code and other forms of telegraphy.

Computers do arithmetic on bits of information. Humans construe the bits as meaningful symbols. But this distinction is now being blurred, or at least complicated, by the advent of modern operating systems that use, and frequently abuse, the power of metaphor to make computers accessible to a larger audience. Along the way – possibly because of those metaphors, which make an operating system a sort of work of art − people start to get emotional, and grow attached to pieces of software.

About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible


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incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) “productized.”

Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.

A person who went into a coma before Microsoft was founded, and woke up now, could pick up this essay and understand everything in it – almost:

Item: the richest man in the world made his fortune from-what? Railways? Shipping? Oil? No, operating systems. Item: the Department of Justice is tackling Microsoft’ s supposed OS monopoly with legal tools that were invented to restrain the power of Nineteenth-Century robber barons. Item: a woman friend of mine recently told me that she’d broken off a (hitherto) stimulating exchange of e-mail with a young man. At first he had seemed like such an intelligent and interesting guy, she said, but then “he started going all PC-versus-Mac on me.”


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The text above is a scientific essay written by Neal Stephenson and published in New York Times, 2001. Scientific texts use what we call ESP (English for Specific Purposes). ESP has certain characteristics. Look at the next text and then try to infer the chracteristics of scientific texts:

The Principle of Relativity Newton’s Second Law, expressed by the equation F = d (mv) dt,

was stated with the tacit assumption that m is a constant but we now know that this is not true, and that the mass of a body increases with velocity. In Einstein’s corrected formula m has the value

mo m = ——— 1- v2/c2

where the rest mass mo represents the mass of a body that is not moving and c is the speed of light, which is about 3 105 km . sec-1, or about 186,000m. sec-1. …

Suppose that Moe is moving in the x-direction with a uniform velocity u, and he measures the position of a certain point, shown in Fig. 15 -1. He designates the “x-distance” of the point in his coordinate system as x. Joe is at rest and measures the position of the same point, designating its x-coordinate in his system as x'. The relationship of the coordinates in the two systems is clear from the diagrams. …

How can you describe the text in point of its structure and

vocabulary?


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Comprehension ● After reading the first text, look up the meaning of the words in

italics using them in contexts of your own. ● Answer the following questions: a) Do you have any computing abilities? b) How do human beings communicate? c) What do software and hardware mean? d) What was Bill Gates’ fantastical idea? e) Does the operating system business have a future? f) Enumerate the advantages of using computers. ● Here is a list of phrasal verbs. Match the verbs with the

explanations on the right: to call back to cause to come into existence to call for to summon, invoke, order to call forth to need, to require to call in to summon for advice or help; to demand

payment of; to make a short visit to call off to make active, to evoke, a quality,etc. to call on (upon) to put oneself into communication with a

person on the telephone to call out to cancel a plan, engagement,etc. to call up to cause one to remember, to remind one of Now use them in sentences of your own. ● Talk with your colleagues about your e-mails and on-line chats.

Use as many special terms as possible. Here is a specialized word list which might be of help to you: access, feed in, data banks, modem, screen, keyboard, terminal, to edit, to insert, to delete, to justify, to lay out, on-line, off-line.


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Grammar Functions of Modals Ability/Inability I can see smoke in the distance. She can’t speak German. When I was at school, I could play a lot. (repeated action) He was able to escape through a window. (single action) She wasn’t able to/couldn’t eat the sandwich. (Both types can

be used in the negative for either a repeated or a single action) Possibility/Impossibility You can have a piece of cake if you want one. You could ask someone for help. You may be lucky this time. She might come with us. (But I don’t think so) You can’t rely on British weather. Is she likely to come? Is it likely that she’ll come? Permission/Concession Can I ask you a question? Could you give me some advice? May I make a suggestion? Might I borrow your newspaper? (formal) You can sit here if you’d like to. You may take the last sweet.


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Obligation/Duty She must pay the rent by Friday. (strong obligation or duty) I have to speak to the boss. (obligation/necessity) He had to have an X-ray. Necessity I need to improve my English. The house needs cleaning. He has to make up his mind soon. Must I go with you? Do I have to finish this now? Need he sign the form? Prohibition You mustn’t smoke in this room. You are not to smoke in this room. (= it’s against the rules) You can’t join the Rotary Club. (= you aren’t allowed to join) Absence of Obligation or Necessity You needn’t worry – everything’s under control. I don’t have to leave until 3 pm. You needn’t have waited for me. (But you waited) They didn’t need to make any more food. (And they didn’t) Logical Assumption (affirmative) He must be nervous about the test. You must be feeling very sad. She must have left by now. He must have been lying all along.


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Logical Assumption (negative) It can’t be yours – I’m sure it isn’t. She can’t be enjoying herself; she looks so bored. He can’t have broken the window. You can’t have been listening properly. Advice You should take a holiday. You ought to try harder. You ought not to complain. Criticism We should have made sure that the tickets were valid. (but we

didn’t) He ought to have cooked dinner. (but he didn’t) Requests, Offers, Suggestions Can you hurry up, please? Would you pass me the salt? I’ll give you a lift. Shall I make the tea? She should go to the dentist’s. I might as well watch TV. ● Choose the correct modal to complete these sentences.

Remember that should in technical writing expresses instructions to operators, etc., (e.g. These machines should be handled with great care.) and specifications, (e.g. The temperatures in the core should not exceed the safe limit of about 6000C.)


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1. Don’t drive so fast! We … have an accident. 2. The news … be true, of course. 3. I saw the Opera House yesterday and the place was full of

painters, so it … be closed tomorrow. 4. Each student … take only one book home. 5. In London buses you … smoke on the upper deck, but you …

smoke downstairs. 6. … you give me the number of the Art Museum? 7. The fast reactor (… be) in operation by 2003. 8. The results of the experiments (… write) up carefully. 9. The road surface (… be) capable of withstanding very heavy

traffic loads. 10. Workers (… wear) overall all the time. ● Put the verbs in brackets in the correct form and then translate

the text into Romanian: It used (be) a science-fiction fantasy that one day computers

would (rule) the world. Some people thought it was impossible (prevent) these man-made devices from (become) more powerful than their creators, so they wanted (stop) more advanced computers (be) developed. Scientists were warned not (hand) over our destiny to machines. But computers can only (do) what we ask them (do). We can (get) them (complete) increasingly complicated operations, but, contrary to the science-fiction nightmare, computers can never (make) us (do) anything.

Today we expect computers (help) us (live) at the faster pace modern living demands. It is worth (mention) a few examples. Computers allow business people (keep) in touch with developments all over the world. They enable doctors (diagnose) illnesses more accurately. They let thousands of aircraft (fly) safely through our crowded skies without (bump) into other planes. In fact it is difficult (imagine) any area of life where computers do not play an important role.


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Written Assignment 1. It is generally agreed that society benefits from the work of its

members. How is the contribution of scientists valued in our society? 2. Extend upon the following: “Science is an ocean. It is open to the cockboat as the frigate.

One man carries across it a freightage of ingots, another may fish there for herrings”

(Bulwer, The Caxtons) “Knowledge is not an inert and passive principle, which comes to

us whether we will or not; but it must be sought before it can be won; it is the product of great labour and therefore of great sacrifice.”

“The powers of man, so far as experience and analogy can guide

us, are unlimited; nor are we possessed of any evidence which authorizes us to assign even an imaginary boundary, at which the human intellect will, of necessity, be brought to a stand.”

(Buckle, History of Civilization)


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INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS Lesson 1 EDUCATION Gap years: a growing trend It was heartening to see a rise in the number of school-leavers

applying to take a gap year before embarking on university study. One student in six chooses to stay at home rather than face the financial burden of starting a new life away at college. Clearly, these are also likely to be the least able to afford a traditional gap year. And yet employers and university dons agree that students who have taken a year off to travel or work overseas often make the best students and the most employable graduates.

The experience confers extra maturity and determination while studying, as well as those “key skills” of communication and team-working that the Government wants youngsters to be able to demonstrate.

A host of gap-year companies and charities has sprung up to meet demand and some can offer financial help to a few youngsters. However, it still helps in making the decision to travel if you can pack a credit card or phone home for cash when the going gets tough.

As the most adventurous school-leavers are the ones that universities and employers most want, there should be a more formal nationwide system for helping to organise gap years. In no way should the experience be made compulsory, as it is clearly not for everyone.


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Learning is their goal Ten and 11-year-olds are swarming over the pitch at Nottingham

Forest Football Club. Some are counting the number of seats in the stadium. Others are trying to calculate its height. A third group is measuring the length of the pitch with a trundle wheel.

Later the group will be taken on a tour of the ground, including the directors’box and the away team’s dressing-room, and asked to write up their impressions on a computer, using different designs and fonts to create a report that is also an attractive document.

Set them the same work in the classroom and many would switch off, convinced that it was too hard. Here, it is not seen as Maths or English, but as fun.

Another popular task is to redesign the club’s kit. Each centre has a computer suite, usually paid for by business sponsors, with at least 15 workstations, as well as scanners, photocopiers, faxes and an Internet link.

This is part of the Government’s Playing for Success initiative, under which all 44 football clubs in the FA Carling Premiership and the Nationwide League first division have been invited to set up after-school study centres for local children.

The right to choose a life full of meaning Bobby has high support needs but he has always wanted to be

like other people, someone who goes to work with a flask of tea, sandwiches and a paper. His dream was realized when he found a job in a motorbike showroom – an unusual and significant jump into mainstream employment. The European Committee of Inclusion International (ECII), a league of societies for people with learning disabilities, was set up to help people such as Bobby.

The Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities has been running a three-year study to examine the way in which those with severe multiple problems, and particularly people with little or no speech, can be helped to make informal choices in all aspects of life including education, training and employment. About 2 per cent of the


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UK population have a learning disability, known previously as a mental handicap.

The Foundation welcomes recent moves to strengthen the rights of people with learning disabilities. These include the extension of the Disability Discrimination Act, the appointment of Eve Rank-Petruzzietto, a woman with learning disabilities, to the Disability Rights Commission, and the Governments cross-departmental development of a national strategy, involving people with learning disabilities, carers and professionals. Paul Hocker says: “This initiative has given us the chance to give other people a flavour of the community they live in, feel part of that community, and let the community see that they exist.”

The three fragments selected from The Times, 2000, describe the major preoccupations of the British government to improve the education system.

Comprehension ● Answer the following questions: a) What are the advantages brought about by gap years? b) How does society and the policy of Britain encourage such

options? c) What means of making learning attractive can you imagine? d) Are there similar preoccupations in our country? e) If you were Prime Minister, what strategies would you

promote to improve the system of education in Romania? f) As a future university graduate would you like to specialize

and participate in a programme concerned with disabled people?

g) Are all the concerns and efforts mentioned above only a matter of finance or, equally, a matter of mentality?

● Look up the meanings of the words in italics and use them in similar contexts.

● Match the phrasal verbs in the list on the left with the explanations on the right:


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to come about to arrive at the place where a person is to come across to become less in price to come by to happen to; to result from to come down to happen to come in accidentally to meet, encounter, or run into to come of to enter into, concern, be relevant to to come on to get known, become public; be published to come out to begin; to become; develop, improve; hurry ● Now practise using the phrasal verbs. Grammar The Subjunctive Three categories of subjunctive may be distinguished (according

to Randolph Quirk): a) The mandative subjunctive, used with any verb in subordinate

that-clauses when the main clause contains verbs like: demand, require, move, insist, suggest, ask, etc. that ….The use of this subjunctive occurs chiefly in formal style (and especially in Am E) where in less formal contexts one would rather make use of to-infinitive or should+infinitive:

It is/was necessary that every member inform himself of these rules.

It is/was necessary that every member should inform himself of these rules.

It is/was necessary for every member to inform himself of these rules.

Other examples: a) It is important that children associate education with men as

well as women. b) It is important that we have parental support.


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c) Fairness required that each bidder should have the opportunity to allay the commission’s concerns.

d) Its time that the Government acted to protect teachers from this sort of intolerable pressure.

e) It was of paramount importance that members of the service should have complete confidence in all their dealings.

b) The formulaic subjunctive is only used in set phrases which

have to be learned as wholes: Come what may, we will go ahead. Suffice it to say that … Heaven forbid that … Far be it from me to (spoil the fun) A slightly less archaic – a rare use of may as a ‘quasi-subjunctive

auxiliary’ – for expressing a wish is may + subject + predication: May the best man win! May you be happy!

May he never set foot in this house again! Note: In very familiar style we find the question formula How

come (you missed the bus)? Also familiar is the greeting formula How goes it?, without do-periphrasis.

c) The subjunctive were is hypothetical in meaning and is used in

conditional and concessive clauses and in subordinate clauses after optative verbns like wish:

were If she { } to do something like that, … was were He spoke to me as if I { }deaf. were was I wish I{ } with him. was The subjunctive or should is sometimes used in formal real

conditions: be found


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If he { }guilty, his wife will suffer terribly. should be found The subjunctive or should is used in finite clauses as direct

object: admit all applicants. I proposed that he {

should admit all applicants.

● Translate the following quotations about education:

„Lucrurile frumoase le realizează educaţia; pe când cele urâte pot fi dobândite fără trudă, ca nişte fructe care cresc de la sine. Căci adesea ele silesc pe om, chiar împotriva voinţei sale, să fie rău, dacă are din natură o mare slăbiciune de caracter.”

(Democrit)

„Există, fără îndoială, tineri cu judecată şi bătrâni fără minte; căci nu timpul ne învaţă să gândim, ci o educaţie timpurie şi predispoziţia.”

(Democrit)

“După cum un ogor oricât de fertil, nu poate da roadă, dacă nu e cultivat, tot astfel şi sufletul fără învăţătură.”

(Cicero)

“Buna creştere a tineretului este garanţia cea mai sigură a fericirii unui stat.”

(Oxenstierna)

Written Assignment Comment upon the following ideas: 1. The mind of a child is a virgin page, on which we can write

almost what we like; but when we have once written, the ink is almost indelible.

2. We should teach our children something of everything, and then, as far as possible, everything of something.

3. Without popular education, moreover, no government which rests upon popular action can long endure.


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Lesson 2 CAREER Make your holiday pay August is quite a good time to be job searching in Britain because

students who have been working in July are now setting off on holiday. Many permanent employees are doing the same and these positions need to be filled. In Autumn, the Blue Arrow Agency is to introduce mobile recruitment centres which will visit universities to allow students to register for Christmas holiday jobs.

Then there are the Internet sites. Revolver.com has a wide range of job opportunities, including those that appear in The Times. Hotrecruit.co.uk caters specifically for students and young people. It offers some of the zaniest jobs around both in the UK and abroad. It does have “normal” office and bar tempting work, but its openings for summer jobs also include wing walking for a stunt team, tank driving, dungeon keeping (at the London Dungeon) and a scuba diving assistant in Greece. A look at the sites demonstrates that temporary work does not need to be boring.

A Web future in journalism Bigbluespot has been set up to give away free computers to

students. The site has an online student magazine and I am proud of my work on that. I know the idea of free computers sounds too good to be true but it isn’t.

They are second-hand computers, previously used by large organisations. We wipe the hard drives and load Windows 95 which is fine for writing dissertations. To be eligible, students need to sign up for an account, which gives them an e-mail address, and fill in a lifestyle questionnaire. There is an ₤ 85 returnable deposit and ₤14 is


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charged for delivery. We think we can make money out of companies which want to advertise on our student e-mail system.

I enjoy working in an academic/student environment and think the Web is the future, especially online journalism.

So you want to be a Television researcher Am I the right type? Are your Sherlock Holmes deerstalker and

magnifying glasses ready? So, what should I do? Find information on people and places

and check facts and figures for writers and producers. You might locate archive film and material and write briefs for presenters, interviewers or chat show hosts. On a current affair programme, you might suggest suitable topics and also brief guests. For a discussion programme, you would select participants and write background notes.

How would I dress for work? Casually. You could dress more formally when meeting high-profile interviewees.

Accessories? Phone, contacts book, clear speaking voice. Skills? Ability to communicate at all levels and to put people at

ease, methodical approach, detective ability, perseverance, awareness of research sources, specialist knowledge (according to programmes worked on), ability to meet dead-lines. You would also need to be self-motivated as researchers work alone for much of the time.

How do I begin? Tricky one this. It’s a classic chicken and egg situation when your work is known and respected, people will give you more. Researchers have various backgrounds, including journalism (useful for establishing contacts), publishing and other work in broadcasting.

Who would give me a job? The BBC, independent television companies, satellite and cable TV companies, independent production companies. But most researchers are freelances who are hired for a particular programme or for the duration of a series. The BBC has a very small number of full-time researchers. The norm is fixed-term contracts often short in length.


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How much could I earn? Around ₤20,000. Difficult to gauge because you might be paid on a weekly or daily rate. Daily rates can be between ₤100 and ₤400.

How could I progress? You will either become more highly paid because your skills are in demand or move into another function, such as producing or presenting.

Tips? Expect to work long hours and to travel in order to locate information. Don’t do this if you are worried by lack of job security. There are hundreds of independent television producers who sell programmes to TV companies and put together different teams for each project. Try to get some work experience. See media guides in your reference library.

(The Times, August, 2000) The texts above present different choices the young graduates in

the United Kingdom have to get a job. 1. Describe the situation of the graduates in our country. 2. What possibilities are there for the young philologists to get a

job? 3. Is there a job market in Romania? 4. What are the organisations which help young graduates in

getting a job? 5. What does an applicant for a job need to do? 6. What is a cover letter? 7. What is a CV (curriculum vitae)? 8. What questions do you expect to be asked when you go for

an interview? Listed below you will find samples of a cover letter and a CV so

that you could learn how to prepare yourself to get a job. The samples were taken from the Internet, updated February, 2002.


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The Cover Letter Basics The cover letter or letter of application is a personal statement of

interest in a particular position or company. A resume that is being submitted by mail should always be accompanied by such a letter. It is not necessary for on-campus interviews. It should be typed on the same quality paper as the resume and limited to one page. Optimally, it should be addressed to a specific person since this receives more attention than one merely addressed to “Personnel Director.”In preparing your letters, pay careful attention to the organization of ideas, grammar and spelling. Edit it meticulously and get a second opinion. Always use a standard business-letter format and maintain a formal tone, even if you are well-aquainted with your contact within the organization.

Format A cover letter serves three basic purposes and is divided into

sections accordingly: Statement of Purpose:

Begin with a statement of purpose. Name the position to which you are applying and how/where you learned of the position or organization.

Explanation of Qualifications: Explain why you are interested in working for this employer and specify your reasons for desiring this type of work. Emphasize any qualifications you particularly want the employer to notice and refer him/her to the enclosed resume.

Closing: State your availability for an interview. Better yet, give a time when you will recontact the company to further discuss employment opportunities.


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Sample Cover Letter Maria Ionescu 28, Victoria Str. Sector 1 Bucureşti [email protected] Prof./Dr. … Principal/Rector of … 35, … Str./Blv. Sector/Code … August 1, 2002 Dear Mr./Mrs. … Please consider my enclosed application for a high-level

teaching position in your school. In June I will complete the teacher education programme at the University Spiru Haret in Bucharest and I will be eligible for the Master’s Degree with the Cross Cultural Language Academic Development emphasis.

Your information packet indicates that your school is especially interested in teachers who are “highly competent in foreign languages.” As you will see on my enclosed resume, my academic preparation is quite strong in foreign languages and literatures, qualifying me for a supplemental authorization to teach those subjects in grades nine to twelve. Given my strong training in language instruction, and my sincere desire to help every child to succeed in school, I am confident that I can make a significant contribution to your school.

Please let me know if any additional information is needed. I look forward to meeting you in person to discuss my application.

Sincerely, Maria Popescu


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Curriculum Vitae (CV) Who should use a curriculum vitae? The curriculum vitae (or CV) is an essential document in

applications for academic employment. Persons applying for teaching, research, and some administrative positions are expected to submit a CV along with a rather detailed letter of application and other supporting materials. The CV is also used by professional educators who are seeking positions in school administration and other education-related careers.

Generally, academic institutions are the only employers who want to see a CV. Most other employers in private business and government strongly prefer a short, one-page resume; sending these employers a CV can, in fact, be counterproductive.

What is a curriculum vitae, and what is it used for? A curriculum vitae is much like a resume, only much longer and

more detailed. The CV ranges from two to dozens of pages in length, depending upon such factors as the extent of ones research record or the stage of one’s career. Entry level CVs in higher education tend to be only a few pages in length.

In applying for positions in higher education, the CV generally takes place of the printed application form. Typically, a position announcement for an assistant professorship will ask for a letter of application, a CV, a writing sample and other supporting materials.

Beside mailing the CV with application materials, you should carry a few copies to any interviews or site visits. You should generously give a copy to everyone with whom you interact during your visits.

What information should I include on my CV? The curriculum vitae is your opportunity to present yourself and

your qualifications in the format of your choice. It is important to keep in mind that the CV is your document, and as such you want it to present you in the best possible light with regard to the position for which you are applying. The format and categories used on CVs can vary among the academic disciplines; the suggestions offered here are to be used as a generic model only.


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In general, DO include any and all information that is pertinent to your qualifications for the job. The following is a list of possible categories of information to include:

Name, Address(es), Phone Number(s), E-mail Address Objective: What exactly are you applying for? Academic Preparation: College degrees with details Relevant Work Experience Specific Skills: Computing abilities, Lab techniques, etc. Publications/Exhibitions/Performances Papers etc. submitted for publication Current research interests Paper/Posters presented at conferences Grants received Travel Languages Professional organization memberships Professional services Honours and awards References

This list is suggestive and not exhaustive, and I strongly urge your consultation with an advisor in your academic field in choosing the appropriate categories.

On the other hand, DO NOT include in your curriculum vitae the kinds of personal information that have nothing to do with your qualifications for the position. Here are some items that range from tasteless to illegal if included. Do not list your height, weight, or other physical characteristic. Do not give your age, marital status, sexual preferences, racial or ethnic identity, political or religious affiliations, place of birth, or other information of this kind. Do not attach a photograph.

Your finished CV should be on good quality, standard 8.5 X 11 inch paper that is white (or something very close to white). It should, of course, be typed or printed on one side of the page only, and copies should be neat and letter-quality dark. It is acceptable to staple the pages in the upper left corner. Make the layout look highly organized


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and easy to peruse. Use capitals, underlines, bold print and bullets appropriately to lead the reader’s eyes where you want them to go. Use ample blank space between sections, and leave generous margins on all four edges. This is not a time to save paper. Make the most important information stand out on the left side of the page. Create a document that welcomes the reader’s attention.

● Before starting to prepare your cover letter and CV, make sure

you understand all the words underlined as well as the ideas. ● Use the following phrasal verbs in contexts of your own: break

away, break down, break in, break off, break off, break out, break through, break up, break with.

Grammar Direct and Indirect Speech ● Report the following, paying attention to the sequence of

tenses: 1. The Chancellor said: “My first concern is to lift pensioners

out of poverty.” 2. He added: “We can’t go back to the earnings link. What we

must do is help the poorest pensioners and people on modest incomes.”

3. A union official insisted: “Of course there was dissent, otherwise why would they have to redraft the document?”

4. The chief executive said: “We are back in the race, which is all that we ever wanted.”

5. Mr. Richards said: “The commission has decided on a procedure that results in such unfairness as to render the decision unlawful.”

6. Cdr. Fry said: “They will be uppermost in our minds.”


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7. “We owe it to our ancestors,” Mr. Lambert shouted. 8. “I don’t know if anybody really did suggest it but if they did,

they probably said it as a joke,” the actress said. 9. “What she is saying is that she wants the right people with

the right credentials to front all programmes,” she added. 10. “Their support in me has never wavered and their prayers and

good wishes have seen me through”, the teacher declared. 11. “I like to enhance beautiful faces – I’ve never been one for

slapping lots of make-up on”, says Hamilton-Smith, make-up artist.

12. “Children who were previously quiet have a lot more to talk about,” the headmaster said.

13. “All our children are at risk of dropping out of school at any stage,” he added.

14. “It is working far better than ever I expected,” Glen’s mother said.

15. She says: “I was worried that his opportunities would become increasingly limited.”

16. “Almost 500 years ago”, he started his confession, the rules of Thomas More’s Utopia held this view of legislation.”

17. “In this country tax law has exploded,” he pointed out. 18. “What governments seem to want is to change our

behaviour,” he continued. 19. “In my experience tax incentives rarely achieve their

intended effect,” he concluded. 20. The shrink told his patient: “I may be a therapist but I’m a

human being, too.”


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Written Assignment 1. Prepare your cover letter(s) and CVs for a position in a

school, university or a company.

2. Comment upon the following: “The real price of labour is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth

and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.”

(Emerson) “Real intelligence is a creative use of knowledge, not merely an

accumulation of facts. The slow thinker who can finally come up with an idea of his own is more important to the world than a walking encyclopedia, who hasn’t learned how to use the information productively.”

(D. Kenneth Winebrenner – Argonaut)


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Lesson 3 FAMILY LIFE The Spectrum of family relations across cultures and time 1. Cultural factors shaping family structures and processes – Matters of age – Matters of sex – Violent societies, Violent families 2. Relationship preferences − Stages of coupling − Courtship and pairing − Cohabitation − Before commitments made − Marriage rituals 3. Relations between husband and wife through time

–

– When first wed and its consequencies – The bearing of relative age – The bearing of relative education 4. Parenting – Thinking about socialization – The father role – The mother role – Children having children – Single parenting – Adoption and foster parenting – The son/daughter role 5. Singlehood and alternative family forms 6. Other family players beyond the nuclear cast – Implications of 3+generations alive simultaneously – Grandparents & the greats – Godparents & surrogate kin


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7. Marital Disunions – Divorce – Death 8. Institutions affecting & affected by family systems – religion – work – science – political orders – law – mass media 9. Remembering our roots: genealogy

(Journal of Marriage and Family, February, 2002) ● Comment upon each of the topics mentioned above. Understanding Anger in the Parent – Child Relationship From time to time we all get angry. Parents and children both

have a right to be angry at times. It’s all perfectly normal. To understand the role anger plays in the parent – child relationship, you need to understand why your child is behaving in a particular way. And you need to understand your reactions to that misbehaviour. Through this understanding, you can learn to respond to a child in a positive and constructive way.

The first step is to look at your own anger. Remember that children learn from observing and will imitate your behaviour. How we express anger is influenced by our culture, family background, and the norms set by the people around us. While we can learn to choose how we express anger, these influences are powerful. Psychologists have grouped people into three general categories based on how they express anger.

First, there are people who use a passive style and rarely express anger directly. Instead, this type of person stuffs their anger inside, which often leads to psychological or physical problems. Unresolved issues build up until the person explodes, often at another person who has little to do with the underlying cause of the anger.


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In the second group are people who use an aggessive style and react angrily to many different things. Their aggession is a way to dominate others and control the situation. It also can be a barrier to building relationships.

In the third group are people who use an assertive style to express anger and communicate their feelings without blaming the other person. The focus is on the behaviours involved, not on the person’s character.

Easing the Parent/Teen Crisis What are some ways parents can begin to break the circle of

disagreement with their teens? First, recognize that teenagers must become independent, to learn to become adult, just as they had to learn to walk and talk to grow from infancy to childhood. The first toddling steps away from the mother and the first “No, I won’t” are the beginnings of growth toward independence, the task of every healthy child.

If becoming independent is the task of children, then the task of parents must be to help their children reach independence by allowing them to walk (and fall), talk (and make mistakes) and slowly take control of their lives.

The changing parent/child relationship is bound to cause some problems and stress in all families. Parents can no longer control every part of their teen’s life, but they can keep communication lines open and be a positive example for their teen to follow. The warmth with which mature parents speak of their relationship with their teens is evidence that the struggle to help and let the children go is well-rewarded, for only then will they want to come back.

(Donna Rae Jacobson, family science specialist, 1995)


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The following are among the questions that the nation’s courts have had to wrestle with as the nature of American life has, in the course of a generation, been revolutionized:

– Does a father have the right to give his children his last name

even if his wife objects? – Can an expectant mother obtain an abortion without her

husband’s permission? – Should a teenager, unhappy with her parents’ restrictions on

her smoking, dating, and choice of friends, be allowed to have herself placed in a foster home?

– Should a childless couple be permitted to hire a “surrogate mother” who will be artificially inseminated and carry a child to delivery?

The modern family in today’s America faces such problems as

those mentioned above. What are the family problems in Romania? What are the causes ? Can you anticipate remedies for these

family and social problems? Comprehension ● Answer the following questions: a) Would you like to have a family? b) What do you think of single parenting? c) What are the traditions of the Romanian family? d) How have things evolved in modern society? e) What may the causes for such changes be? f) How did you feel the relationship between you and your

parents? ● Make sure you understand the words in italics and make up sentences using them.


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● Have another look at the Spectrum of family relations at the beginning of the unit and state how many of them match the status of the Romanian family. ● Here is a list of English idioms with their explanations. Use them in contexts of your own: to carry all before one – to be entirely successful in one’s career to carry one’s point – to convince one’s opponent in argument to cast in one’s lot with – to associate oneself with to clip a person’s wings – to reduce his powers or authority to dash one’s hopes – to destroy one’s hopes dark days – times of trouble, distress, misfortune to descend to particulars – to stop talking generalities to keep one’s distance – deliberately to avoid close relations to do one’s bit – to do one’s share in a common task or cause to do the handsome – to act generously, especially in hospitality Grammar The Passive Voice ● Put the verbs in brackets in the correct tense in the passive: 1. The local postal service (overwhelm) during the Christmas

holidays. 2. Everyone who receives the letter (ask) to send copies to 10

other people. 3. A copy (send) to The Daily Telegraph by an Old Bailey

judge. 4. Labour (leave) without a policy on state pensions. 5. The commission (refuse) permission to appeal. 6. The requirement of fairness could not (displace) by the

commission’s view that Mr. Brown would not come up with anything useful.

7. Parts of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher (find) by police last night in a park.


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8. The Real IRA (consider) most likely to be behind the attack, though no one had admitted responsibility.

9. The attack (describe) by the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch as reckless and audacious.

10. More than 23,000 British homes (build) near high-voltage lines, a practice banned in Sweden and America.

11. KLM (understand) to have been unconvinced about the need for the combined company to cut costs in order to boost profitability.

12. A shortage of teachers for the autumn term (predict) by a report published this week.

13. I (help) and (support) throughout this ordeal by my family, friends and colleagues.

14. A 4,000-year old pagan circle removed from the Norfolk foreshore a year ago, may have (rebury) in its original site.

15. They (expect) to hold hands and sing Auld Lang Syne into the new century.

● Change the following into passives in which the subjects are

formed from the words and/or clauses in italics: 1. I hadn’t been with the firm for more than four months when

they taught me the elements of marketing and made me a sales representative.

2. They recently increased my salary by thirty per cent. 3. The trouble is that at the same time they reduced my expense

allowance by nearly half. 4. Now my firm has offered me a job in Hong Kong but I won’t

take it because someone else has promised me a much better job in Japan.

5. They should do away with income tax altogether. 6. If necessary they could put up value added tax by way of

compensation.


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7. Unfortunately, you can always rely on this Government not to do the right thing.

8. From the way people are speaking about this Government one might think that they will not vote it back into power at the next election.

9. However, the proverb “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” will probably decide the result in the Government’s favour.

10. They humiliated the UN forces when the Revolutionary United Front rebels broke the terms of peace accords with the government and took hundreds of UN soldiers hostage.

● Translate the following fragment paying attention to the

passives: The ozone layer is what protects all life on earth from the harmful

effects of the sun’s ultra violet rays. The most frightening part is that the damage is irreparable. Efforts were made in that direction when the first hole over Antarctica was given official confirmation in 1985. The world was thrown into panic, or so it seemed. Individuals, galvanised into action, threw away their aerosols and stocked their cupboards with the so-called “ozone-friendly,” pump-action alternatives. However, as the shock wave of publicity subsided, people gradually began to revert back to their old habits, probably imagining that it was all alarmist propaganda designed to make money for someone. Fortunately, drastic action was taken by the world governments and a programme of chemical reduction was devised and implemented which, it was hoped, would see the total phase-out of CFCs (chlorofluoro carbons) by the year 2000. Yet, it was not drastic enough. New holes are threatening.


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Written Assignment • Extend upon the following: 1. Every generation of people is different in important ways.

How is your generation different from your parents’ generation? 2. Is it better for children to grow up in the countryside than in a

big city? Do you agree or disagree? Use specific reasons and details to develop your essay.

3. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents are the best teachers. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.


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Lesson 4 FEMINISM Pre-reading discussion Here are a few quotations from the French writer Simone de

Beauvoir. How would you comment upon them?

“Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination. In the legends of Eve and Pandora men have taken up arms against women. They have made use of philosophy and theology, as the quotations from Aristotle and St. Thomas have shown”.

“The parallel drawn by Bebel between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind. And instead of a single historical event it is in both cases a historical development that explains their status as a class and accounts for the membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in virtue of their anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they have always been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change it was not something that occurred. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts”.

“Woman’s brain is smaller; yes, but it is relatively larger. Christ was made a man; yes, but perhaps for his greater humility. Each argument at once suggests its opposite, and both are often fallacious”.

“If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if


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nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”?

[…] Profound changes have reshaped American family life in recent years. In a decade, divorce rates doubled. The number of divorces today is twice as high as in 1966 and three times higher than in 1950. The rapid upsurge in the divorce rates contributed to a dramatic increase in the number of single-parent households or what used to be known as broken homes. The number of households consisting of a single woman and her children has tripled since 1960. A sharp increase in female-headed homes has been accompanied by a startling increase in the number of couples cohabitating outside of marriage. The number of unmarried couples living together has quadrupled since 1970.

What accounts for these upheavals in family life? First, there has been a sexual revolution. Contemporary Americans are much more likely than their predecessors to postpone marriage, to live alone, and to engage in sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Today, over 80 percent of all women say that they were not virgins when they married, compared to less than a 20 percent a generation ago.

Extramarital sex also increased sharply. Back in the 1940s, just eight percent of women under the age of 25 had committed adultery. Today the estimated figure is 24 percent. Meanwhile the proportion of children born to unmarried mothers has climbed from just five percent in 1960 to over twenty percent today.

Feminism has been another major force that has transformed American family life. The women’s liberation movement attacked the societal expectation that women defer to the needs of spouses and children as part of their roles as wives and mothers. Militant feminist activists like Ti-Grace Atkinson dennounced marriage as “slavery” and “legalized rape”. The larger mainstream of the women’s movement articulated a powerful critique of the idea that child care and housework were the apex of a woman’s accomplishments or her sole means of fulfillment.

The feminist movement awakened American women to what many viewed as one of the worst forms of social and political oppression: sexism. The introduction of this awareness would go far beyond the feminists themselves. Although only a small minority of


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American women openly declared themselves to be feminists, the arguments of the women’s movement drastically altered women’s attitudes toward family roles, child care and and housework. As a result of feminism a substantial majority of women now believe that both husband and wife should have jobs, do housework, and take care of children.

The changes that have taken place in family life have been disruptive and troubling and have transformed the family into a major political battleground. Without a doubt, the family will remain one of the hottest political issues in the years to come.

(The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2001; the site updated on February 1, 2002)

The fragment above is part of an official report, written by

researchers of a national institute, and is the result of deep sociological studies. It deals with precise concepts, figures and dates.

Comprehension ● Answer the following questions:

a) What happened to the American family life in recent years? b) What are the divorce rates at present? c) What about the unmarried couples rates? d) What are the causes of such changes? e) How do many modern Americans view sex? f) How did the feminist movements contribute to this situation? g) How do feminist activists view married life? h) What is your opinion about such evolutions in modern

mentality? ● Use the following idioms in sentences of your own:

to be down on – constantly to find causes for complaint to draw in – to persuade, induce, lead on to draw out – by encouragement, to get (smb.) to talk freely to drive at – to imply, to hint


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to drop a line – to send a note, short letter, postcard to drop on – to find fault with (esp. a person in an inferior

position) to eat into – to reduce the amount or number of to be on edge – to be in a highly nervous state to have one’s eyes about one – to be sharply observant to fan the flames – to increase anger, to aggravate the trouble

● Explain the use of the following in your own words: single-parent household, female-headed homes, awareness, defer, disruptive, upheaval, upsurge, apex, cohabitating, adultery.

● Put each of the following words or phrases in its correct place in the passage below:

male chauvinist the weaker sex exploitation second-class citizens militant discrimination male-dominated unisex battle of the sexes feminist sex-objects sexist

A (1)…is a person, usually a woman, who believes that women should be regarded as equal to men. She, or he, deplores (2)… against women in the home, place of work, or anywhere, and her principal enemy is the (3) … who believes that men are naturally superior. Tired of being referred to as (4) …, women are becoming more and more (5) … and are winning the age-old (6) … . They are sick to death of (7) … jokes which poke fun at women. They are no longer content to be regarded as (8) … in terms of economic, political and social status. They criticize beauty-contests and the use of glamorous female models in advertisements, which they describe as the (9) … of female beauty, since women in these situations are represented as mere (10) … . We no longer live in the (11) … societies of the past. Let us hope, however, that the revolution stops before we have a boring world in which sex doesn’t make much difference. We already have (12) … hairdressers and fashions. What next?


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Grammar The Sequence of Tenses

● Use the correct tense form of the verbs in brackets: 1. They indicated that the minimum income guarantee (extend)

to include those drawing small private pensions. 2. English Heritage argued that Seahenge, with a massive oak

centrepiece, (risk) destruction unless its timbers (be) restored. 3. Mr. Lambert, the head of a haulage firm, has said he (pay) to

have the circle put back in the sea. 4. British officials said it was unlikely that the government

(increase) its deployment of troops. 5. Ministers suggested that senior citizens (spend) too much

time on cruises and not enough doing voluntary work for the community.

6. He needed to understand that the manager (want) him for a reason, and he’s grabbed that – his job (become) part of his image and he’s proud of it.

7. The student declared that she (learn) about restrictive relative clauses a long time before.

8. She has just told me that she (not like) rap music. 9. I was thinking what a pleasure it (be) to see my friends in

England again. 10. I hope you (not forget) that there (be) a meeting tonight. ● Supply the correct tense of the verbs in brackets; then turn the

passage into reported speech. “I apologise for not (type) all the letters,” said the boss’s

secretary, “but I (have) too much work to do,” she explained. “You always (make) this excuse,” complained the boss; “perhaps

you (not work) hard enough,” he suggested. “No, that (not true),” she denied. “But I (arrive) rather late,” she

admitted.


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“I (cut) your pay unless you (start, work) properly,” the boss threatened.

Afterwards the boss (wonder) if he (be) a bit too hard on her. “When Ann (join) our firm ten years ago,” he said “she already

(work) in the same business and (learn) a lot about it.” “For the first five years with us,” he added, “she (work) in the Sales Department, and (work) there when I (become) Managing Director, but since then she (work) as my personal assistant.” “I sincerely hope,” he pointed out, “that she (go on work) here until I (retire).”

● Translate the following paragraph into English: Niciodată nu aş fi crezut că soţia mea era o femeie atât de crudă,

în stare să-mi facă fără folos atâta rău. Până a doua zi, care mi se părea la capătul unui interminabil trecut, simţeam că voi înnebuni. Ştiam că iubirile sunt trecătoare, dar îmi spuneam că sfârşiturile trebuie să fie cinstite, că între oameni, care după ce au făcut o călătorie plăcută împreună, se despart elegant, se salută cu cordialitate şi la nevoie cu părere de rău că totul a durat atât de puţin. Sfârşitul acesta mi se părea o nemeritată infamie. Mi-e cu neputinţă să notez toate încercările prin care am trecut, haosul de gânduri pe care le-am confruntat aşa cum n-o mai făcusem până atunci şi nici de atunci încoace.

Written Assignment ● Comment upon the following using specific reasons and

examples to support your ideas. 1. Modern life is causing many traditions and beliefs to become

less important. Explain why certain traditions should be continued and maintained.

2. Research revealed the ten most expressive words in the English language: the most bitter word is “Alone”; the most reverent, “Mother”; the most tragic, “Death”; the most beautiful, “Love”; the most cruel, “Revenge”; the most peaceful, “Tranquil”; the saddest, “Forgotten”; the warmest, “Friendship”; the coldest, “No”; the one bringing the most comfort, “Faith”.


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LEISURE AND ENTERTAINMENT Lesson 1 BOOK REVIEW The two texts written below represent two types of cultural

critiques: one is a book review, the other one is a theatre chronicle. Both of them were published in specialized magazines and were written by columnists.The styles of the two resemble but there are also differences. Can you mention similarities and dissimilarities between the two?

On Poetry & Craft Theodore Roethke Foreword by Carolyn Kizer Copper Canyon Press

PO Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368 210 pages; paper, $15.00 Theodore Roethke is one of those rare poets whose enduring

reputation in American letters owes more to his stature as a teacher than to his own body of work. His poetry is less known now than it was at his death in 1963; he never enjoyed the rock-star status of Robert Lowell, and his untimely death prevented him from reaching the venerable age of Robert Frost or William Carlos Williams. Arguably, he gained his greatest influence as a teacher in the years following his death through the efforts of his former students, many of whom enjoyed notable careers as poet-teachers themselves, including Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, James Wright, and David Wagoner. Thus, many of Roethke’s methods and gestures lived on, particularly in the college writing programs that were rapidly proliferating in the 1960s. Indeed, Roethke’s presence was formidable, though sometimes


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subterranean, and his pedagogy and aesthetics certainly have influenced the way poems are vivisected in workshops. Fittingly, On Poetry & Craft, a new selection of Roethke’s essays, lectures, and articles, recasts previously published material in order to focus on Roethke’s pedagogy, and by extension, his aesthetics.

One point of access to Roethke’s aesthetics is through his unending fascination with the association, or dissociation, of feeling and thought. Like Eliot, Roethke used this notion as an expression of dissatisfaction with contemporary poetry, but whereas Eliot, particularly in his early critical works, ventures to show that thought and feeling coalesced in great poets to produce a comprehensive and orderly expression of human emotion (irrespective of what that emotion may be), Roethke’s tastes and temperament led him in an entirely different direction. In “On ‘Identity’”, included in On Poetry & Craft, Roethke states:

“We think by feeling. What is there to know? This, in its essence, is a description of the metaphysical poet who thinks with his body: an idea for him can be as the smell of a flower or a blow on the head. And those so lucky as to bring their whole sensory equipment to bear on the process of thought grow faster, jump more frequently from one plateau to another more often.” Superficially, one could say that Roethke is restating, in a

particularly American idiom, ideas popular during the 1920s’ rediscovery of English metaphysical poetry, but that would be a mistake, for there is less talk here of integration and more a privileging of feeling over thought. From the rhetorical question at the beginning of the quotation until it peters out into vagueness, Roethke charts a process that is less about thinking and more about the body. It is Eliot inverted, and perfectly complements Roethke’s intensely personal poetry. Whereas Eliot yearned for proportion and order, Roethke sought out a more disordered poetic universe, or as he wrote in his notebooks, “Today I’m going to lecture on confusion. I’m all for it.”

Cultivating this “unsoundness of mind” in students was a task of gigantic dimensions, and one at which Roethke excelled. Even in today’s university, where competition for students among disciplines


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can become quite grotesque, many creative writing programs still employ this form of branding, promoting their courses by lauding the virtues of “sideways thinking,” “non-linear reasoning” and the like.

It would be irresponsible, not to mention inaccurate, to blame Roethke for the excesses of the following generation. After all, Roethke was not alone in championing such tastes in poetry. Much of what Roethke wrote and taught was a grand gesture of swimming against the stream, in which case the tide has decidedly turned … many of today’s younger poets could do with a little more prosody and a little less attitude.

J. S. Renau (American Book Review, Nov./Dec. 2001, Volume 23, Number 1)

April 20, 1956 Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” by Brooks Atkinson Don’t expect this column to explain Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting

for Godot”, which was acted at the John Golden last evening. It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

But you can expect witness to the strange power this drama has to convey the impression of some melancholy truths about the hopeless destiny of the human race. Mr. Beckett is an Irish writer who has lived in Paris for years, and once served as secretary to James Joyce.

Since “Waiting for Godot” has no simple meaning, one seizes on Mr. Beckett’s experience of two worlds to account for his style and point of view. The point of view suggests Sartre – bleak, dark, disgusted. The style suggests Joyce – pungent and fabulous. Put the two together and you have some notion of Mr. Beckett’s acrid cartoon of the story of mankind.

Literally, the play consists of four raffish characters, an innocent boy who twice arrives with a message from Godot, a naked tree, a mound or two of earth and a sky. Two of the characters are waiting for Godot, who never arrives. Two of them consist of a flamboyant lord of the earth and a broken slave whimpering and staggering at the end of a rope.


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Since “Waiting for Godot” is an allegory written in a heartless modern tone, a theatre-goer naturally rummages through the performance in search of a meaning. It seems fairly certain that Godot stands for God. Those who are loitering by the withered tree are waiting for salvation, which never comes.

The rest of the symbolism is more elusive. But it is not a pose. For Mr. Beckett’s drama adumbrates – rather than express – an attitude toward man’s experience on earth; the pathos, cruelty, comradeship, hope, corruption, filthiness and wonder of human existence. Faith in God has almost vanished. But there is still an illusion of faith flickering around the edges of the drama. It is as though Mr. Beckett sees very little reason for clutching at faith, but is unable to relinguish it entirely.

Although the drama is puzzling, the director and the actors play it as though they understand every line of it. The performance Herbert Berghof has staged against Louis Kennel’s spare setting is triumphant in every respect. And Bert Lahr has never given a performance as glorious as his tatterdemalión Gogo, who seems to stand for all the stumbling, bewildered people of the earth who go on living without knowing why.

Although “Waiting for Godot” is a “puzzlement”, as the King of Siam would express it, Mr. Beckett is no charlatan. He has strong feelings about the degradation of mankind, and he has given vent to them copiously. “Waiting for Godot” is all feeling. Perhaps that is why it is puzzling and convincing at the same time. Theatre-goers can rail at it, but they cannot ignore it. For Mr. Beckett is a valid writer.

Comprehension

● Answer the following questions: a) Do you enjoy reading? b) What are your favourite writers? c) Which do you prefer: prose or poetry? d) As a philologist, you definitely read more than other students;

what are your reading habits? e) What do you look for when reading? f) Do you prefer to use the Internet instead of reading? g) What are the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet?


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● Make sure you understand the words in italics in both texts, and use them in contexts of your own.

● Learn the following idioms by using them in sentences of your own:

to give the go-by to – to ignore (a person or thing); to give a handle to – to provide an enemy/opponent/critic, with

an occasion/argument/excuse/pretext, that can be made use of or taken advantage of;

to give the palm to – to admit as best/pre-eminent/winner; to give a person beans/socks – to punish or defeat severely; to give tongue (or mouth) to – to express in speech; to go into a flat spin – to become muddled, to panic; to go to the country – (of a government) to resign and have a

general election; to go to pieces – of a thing, to be ruined; of a person,

physically/mentally/morally, to deteriorate, to break up; to go under – for a person, to fall into a state in his

career/business/social position, where he no longer has the importance/success/prestige, he formerly had;

to go up (or end) in smoke – to lead to no effective result, to be a failure.

Grammar The Infinitive

Remember the forms of the infinitive! Active: Passive:

Common aspect: Present: (to) give (to) be given (to) go ―

Perfect: (to) have given (to) have been given (to) have gone ―

Contin. aspect: Present: (to) be giving (to) be going Perfect: (to) have been giving

(to) have been going


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● Analyse the following examples (apud Leon Leviţchi) and state

the function of the infinitives: 1. Absolve yourself and you will have the suffrage of the world. 2. Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg,

and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another. 3. Did you find a rhyme to “niche”? 4. A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man

perfected without trials. 5. They began to count the absentees. 6. I want him to act less rashly. 7. This is for him to account for. 8. He was the last to come. 9. Byron went to Greece to fight for her independence. 10. To guard a title that was rich before,

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

(William Shakespeare, King John) 11. To know is to be powerful. 12. To be or not to be, that is the question.

(William Shakespeare, Hamlet) 13. He was known to be an expert in these matters. ● State the tense, aspect and voice of the infinitive forms in the

following sentences: 1. I am glad to be flying in a Boeing 737 to Bangkok. 2. Anaїs was very glad to be invited to the party. 3. My yellow roses don’t seem to have been damaged by the

storm. 4. I expect my daughter-in-law to come soon.


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5. She seems to have been appointed as Sales Manager. 6. She was glad to have been driving her Honda for such a long

time. 7. The letter was to be answered by e-mail only. 8. The plane seems to have landed. 9. He is said to have been studying the problems caused by

radon for a couple of years now. 10. I like to spend my evenings listening to music. ● Supply the missing forms of the following infinitives and name

them: to be visiting; to serve; to have talked; to be cleaned; to have been walking; to be lying; to have arrived;

● State the form and function of the infinitive in the sentences

below: 1) He repeated all the words so as not to make any spelling

mistakes. 2) It was too late to find them in the forest. 3) He wanted his voyage to be as interesting as mine. 4) It was a scene never to be forgotten. 5) I think the best way to get a general idea of a country is to see

it for yourself. 6) She was happy to have won the contest and to have been

given the prize money in cash. 7) I am sorry to be giving you so much trouble. 8) They stopped to buy an ice-cream. 9) It was kind of you to come. 10) Don’t make me laugh.


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Written Assignment ● Comment upon the following: “A book is the product of mind and yearning, spread patiently

across long centuries. It is the sign and symbol of man’s culture and understanding. It prevents the loss of good thinking and it expands man’s highest moments of permanency. It is the carrier and distributor of the germinations of the mind. It will not permit noble visions to wither. It breathes vitality into the past and brightens the eyes that search the future”. (Peabody Journal of Education)

“A man will turn over half a library to make one book”.

(Samuel Johnson) “If teachers can accumulate degrees and write books, well and

good, but the first requisite should be their ability to inspire youth”. (Eleanor Roosevelt)


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Lesson 2 SCULPTURE Pre-reading discussion 1) Do you like plastic arts? Which do you prefer, sculpture or

painting? 2) Do you know any famous Romanian sculptors/painters? 3) Which famous museums of the world would you like to visit? 4) Do you have any artistic talent? 5) What do you know about the art schools in Romania? VCU Sculpture: A Prominent Profile Richmond – It is critique day at Virginia Commonwealth

University’s graduate sculpture program, a demanding, nationally ranked crucible of young artistic talent that one professor here refers to as “boot camp for the battle of Sotto”. Twice each semester, students are required to invite three faculty members into their studios to see and discuss the works in progress.

Critiques, or “crits” , are used by many of America’s top art schools. But at VCU students are given usually broad lattitude to pursue their artistic visions, and they spend months working independently. That policy puts tremendous weight on the critiques. It has produced a steady stream of acclaimed young artists and made VCU, a nondescript urban university located in this citadel of Southern culture, arguably the hottest graduate sculpture program in the country.

These meetings between students and professors are usually collegial, serious and unflinchingly frank, a mixture of midterm, cabin inspection, brainstorming session and encounter group. Occasionally


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they turn rough. “Crits can get ugly. But then after you’ve bitten somebody’s head off, everyone goes out for a beer”, says Tara Donovan, a sculptor who received her master’s degree from VCU last spring and was recently selected for the Whitney Biennial, one of America’s premier contemporary art exhibitions. “The teachers treat you like a professional. The point is to give you feedback on your work, to make you think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it”.

On this particular day the grad students, most wearing the standard-issue art school colors of black or gray, arrive at their studios early. Their faces bear the tired-but-wired look born of late work, bad sleep and stress.

A trio of professors files into Peter Tascarella’s spacious studio in VCU’s new $14 million sculpture building. In the center of the room is an exact plywood replica of a video arcade game console, complete with glowing computer screen and pistol-grip joystick. The teachers gaze at the contraption as if it were an alien spacecraft.

Those art schools tend to stress art about socio-political issues such as gender and identity. The emphasis is clearly on process, on conceiving and producing first-rate art. Grad students are given broad lattitude to develop and pursue their own work. Everyone here likes making stuff and making it as technically sophisticated as possible.

Many VCU grads had gallery shows outside Richmond while still in school. Using water-soluble fabric, Renee Rendine sewed series of concentric cylinders that were suspended from the gallery ceiling. At the opening of the exhibit, she wore a bodysuit and slipped inside the cylinders and carefully rubbed holes in the fabric, creating gossamer honeycombs that had a womblike quality.

Donovan, who creates lyrical, tactile and beautiful installations based on the innate physical properties of common materials such as fiber optic cable or toothpicks, filled the Hemphill Gallery with roofing felt, turning it into a topographical survey of some black planet reeking of tar. In both instances, the artists were assisted by their fellow students.

(Ferdinand Protzman, Special to the Washington Post, Sunday, January 30, 2000)


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John Van Alstine is widely known for works that combine stone,

steel, and found objects (sometimes industrial in origin and sometimes natural or manmade forms cast in bronze). The work is abstract yet allegorical, exhibiting an ongoing narrative that is carried forward by the artist’s alchemical combination of forms and materials. He began his career as a stone sculptor, emulating Brancusi, Arp and Moore, but he soon became interested in Noguchi’s use of rough-hewn rocks and in the Postminimalist strategies of Richard Serra and Jackie Ferrara, among others. In the 1970s, he began assembling stones, taken straight from the quarry, with added wood and steel elements.

His later works continue to juxtapose stone and steel, but in the context of the inherent imagery of found objects that suggest human industry and labor as well as the history and fate of the environment and the landscape. Tether (Boy’s Toys) (1995) is a key work that includes a huge airplane fuel tank that floats at the end of a chain above a large round stone and an anchor. The assemblage suggests a vessel or a missile and brings to mind both the constructive and the destructive, the comic and the apocalyptic aspects of boys’ toys.

Van Alstine’s works establish places of contemplation about humanity’s many physical, cultural, and spiritual relationships with the land and our planetary home.

(Glenn Harper, Washington Post, 2000) The first text is a special report, for a famous American

newspaper, devoted to a similarly famous event in one of the best America’s art schools.

Have a look at the words in italics, make sure you understand their meanings, and make up sentences with them.


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Comprehension

● Answer the following questions: a) Why is the day referred to in the first text called “critique”

day? b) What is the policy of VCU? c) Why is it important for the graduates of VCU art school to

meet with their professors and the critics? d) How are the students dressed on that particular day? e) What do most art schools in America tend to stress about? f) What materials do graduate students use in their creations? g) How would you characterize the works of John Van Alstine? ● Match the phrasal verbs on the left with the corresponding

explanation on the right: look after think about the future look ahead watch out; be careful look for respect look down on have a view look up to rely on somebody look out take care of look onto search for look up read look at search for (a word) in a reference

book look to despise ● Use the above phrasal verbs in sentences of your own.


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Grammar The Participle Remember the forms of the participle!

Active: Passive:

Present: giving being given going ― Perfect: having given having been given

having gone ― Past Participle: gone given ● Now analyse the following examples: A poet is a man speaking to men. (W.Wordsworth) Seeing me, he stopped. Feeling tired, mother went to bed. He entered the living-room singing his favourite song. He spoke in a loud voice, as if being alone. Having signed the article, he gave it to the editor-in-chief. Having finished his training course, he went to the movie.

Having been warned of the low temperature in Himalaya, she knitted some warm gloves. Participial Constructions The Accusative with the Participle e.g. I heard him playing the piano. They saw Bill crossing the street. When she returned home she found her husband reading.


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The Nominative with the Participle e.g. They were seen watering the flowers. The actors were heard rehearsing several times. The Absolute Nominative with the Prticiple e.g. There being no other person in the office, she lit her cigarette. All the candidates having been examined, the commission left the classroom. ● Practise the participial constructions mentioned above. ● Supply the missing forms of the following participles and name

them: gone; missing; having taken; having been spent; being sold; coming; having lived.

● Define the forms of the participles in the following sentences: 1. Having translated the article he handed it to the teacher. 2. The rain having ruined my shoes, I had to buy a new pair. 3. Not having been written in time, the essay was not accepted

by the commission. 4. This done, they went home. 5. They resent not having been invited to the concert. 6. While reading the text, I noticed some misprints. 7. Translated very carelessly the article was difficult to

understand. 8. Arriving at the theatre we came across some friends. 9. The question being settled, the two boys shook hands. 10. We found her gone.


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Written Assignment

• Mind the following pieces of wisdom referring to success:

♦ The man who is afraid of making a big mistake will never make a big success; more opportunities are lost by over-preciseness than through carelessness.

♦ The world is filled with people who have worked hard but

have little to show for it. Something more than hard work is necessary; it is creative thinking and firm belief in your ability to execute your ideas. The successful people in history have succeeded through their thinking. Their hands were merely helpers to their brains.

♦ Do you know how to fail? If you do, then you will know

also the secret of succeeding, for the two are forever locked together.

♦ Success is getting what you want out of life without

violating the rights of others.

♦ The father of success is work. The mother of success is ambition. The eldest son is common sense. Some of the other boys are perseverance, honesty, thoroughness, foresight, enthusiasm and cooperation.

♦ The eldest daughter is character. Some of the other sisters are cheerfulness, loyalty, courtesy, care, economy, sincerity and harmony.

♦ The baby is opportunity. ♦ Get acquainted with the “old man” and you’ll be able to

get along pretty well with the rest of the family.


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♦ Women can never be as successful as men; they don’t have wives to help them.

♦ A successful man is one who makes more money than his

wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

(Teacher’s Treasury of Stories for Every Occasion)


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Lesson 3 MUSIC Pre-reading discussion a) Do you like music? b) What genre of music do you like best? c) Did you get any education in pre-classical or classical music? d) How do you feel when there are people who enjoy such

music? e) Have you tried at least to get accustomed to listen to such

music? f) Have you ever been to a concert at the Athenaeum? g) What famous Romanian or foreign conductors do you know? h) Which are your favourite composers? i) What famous soloists do you know?

Sergiu Celibidache (1912 - 1996) Sergiu Celibidache was born in Roman, Romania, on July 11,

1912. His childhood was spent in the Moldavian town of Jassy, becoming interested in musical composition at an early age. He studies mathematics, philosophy and music in Iassy, and later in Bucharest and Paris, and went to Berlin in 1936 to study composition at the Berlin Academy of Music (Hochschule für Muzik). Two years later he enrolled to study conducting under Walter Gmeindl, and subsequently graduated from the Friedrich Wilhelm University with a dissertation on Josquin des Pres (a 15th century Flemish composer whose poliphonic works had a great influence on 16th century music).

At the same time the young Celibidache became attracted to Zen Buddhism, an ancient Chinese (and, later, Japanese) school of thought for guidance in the way of life.


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Celibidache was much sought after for both his style of

conducting and his teaching of conducting. In interpreting works, he was known for his very original tempi, which he believed were necessary to let the complexity of sounds from a passage develop and be heard in a concert hall (a phenomenon called “epiphenomena”). Hence, the richer the music, the slower the tempo required; and especially in his later years, when his legendarily generous tempi helped to broaden the vision of the works performed under him.

In the art of conducting, Celibidache aimed to incorporate the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. He was also actively involved in giving masterclasses to budding conductors. Enthusiastic students claim that they learnt more from simply observing him for an hour than in weeks of lessons. Inspired Celibidache – wannabes came away from masterclasses embroiled in Zen teachings, transformed from rigid human metronomes to conductors who move, beat and breathe with the innate natural rhythmic flow of the body.

The celebrated Maestro died in Paris on August 14, 1996, from the effects of a fall that he had suffered in Florence in May. Among the many honours and awards bestowed on Celibidache are the appointment to an Honorary Professorship of the Federal Capital Berlin and the Bavarian Order of Merit. He is also an honorary citizen of his hometown Jassy and a “doctor honoris causa” of the Jassy Academy of Art. On his eightieth birthday he was awarded the Great Cross of Distinction of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and honorary citizenship of the city of Munich.

(Soon Kian Hing) […] Josh Ronsen: Celibidache, why is he so significant for you? Iancu Dumitrescu: Above all, Celibidache is, in my opinion, one

of the greatest intelligencies of this century. He is thus a thinker, a philosopher of unordinary stature, even among people of profession, the philosophers …

JR: Could you be more specific?


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ID: Celibidache is a master of thought, of the process of thought, certainly in a particular direction; he is a thinker who follows the process of living thought, a Guru who leads his meditations in an extreme synthesis, and at the same time in a flexible way, fresh, alive.

JR: How would you characterize Celibidache’s art? ID: Celibidache is a musician, a conductor of genius who applies

his motivations of thought to a material as fragile as music. For a guru – excuse me for insisting – there is no separation between life and art. This is the source of the radiant force, the magnetism of Celibidache, my spiritual father. He does not conduct. He finds himself in a complicity with the music, personifying a principle, that of the indepth lived thing. It is a spiritual excursion which he realizes, by means of the music, of the scores, in a world always incipient, an eternal present.

JR: How did he influence your musical creation? ID: Celibidache’s thinking gave me a system of composition in

which phenomenology is assumed to the maximum, from where, if you want, the success of his music, beyond its declared difficulty. Thus, music occupies a place privileged by its temporal dimension, not by concrete sound. […]

● The first text is a short biographical note; the second one is an

interview. Imagine you are a reporter and you are asked by the editor of our university magazine to interview a famous Romanian musician. Don’t forget to put a short biography at the beginning of your interview.

● The words in italics belong to the domain of music. Find more

such words in a specialized dictionary.


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Comprehension ● Answer the following questions: a) When and where was Sergiu Celibidache born? b) What did he study and where? c) What University did he graduate from in Germany? d) What was his doctoral thesis about? e) Why was Celibidache so much sought after? f) What did he incorporate in the art of conducting? g) How did Celibidache form the young conductors? h) When did he die? i) What awards and honours did he receive? ● Summarise Celibidache’s merits as they are presented and

praised by Iancu Dumitrescu in his interview. ● Match the following phrasal verbs on the left with the

explanations on the right: hold back control (oneself/feelings) hold in delay; prevent development hold off wait to get sth desired hold on postpone hold out keep at a distance; delay hold out for endure; resist hold out on wait hold over delay; rob hold up keep a secret from sb ● Make sentences using a) hold back, b) hold off, c) hold up

meaning “delay”.


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● Fill in the blanks with one of the idioms: on the quiet, out of the

question, be in the same boat, be in sb’s shoes, through thick and thin, on second thoughts, make one’s day, in deep water, make waves, frosty welcome.

1) Although he was collecting unemployment benefit, … he was

working as a cosmetics distributor. 2) It is … that you should drive the car without your licence. 3) As far as jobs go, we’re both … . I haven’t worked for

months either. 4) If I …, I would think twice about taking that job. 5) “Don’t ever leave me,” pleaded Bussaba. “Don’t worry, we’ll

be together ….,” answered Alex. 6) “Write this essay for homework,” the teacher said. “No, …

do it now,” he added. 7) She … when she accepted his proposal; it was the happiest

day of his life. 8) Unless you can explain where you got the money, I’m afraid

you’ll find yourself … . 9) My boss accused me of … when I complained about our

working conditions. 10) We got such a … when we arrived at the party that we almost

wished we hadn’t gone. Grammar The Gerund Remember the forms of the Gerund! Tense Voice Active Passive Indefinite requiring being required going ― Perfect having required having been required having gone ―


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Formally the gerund has the same form as the participle and it

also has a verbal origin, only its function is both verbal and nominal. e.g. He had an aptitude for mimicking people. He had a bad habit of smoking before breakfast The gerund may be associated with certain parts of speech: a)

verbs, b) verbs with prepositions, c) nouns with prepositions, d) adjectives with prepositions. e.g. a) (to) avoid, bear, begin, finish, hate, intend, keep, prefer, start, stop, I cant help;

b) (to) accuse of, agree on, aim at, believe in, consist in, prevent from, result in, succeed in;

c) art of, disappointment at, experience in, fear of, habit of hope(s) of, idea of, importance of, objection to, process of, reason for, right of, surprise at, way of;

d) capable of, conscious of, proud of, responsible for. Also: worth.

● Make up sentences of your own practising the gerund. The Perfect Gerund ● Read the following sentences and state the function of the

gerund: 1) He denies having spoken rudely with his girl friend. 2) Thank you for having contributed to this issue of our

students’ newspaper. 3) After having read the message, he went downtown to meet

her. 4) Owing to his having directed “A Beautiful Mind”, the film

was awarded an Oscar for the best film. ● Find the gerunds in the following sentences and name them:


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1. Knowing is easier than guessing. 2. I hate being visited by uninvited people. 3. After having shaken hands they parted. 4. She felt proud of having been seen in company with a famous actor. 5. She spoke much of her writing the essay. 6. We rely on his doing his job properly. 7. Hearing these words, she couldn’t help crying. 8. My friend told me of his having taken Arabic lessons. 9. I dislike his interfering in the affair. 10. He was accused of having entered the country illegally.

● Here are sentences containing -ing forms. State the name and

function of each of them. 1) The fall in the number of men taking up teaching as a career

is particularly worrying. 2) When I talk to the people recruiting graduates to teacher

training, the thing that men say most often is that they are worried about building up further debt.

3) Societys perception of teaching young children is that it is not a manly thing to do – young children are women’s work.

4) The publisher agreed to pay him advances on signing the contract.

5) The law recognised that the innocent party had a legitimate interest in having the contract performed.

6) By submitting his manuscript for publication without first obtaining clearance, the author committed a breach of that undertaking.

7) An extraordinary glimpse of the web of contacts sustaining the legal and political establishment has emerged from a chain letter that has spread like a benign virus, nourished by the goodwill of busy people.

8) Their kids are doing soccer camp, sailing camp, kayaking and lots af mind-improving reading.

9) I have my standards, however, I don’t mind a bit of wrestling. 10) A mother likes to be needed. Especially when she has

stopped providing food and bedtime stories.


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Written Assignment • Write an essay starting from the famous idea that “music is

the real universal language”. • Translate into English:

Ceea ce este esenţial în crezul artistic al lui Celibidache, nu stă

sub semnul perfecţiunii, cum ar putea să pară natural, ci sub semnul adevărului artistic.

Românul Sergiu Celibidache – maestru vrăjitor în a obţine cele mai rafinate nuanţe … El poate fi când «charmeur» , când demon, când acrobat … Cu gestul său impulsiv dar foarte precis, aci înăbuşă o voce, aci o realizează din desişul partiturii, aci rotunjeşte o cantilenă, aci subliniază contururile incisive ale alămurilor.

Felul în care marele artist îşi structurează programele îndreaptă atenţia asupra esenţei muzicale, propunând o singură vedetă, muzica însăşi şi, paradoxal, un singur solist: orchestra însăşi.

(Iosif Sava – Iubiţi muzica secolului 20)


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Lesson 4 BEAUTY PAGEANTS Pre-reading discussion 1) Have you ever been to a beauty pageant? 2) Have you participated in a beauty contest? 3) Why do you think such contests are organized? 4) What is your opinion of the women who participate in such

contests? 5) Do you think fashion models are more important than beauty

contestants? Beauty pageants are basically a diligent grading procedure. They

are the female human being equivalent of those posh greengrocer shops that display neat rows of strawberries, or apricots, which are all identical in size and shape and colour. Similarly, all beauty pageant contestants share common features. They have legs taller than tent poles. They possess teeth so large and so white that they glow in the dark. Their tresses have been whipped, like egg whites, to create an inflated hairy meringue. And they have crotches hidden behind such itsy-bitsy triangles of bikini that its hard to believe you could conceal even an M&M behind there, let alone a fully functioning sexual reproductive organ. Are they bright? Not always. But many are; and they exploit their looks as a way to escape poverty, the same way that Cassius Clay chose boxing as his way out of the ghetto.

Anyway, why should there be any more need for Miss World to be brainy than for Einstein to be also handsome, or for J.D.Salinger to be an exemplary parent as well as a fine novelist? Beauty contestants hardly have a monopoly on inanity. There are many people who say dumb things, and not all of them are pretty. Some of them are Robin Cook.


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Are beauty queens vain? Probably: many people who are beautiful, or brainy, or rich, or successful, or famous are also vain. Fashion models almost all are, to a greater or lesser degree, though they aren’t as vilified as beauty queens. So, yes, beauty contestants can be vain, too. Mpule Kwelagobe, Miss Universe 1999, says: “One thing you know is that you only have one year to be Miss Universe and it’s a year that will never come again. You have to make the most of it because millions of women are green with envy to be in my shoes”

Beauty pageants are just too easy a target for ridicule, and the more sophisticated you think yourself to be as a presenter, the more tawdry it looks to take cheap shots at these women – women who may have the IQ of tree bark, but who may equally speak six languages and be as bright as brain surgeons. Fat women rightly hate it when people assume that they eat like hogs, don’t care about their appearance, have scant interest in sex and may be dim to boot. But these are some of the women who brand all beauty contestants as not only traitors to feminism, but also so mindless they can barely remember their own shoe size.

Frankly, who can be bothered to get hot under the collar any more about beauty competitions? These contests hardly dominate our lives. Given that people like seeing other attractive people, just as people like eating good food, you might well argue that damning beauty contests is hypocritical if you don’t also damn Michelin stars for restaurants.

The irony is that the people who most like watching Miss Universe are not men, but other women – just as it is women who pore over the slinky models in Vogue. I don’t think beauty contestants even match most men’s template of a sexy woman. The contestants seem to be competing within certain agreed guidelines of what constitutes beauty for the purposes of competition, much the way prize vegetable-growers have to follow strict rules when cultivating competition marrows which may turn out to be huge, green and speckled, but not necessarily tasty. Not that I’ve ever been to a beauty pageant. Maybe these women are hotter than napalm when seen in the flesh.

(Joe Joseph, In the Eye of the Beholder, The Times, August, 2000)


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The text is a commentary upon what beauty pageants may mean

and it is written by a columnist of The Times. Read it attentively and talk with your colleagues about its style.

● Make sure you understand the words in italics. Use them in

new contexts. Comprehension ● True or false? 1. All beauty pageant contestants share common features. 2. They have legs shorter than tent poles. 3. They are always bright. 4. They exploit their looks as a way to improve their English. 5. All beauty contestants are pretty. 6. Fashion models are as vilified as the beauty contestants. 7. Some may equally speak six languages. 8. Most people who like watching Miss Universe are men. 9. Beauty contestants match most men’s template of a sexy

woman. 10. The author always goes to pageant beauty contests.

● Invent a little story referring to beauty queens using the

following idioms: pull someone’s leg; wash your dirty linen in public; sweep sth under the carpet; take someone under your wing; behind your back; give someone a hand; a white lie; let the cat out of the bag; below the belt; pull the wool over someone’s eyes.

● Read the following passage, then answer the questions which

follow it. The relevance of the British monarchy to modern life is a subject

of constant discussion. While academic debate over the hotly disputed “unnecessary expense” and “insignificance” of what is sometimes


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termed an archaic institution rages on, it is increasingly clear that public interest will not be diminished by rational argument. It is surely down to a question of human nature; we are singularly fascinated by the lives and loves of famous people who move in an exotic, alien world far more glamorous than our own. The Royals are the ultimate in fame and glamour. The media falls over itself to quench our insatiable desire and provide us with a continuous flow of tit-bits and more substantial chunks.

We have recently been afforded a long-awaited and fascinating glimpse into the Queen’s jewel box. No, it isn’t on display at the local supermarket but it has been publicly undressed in a new book. Jewels have always symbolised royal prestige; it is the mystique of the priceless gems which transform Queen Elizabeth in the eyes of the public from grandmother to Head of State. Her private collection, which has never been fully inventoried, dates back to the sixteenth century. The jewels themselves are said to “reinforce a sense of stability”, which is seen by many as the monarchy’s greatest strength. Certainly, many of the necklaces and tiaras which have adorned the Royals in portraits stretching back through the centuries reappear in present day photographs of the family, and the history of the gems is sometimes more colourful than the gems themselves.

1. What is suggested by the phrase “academic debate”? 2. What does “it” refer to? 3. Give an alternative phrase for “quench our insatiable desire”. 4. Explain what “tit-bits” and “more substantial chunks” refer

to. 5. In what sense has the glimpse into the Queen’s jewel box

been “long-awaited”? 6. In what sense has the Queen’s jewel box been “publicly

undressed”? 7. What two functions are the jewels described as having? 8. Explain the use of the word “colourful”. This last lesson of our practical course is meant to be – as the

English say – in lighter vein. As we amused ourselves with the “efforts” of fake queens and the “fancies” of real queens, we’ll have a


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good laugh listening to politicians. If you manage to correct their English, you won’t become better politicians but you’ll be better specialists in English. Good luck!

“You don’t need to be smart to be president”. “I think anybody who doesn’t think I’m smart enough to handle

the job is underestimating”. “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning”. “It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it”. “Laura and I really don’t realize how bright our children is

sometime until we get an objective analysis”. “I understand small business growth. I was one”. “I’ve changed my style somewhat, as you know. I’m less, I

pontificate less, although it may be hard to tell it from this show. And I’m more interacting with people”.

“The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case”.

“The important question is, How many hands have I shaked?” “Keep good relations with the Grecians”. “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully”. “Will the highways in the Internet become more few?” “They misunderestimated me”. “We have struggle to not proceed but to proceed to the future of

a nation’s child”. “The reason we start a war is to fight a war, win a war, thereby

causing no more war!” (The first presidential debate) “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take

dream”. “There’s a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up

to me and say, I don’t want you to let me down again”. “I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to

answer questions. I can’t answer your question”. “You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a

literacy test”. “If you’re sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and

principles, come and join this campaign”. “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family”.


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“There needs to be debates, like were going through. There needs to be townhall meetings. There needs to be travel. This is a huge country”. (Larry King Live, Dec. 16, 1999)

Unless otherwise specified, the quotations were selected from Home of the George W. Bush quote library, 2000-2001.


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CONSOLIDATION EXERCISES Use the words in brackets in the correct tense.

1. The weather (get) colder since the end of October. 2. The children (look) forward to seeing snow for along time. 3. Yesterday it (start) to snow and they (get) very excited. 4. After it (snow) for an hour, they (go) outside to play. 5. How long (she, live) in this county? 6. (your family, live) here all their lives? 7. We (not have) a test yesterday. 8. We (not have) a test for a long time. 9. We (have) a seminar in English literature now. 10. The bell (ring) when the teacher entered the room. 11. Anaїs (learn) to play the piano when she was three. 12. She (like) to play the piano. 13. I (receive) her invitation last week; I (not see) her for weeks. 14. The professor has just told me he (be) very busy tomorrow. 15. He (be) very tired by the time he (get) back. Use the appropriate modals.

1. After finishing the exam … (go home – permission) 2. After passing our exams … (go on holiday – ability) 3. Since it’s nearly midnight …(stop/study – advisability) 4. My friend is going to the doctor this afternoon so …

(feel/well – deduction) 5. The translation isn’t finished yet but… (be/soon –

expectation) 6. I have nothing to do tonight so … (call on him – possibility) 7. Your sister is still sleeping so … (make/noise – prohibition) 8. They serve five courses in this restaurant but…(eat –

negative obligation) 9. I have plenty of change so … (leave/tip – willingness) 10. There is trout on the menu … (order – desire)


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Put the verbs in brackets in the subjunctive. 1. It’s not likely that they (change) addresses. 2. It was very odd that we (meet) in my friend’s house. 3. It is doubtful that her behaviour (change) before we return. 4. It seemed necessary that his friends (keep away) from

interfering with his work. 5. It is strange that she (say) such a thing; it’s not like her. 6. It was inevitable that the conversation with George (turn)

upon novel writing. 7. It was amazing that this coarse man (be) so worried about a

dog. 8. She listened in silence to Alex’s explanation why it was

essential that he (remain) at the airport. 9. It is not fair that her daughter (send) to bed so early on a day

like this. 10. It was all wrong that someone so young (be) so ill.

Put the appropriate form of the infinitive. 1. He was anxious (win) the first prize. 2. I did not expect (invite) to the party. 3. I am sorry (disappoint) you, but I meant nothing of the kind. 4. They are supposed (experiment) in this field for about a year

and are believed (achieve) good results. 5. He must (read) something funny, I can (hear) him laughing

in the next room. 6. They seemed (hear) the news; they look excited. 7. The box is (handle) with care. 8. Don’t worry about her, she is sure (have) a good time at the

moment. 9. That man must (sit) here for about an hour. Who can he

(wait) for? 10. He is happy (award) the Nobel Prize. The ceremony took

place yesterday.


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Use the verbs in brackets without changing the meaning of the

sentences below. 1. They say that this book was written by two people. (said) 2. There is nothing we can do about it. (done) 3. I hate them to leave me behind. (left) 4. You shouldn’t take delight in other people’s failures. (gloat) 5. Could someone answer my question? (there) 6. It is usual for children to ask a lot of questions. (apt) 7. “I disapprove of people who lie,” he said. (disapproval) 8. “Don’t talk during the lesson!” the teacher said. (forbade) 9. He flew to New York with no stop-overs. (direct) 10. A speech was delivered and the film was shown. (first/later) 11. Why don’t you give all these old clothes away? (rid) 12. He felt that his employers didn’t appreciate him. (granted) 13. She said she was worried about the problem of pollution.

(concern) 14. Some friends put his name forward to be spokesman.

(nominated) 15. He suffers from delusions and hallucinations. (prone) 16. The end of the film was completely unexpected. (taken) 17. A rejection of their offer would have been foolish. (accepted) 18. It obviously wasn’t her intention to offend you. (mean) 19. You should do what your tutor advises. (advice) 20. She said she disliked loud music. (expressed)

Make up new sentences as suggested between brackets. 1. She heard the news. She told all her friends.

(On…………) 2. When you finish your work, you can leave.

(The sooner……) 3. The rain stopped. The sun came out.

(Hardly………….) 4. Who does this house belong to?

(Who is ………….)


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5. It is known that she took a drug overdose. (She…………)

6. Should you hear from him, tell him to ring me. (If…………)

7. We left the room and then we started laughing. (Only………)

8. He lost his job and his wife left him as well. (Not…………)

9. It is impossible for me to do this again. (There is………..)

10. I had no idea that Sam was a musician. (Little………….)

Choose the most appropriate word to fill in the blanks. 1. The Prime Minister has ….. the controversial statement he

made about nuclear arms. (retracted, extracted, pulled out, renounced)

2. NATO has ordered its troops to ….. of the area. (pull out, extract, renounce, retract)

3. Following a drink-driving charge, his driving licence was ….. by the court. (refused, denied, revoked, rejected)

4. Alex begged Bussaba to help but she ….. (denied, refused, rejected, revoked)

5. I wasn’t ….. to see a queue outside the new cinema hall. (taken aback, astounded, amazed, surprised)

6. She was a little ….. by this strange behaviour. (astounded, amazed, surprised, taken aback)

7. I don’t think you’re suitably ….. for this party. (clothed, clad, wearing, dressed)

8. The knight was ….. shining armour. (clad in, clothed in, dressed in, wearing)

9. As a single parent, it’s difficult for her to ….. a family. (support, afford, put up with, withstand)

10. The building finally fell down, unable to ….. the terrible earthquake. (put up with, withstand, support, afford)


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SPECIMEN LESSON PLAN

A. Description of the class Level Composition of the class Time and place B. Recent work What students have been studying Listening work Writing notes based on listening C. Objectives To create interest in a certain topic:

to promote discussion To raise expectations and create involvement in a reading task

To read to confirm expectations To study relevant words To prepare a description of the topic

D. Contents (In accordance with the objectives)

a) Context b) Activity/class organisation c) Aids d) Language e) Possible problems

E. Additional possibilities 1. Find the differences 2. Describe and draw 3. A co-operative writing exercise


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PUNCTUATION The Full Stop (.) It is placed at the end of affirmative sentences. e.g. We like pop music very much. Thomas received a letter yesterday. It is used in certain abbreviations, such as M.A., e.g., i.e., etc. e.g. He had a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics, so he could get a fine job. The Colon (:) It is used in writing and printing to introduce an explanation,

example, enumeration, quotation. e.g. She told me she would buy the following vegetables:

cabbage, potatoes, cauliflower and parsley. That’s what the proverb says: “To a grateful man give money

when he asks”. The teacher told me: “Read John Donne’s poems and you’ll

relieve your fear of death”. The Semicolon (;) It has the significance of a longer pause, and it is used to separate

independent parts of a sentence and different things in a list. e.g. I’ve told you once and I’m telling you again; we’re in a

foreign country – mind your behaviour!


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The Comma (,) It separates words or sentences having the same syntactic value. e.g. Bob, Janet, Mary and Philip are all very hard-working. It is used: a) after affirmative or negative adverbs: e.g. No, she said. Yes, of course, they answered. b) after adverbs like: indeed, however, too, of course.

e.g. Indeed, it’s a fine weather today. I don’t like your new hair style. However, you look younger. c) in coordinate clauses:

e.g. They went home, had a nice dinner, rested for a while and then watched TV. d) between subordinate clauses of the same type:

e.g. He told me about the book that he read, that he had to read and that he liked to read. e) before and after a non-defining relative clause: e.g. This grammar book, which was published last year, is one of the best I’ve ever used. f) to separate an introductory word or phrase from the main part

of the sentence:

e.g. To be honest, we’re not sure yet of the possible results.


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g) in direct speech:

e.g. “I’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said, “so I’d better go

home now.” h) in figures, the comma is used instead of the full stop in

Romanian:

e.g. 1,000,000 = 1.000.000 The Dash (–) It marks an unfinished idea, or a long pause; sometimes it has the role of a comma. “The event will bring them here – when?” “Err…it’s a – it’s a nice hat you’re wearing”, she uttered timidly. The Hyphen (-) It is used: a) in compound words: e.g. forget-me-not; kind-hearted; blue-eyed; up-to-date; washing- machine, etc. b) to link a prefix with a proper or abstract noun: e.g. pre-war, anti-American, post-Victorian c) to separate a prefix from a word whose first letter is the same

as the last letter of the prefix:

e.g. co-ordination, re-examine, re-enter, co-operation


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d) in numbers between tens and units:

e.g. twenty-six, two hundred and thirty-five e) when expressions of measurement, amount or quantity are

used as adjectives before a noun:

e.g. a five-pound note, a three-mile walk, a two-hour lecture The Inverted Commas (“ ), (” ) They mark the Direct speech in English, and are also used to

mark a quotation. “I’ve not made up my mind yet”, mother complained. “Beauty lies in lover’s eyes” (Shakespeare) The Question Mark (?) It is placed at the end of interrogative sentences. e.g. Where do you come from? Who’s the girl next to Barbara? The Exclamation Mark (!) It is used: a) in imperative sentences:

e.g. Go and fetch a doctor! b) in sentences expressing admiration towards something or

somebody:

e.g. How beautiful she is! What a nice voice she has!


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c) after interjections:

e.g. “Hush! Hush!” said the Rabbit. Beware of dogs! Tut! Tut!; Fie!; Ugh!; Shame!; Alas!; You don’t say!


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TEACHING ENGLISH THROUGH GAMES SPELLING GUESS Level: any Type: blackboard Choose two teams of not more than 10 members each for this

game. One team decides on the word, and one of its members puts dashes on the blackboard to represent the number of letters in the word. Suppose the word chosen is chemistry. The player puts on the blackboard:--------- (nine dashes). The play continues with each player on the opposite team in turn calling out a letter. The letter is put in its proper place if it belongs in the word. Suppose the first player says A. Since there is no A in the word, the next member of the team calls a letter. He says E, and the player at the blackboard puts it in its proper place: --E------ Because E was correct, the player gets another turn.

If the word is completed before or by the time each member of the team has called out a letter, the team scores one point.

For the second word, the teams reverse their roles. The game continues in this way to any number of words the group decides on.

VOCABULARY ON THE DOUBLE

Level: any Type: oral The person who has been chosen IT gives a three-letter word like

hat or bag and then begins to count to 12. The person addressed must, before the count of 12, give words beginning with each of the three letters in the word given or become IT.

For example, if the word is hat, the player might say, “Hand, arm, toe” . If the word is bag, the player might say, “Beam, apple, gum”.


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WORD FAMILIES Level: intermediate to advanced Type: oral or paper Within the limits of the vocabulary the students have studied,

prepare a list of words, each of which will suggest at least one other word, also known to the students, that is in the same family.

Here are some words that might be in the list, with the words that they suggest in parentheses: law (lawyer, lawless), science (scientist), difference (different), pronounce (pronunciation), etc. The words may be given to the students one by one either orally or in a list on paper. Score correct answers accordingly.

HAVE YOU SEEN MY SHEEP? Level: intermediate to advanced Type: active Structures emphasized: questions and answers. All the players

except IT, who is outside the circle, goes up to one of the players, taps on his back, and asks, “Have you seen my sheep?”

The player addressed asks, “How was he dressed?”. Then IT begins to describe one of the players in the circle. As

soon as the player who is being described recognizes himself, he begins to run around outside the circle with IT running after him. If the player does not get back to his place in the circle before IT catches him, he becomes IT and the play is repeated.

WHICH SOUNDS ARE ALIKE?

Level: intermediate to advanced Type: paper

Prepare in advance and give each student a list like the one bellow. The object of the game is for the players to circle the word on the right in each line which has the same sound as the letter or letters


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underlined in the word on the left. The student who gets the most correct is the winner.

try —winter, kind, fifty, play his —sister, this, zoo, soon little —machine, line, will, time cold —so, today, bottle, other made —map, want, mark, toothache feet —yes, meat, great, get money —young, song, put, thought sit —led, cooked, combed, opened sat —park, paper, dam, car peace —guess, ties, refuse, picnic ruler —soup, food, foot, funny largest —begin, bridge, light, bigger get —eight, receiver, team, bread kind —know, since, comb, place ACCENT AND SYLLABLES


Lists should be prepared in advance within the limits of the vocabulary the students have studied. The object of the game is to find and mark the word in a line of words which has the same number of syllables and the accent on the same syllable as the first word in the line.

afraid ago, consonant, correctly, hero handicapped surprised, together, patience, telephone polonium combustion, apostrophe, mistake, accident September behind, bicycle, foundation, geography thousand homesick, without, directly, alphabet

because president, vacation, carriage, accept sympathy respect, comfortable, collection, geography expensively impossible, chemistry, dictation, difference


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MENTAL HIDE-AND-SEEK

Level: any Type: oral

Structure emphasized: Use of prepositions. First, the group should decide on the limits of the territory to be

considered in the game, such as in the building, in the room, on the grounds, in the city. Then one player thinks of a hiding place, in other words, hides himself mentally. The others try to guess where he is hiding and the player who guesses correctly becomes the next one to hide. Since the game is imaginative, the player may be hiding behind a picture, in a desk, on a high shelf, etc.

BROKEN PROVERBS

Level: advanced Type: oral

The leader should have a master list of proverbs with the division into halves indicated, e.g. “A stitch in time / saves nine”. The second halves of all the proverbs on the list should be written on cards ahead of time. Before the play begins, these cards should be spread out so that all the members of the group can see them.

The play begins with the leader reading the first half of the proverb on the list. The members of the group who recognize it grab for the card containing the other half. The play continues in this way, the player with the most cards at the end being the winner.

WHAT’S WRONG?

Level: advanced Type: paper

Prepare in advance a number of sentences each having one word that is obviously wrong. The object of the game is for the players to rearrange the letters of each wrong word to make a word that fits the meaning of the sentence. One point is scored for each correct word.

Here are some examples, with the solution written in parantheses after each one:


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1. The rats shone brightly in the sky (star) 2. Betty likes melon in her tea. (lemon) 3. Why don t you enlist to what the teacher says? (listen) 4. The students listened carefully to the teacher s sword.

(words) 5. The sun moves around the heart. (earth) 6. The man was riding a fast shore. (horse) 7. The panel landed smoothly on the airfield. (plane) 8. There were flowers on the poles of the hill. (slope). 9. Soldiers must learn to charm. (march) 10. The nations of the world are untied in their fight for peace.

(united) ANAGRAMS


In this game players may work individually or in teams of two or three persons.

Give each player or team a list of words, each of which can be rearranged into at least one other word. The lists may be typed beforehand or written on the blackboard. Give the players a limited time in which to rearrange each word in the list to form a second word. The person or group that gets the most words correct is the winner.

BUILDING WORDS


Write on the blackboard a list of 20 word endings: ted, ent, ket, her, red, dow, sty, ure, ase, tch, wly, ter, ons, try, mes, ast, ics.

Give the players a limited time in which to make these endings into words. The score is the number of correct answers. Any known uncapitalized word is acceptable. The first three above might be wanted, student, basket. The play may be repeated with other lists of


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endings, not necessarily syllables, compiled from the list of vocabulary the students have learned.

RHYME YOUR ANSWER

Level: advanced Type: oral

The players are seated. One player starts the play by asking the next one a question, for example: “How are you?”. The next player must answer with a sentence the first word of which rhymes with the last word of the question. He might say: “Blue, if you really want to know”. The play continues in this way, each player saying something beginning with a word which rhymes with the last word of what was said by the previous player. The above beginning might be continued in this way:

Third player: “Show me something”. Fourth player: “Sing us a song”. Fifth player: “Long ago, there was a flood”. Sixth player: “Mud is difficult to walk in”. Players who can’t answer, who answer incorrectly, or who don’t

answer immediately may be dropped from the game. Of course, the sentence given must be grammatically correct and make some sort of sense.


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TRANSLATION CORPUS English source texts Consciously or unconsciously, men are proud of their firmness,

steadfastness of purpose, directness of aim. They go straight towards their desire, to the accomplishment of virtue − sometimes of crime − in an uplifting persuasion of their firmness. They walk the road of life, the road fenced in by their tastes, prejudices, disdains or enthusiasms, generally honest, invariably stupid, and are proud of never losing their way. If they stop, it is to look for a moment over the hedges to make them safe, to look at the misty valleys, at the distant peaks, at cliffs and morasses, at the dark forests and the hazy plains where other human beings grope their days painfully away, stumbling over the bones of the wise, over the unburied remains of their predecessors who died alone, in gloom or in sunshine, halfway from anywhere. The man of purpose does not understand and goes on full of contempt. He never loses his way. He knows where he is going and what he wants. Travelling on, he achieves great length without any breadth, and battered, besmirched, and weary, he touched the goal at last; he grasps the reward of his perseverance, of his virtue, of his healthy optimism: an untruthful tombstone over a dark and soon forgotten grave.

Lingard had never hesitated in his life. Why should he? He had been a most successful trader, and a man lucky in his fights, skilful in navigation, undeniably first in seamanship in those seas. He knew it. Had he not heard the voice of common consent? The voice of the world that respected him so much; the whole world to him − for to us the limits of the universe are strictly defined by those we know. There is nothing for us outside the babble of praise and blame on familiar lips, and beyond our last acquaintance there lies only a vast chaos; a chaos of laughter and tears which concerns us not; laughter and tears unpleasant, wicked, morbid, contemptible − because heard imperfectly by ears rebellious to strange sounds. To Lingard ∠ simple himself ∠ all things were simple. He seldom read. Books were not much in his way, and he had to work hard navigating, trading, and also, in obedience to his benevolent instincts, shaping stray lives he


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found here and there under his busy hand. He remembered the Sunday- school teachings of his native village and the discourses of the black-coated gentleman connected with the Mission to Fishermen and Seamen, whose yawl-rigged boat darting through rain-squalls amongst the coasters wind-bound in Falmouth Bay, was part of those precious pictures of his youthful days that lingered in his memory. ‘As clever a sky-pilot as you could wish to see,’ he would say with conviction, ‘and the best man to handle a boat in any weather I ever did meet!’ Such were the agencies that had roughly shaped his young soul before he went away to see the world in a southern-going ship ∠ before he went, ignorant and happy, heavy of hand, pure in heart, profane in speech, to give himself up to the great sea that took his life and gave him his fortune. When thinking of his rise in the world ∠ commander of ships, then shipowner, then a man of much capital, respected wherever he went, Lingard in a word, the Rajah Laut ∠ he was amazed and awed by his fate, that seemed to his ill-informed mind the most wondrous known in the annals of men. His experience appeared to him immense and conclusive, teaching him the lesson of the simplicity of life. In life ∠ as in seamanship ∠ there were only two ways of doing a thing: the right way and the wrong way. Common sense and experience taught a man the way that was right. The other was for lubbers and fools, and led, in seamanship, to loss of soars and sails or shipwreck; in life, to loss of money and consideration, or to an unlucky knock on the head. He did not consider it his duty to be angry with rascals. He was only angry with things he could not understand, but for the weaknesses of humanity he could find a contemptuous tolerance. It being manifest that he was wise and lucky ∠ otherwise how could he have been as successful in life as he had been? ∠ he had an inclination to set right the lives of other people, just as he could hardly refrain ∠ in defiance of nautical etiquette ∠ from interfering with his chief officer when the crew was sending up a new topmast, or generally when busy about, what he called, ‘a heavy job’. He was meddlesome with perfect modesty; if he knew a thing or two there was no merit in it. ‘Hard knocks taught me wisdom, my boy,’ he used to say, ‘and you had better take the advice of a man who has been a


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fool in his time. Have another.’ And ‘my boy’ as a rule took the cool drink, the advice, and the consequent help which Lingard felt himself bound in honour to give, so as to back up his opinion like a honest man.

(Joseph Conrad - An Outcast of the Islands) Paul would be built like his mother, slightly and rather small. His

hair went reddish, and then dark brown; his eyes were grey. He was a pale, quiet child, with eyes that seemed to listen, and with a full, dropping underlip.

As a rule he seemed old for his years. He was so conscious of what other people felt, particularly his mother. When she fretted he understood, and could have no peace. His soul seemed always attentive to her….All the children, but particularly Paul, were peculiarly against their father, along with their mother. Morel continued to bully and to drink. He had periods, months at a time, when he made the whole life of the family a misery. Paul never forgot coming home from the Band of Hope one Monday evening and finding his mother with her eyes swollen and discoloured, his father standing on the hearthrug, feet astride, his head down, and William, just home from work, glaring at his father. There was a silence as the young children entered, but none of the elders looked round.

William was white to the lips, and his fists were clenched. He waited until the children were silent, watching with children’s rage and hate; then he said:

‘You coward, you daren't do it when I was in.’ But Morel’s blood was up. He swung round on his son. William

was bigger, but Morel was hard-muscled, and mad with fury. ‘Dossn’t I?’ he shouted. ‘Dossn’t I? Ha’e much more o’ thy

chelp, my young jockey, an’ I’ll rattle my fist about thee. Ay, an’ I sholl that, dost see.’Morel crouched at the knees and showed his fist in an ugly, almost beast-like fashion. William was white with rage.

‘Will yer?’ he said, quiet and intense. ‘It ’ud be the last time, though.’

Morel danced a little nearer, crouching, drawing back his fist to strike. William put his fists ready. A light came into his blue eyes, almost like a laugh. He watched his father. Another word, and the men


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would have begun to fight. Paul hoped they would. The three children sat pale on the sofa.

‘Stop it, both of you.’ cried Mrs Morel in a hard voice. ‘We’ve had enough for one night. And you,’ she said, turning on to her husband, ‘look at your children!’

Morel glanced at the sofa. ‘Look at the children, you nasty little bitch!’ he sneered. ‘Why,

what have I done to the children, I should like to know? But they’re like yourself; you’ve put ’em up to your own tricks and nasty ways ∠ you’ve learned ’em in it, you ‘ave. ’

She refused to answer him. No one spoke. After a while he threw his boots under the table and went to bed.(…).Paul hated his father. As a boy he had a fervent private religion.

‘Make him stop drinking,’ he prayed every night. ‘Lord let my father die,’ he prayed very often. ‘Let him not be killed at pit,’ he prayed when, after tea, the father did not come home from work.

That was another time when the family suffered intensely. The children came from school and had their teas. On the hob the big black saucepan was simmering, the stew-jack was in the oven, ready for Morel’s dinner. He was expected at five o’clock. But for months he would stop and drink every night on his way from work.

In the winter nights, when it was cold, and grew dark early, Mrs Morel would put a brass candlestick on the table, light a tallow candle to save the gas. The children finished their bread-and-butter, or dripping, and were ready to go out to play. But if Morel had not come they faltered. The sense of his sitting in all his pit-dirt, drinking, after a long day’s work, not coming home and eating and washing, but sitting, getting drunk, on an empty stomach, made Mrs Morel unable to bear herself. From her the feeling was transmitted to the other children. She never suffered alone any more: the children suffered with her.(…).

She knew that the man who stops on the way home from work is on a quick way to ruining himself and his home. The children were yet young, and depended on the breadwinner. William gave her the sense of relief, providing her at last with someone to turn to if Morel failed. But the tense atmosphere of the room on these waiting evenings was the same.

(D.H.Lawrence − Sons and Lovers)


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Ursula went home to Beldover faint, dim, closed up. She could scarcely speak or notice. It was as if her energy were frozen. Her people asked her what was the matter. She told them, she had broken off the engagement with Skrebensky. They looked blank and angry. But she could not feel anymore.

The weeks crawled by in apathy. He would have sailed for India now. She was scarcely interested. She was inert, without strength and interest.

Suddenly a shock ran through her, so violent that she thought she was struck down. Was she with child? She had been so stricken under the pain of herself and of him, this had never occurred to her. Now like a flame it took hold of her limbs and body. Was she with child?

In the first flaming hours of wonder, she did not know what she felt. She was as if tied to the stake. The flames were licking her and devouring her. But the flames were also good. They seemed to wear her away to rest. What she felt in her heart and her womb she did not know. It was a kind of swoon.

Then gradually the heaviness of her heart pressed and pressed into consciousness. What was she doing? Was she bearing a child? Bearing a child? To what?

Her flesh thrilled, but her soul was sick. It seemed, this child, like the seal set on her own nullity. Yet she was glad in her flesh that she was with child. She began to think, that she would write to Skrebensky, that she would go out to him, and marry him, and live simply as a good wife to him. What did the self, the form of life, matter? Only the living from day to day mattered, the beloved existence in the body, rich, peaceful, complete, with no beyond, no further trouble, no further complication. She had been wrong, she had been arrogant and wicked, wanting that other thing, that fantastic freedom, that illusory, conceited fulfilment which she had imagined she could not have with Skrebensky. Who was she to be wanting some fantastic fulfilment in her life? Was it not enough that she had her man, her children, her place of shelter under the sun? Was it not enough for her, as it had been enough for her mother? She would marry and love her husband and fill her place simply. That was the ideal.


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Suddenly she saw her mother in a just and true light. Her mother was simple and radically true. She had taken the life that was given. She had not, in her arrogant conceit, insisted on creating life to fit herself. Her mother was right, profoundly right, and she herself had been false, trashy, conceited.

A great mood of humility came over her, and in this humility a bondaged sort of peace. She gave her limbs to the bondage, and loved the bondage, she called it peace. In this state she sat down to write to Skrebensky.

Since you left me I have suffered a great deal, and so have come to myself. I cannot tell you the remorse I feel for my wicked, perverse behaviour. It was given to me to love you, and to know your love for me. But instead of thankfully, on my knees, taking what God had given, I must have the moon in my keeping, I must insist on having the moon for my own. Because I could not have it, everything else must go.

I do not know if you can ever forgive me. I could die with shame to think of my behaviour with you during our last times, and I don't know if I could ever bear to look you in the face again. Truly the best thing would be for me to die, and cover my fantasies for ever. But I find I am with child, so that cannot be.

It is your child, and for that reason I must revere it and submit my body entirely to its welfare, entertaining no thought of death, which once more is largely conceit. Therefore, because you once loved me, and because this child is your child, I ask you to have me back. If you will cable me one word, I will come to you as soon as I can. I swear to you to be a dutiful wife, and to serve you in all things. For now I only hate myself and my own conceited foolishness. I love you − I love the thought of you − you are natural and decent all through, whilst I was so false. Once I am with you again, I shall ask no more than to rest in your shelter all my life −

This letter she wrote, sentence by sentence, as if from her deeper, sincerest heart. She felt that now, now, she was at the depths of herself. This was her true self, for ever. With this document she would appear before God at the Judgement Day.


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For what had a woman but to submit? What was her flesh but childbearing, her strength for her children and her husband, the giver of life? At last she was a woman.

She posted her letter to his club, to be forwarded to him in Calcutta. He would receive it soon after his arrival in India − within three weeks of his arrival there. In a month’s time she would receive word from him. Then she would go.

She was quite sure of him. She thought only of preparing her garments and of living quietly, peacefully, till the time when she should join him again and her history would be concluded for ever. The peace held like an unnatural calm for a long time. She was aware, however, of a gathering restiveness, a tumult impending within her. She tried to run away from it. She wished she could hear from Skrebensky, in answer to her letter, so that her course should be resolved, she should be engaged in fulfilling her fate. It was this inactivity which made her liable to the revulsion she dreaded.

It was curious how little she cared about his not having written to her before. It was enough that she had sent her letter. She would get the required answer, that was all.

One afternoon in early October, feeling the seething rising to madness within her, she slipped out in the rain, to walk abroad, lest the house should suffocate her. Everywhere was drenched wet and deserted, the grimed houses glowed dull red, the butt houses burned scarlet in a gleam of light, under the glistening, blackish purple slates. Ursula went on towards Willey Green.

(D.H.Lawrence − The Rainbow) Ralph lay in a covert, wondering about his wounds. The bruised

flesh was inches in diameter over his right ribs, with a swollen and bloody scar where the spear had not hit him. His hair was full of dirt and tapped like the tendrils of a creeper. All over he was scratched and bruised from his flight through the forest. By the time his breathing was normal again, he had worked out that bathing these injuries would have to wait. How could you listen for naked feet if you were splashing in water? How could you be safe by the little steam or on the open beach?


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Ralph listened. He was not really far from the Castle Rock, and during the first panic he had thought he heard sounds of pursuit. But the hunters had only sneaked into the fringes of the greenery, retrieving spears perhaps, and then had rushed back to the sunny rock as if terrified of the darkness under the leaves. He had even glimpsed one of them, striped brown, black, and red, and had judged that it was Bill. But really, thought Ralph, this was not Bill. This was a savage whose image refused to blend with the ancient picture of a boy in shorts and shirt.

The afternoon died away; the circular spots of sunlight moved steadily over green fronds and brown fibre but no sound came from behind the Rock. At last Ralph wormed out of the ferns and sneaked forward to the edge of that impenetrable thicket that fronted the neck of land. He peered with elaborate caution between branches at the edge and could see Robert sitting on guard at the top of the cliff. He had a spear in his left hand and was tossing up a pebble and catching it again with the right Behind him a column of smoke rose thickly, so that Ralph's nostrils flared and his mouth dribbled. He wiped his nose and mouth with the back of his hand and for the first time since the morning felt hungry. The tribe must be sitting round the gutted pig, watching the fat ooze and burn among the ashes. They would be intent.

Another figure, an unrecognizable one, appeared by Robert and gave him something, then turned and went back behind the rock. Robert laid his spear on the rock beside him and began to gnaw between his raised hands. So the feast was beginning and the watchman had been given his portion.

Ralph saw that for the first time being he was safe. He limped away through the fruit trees, drawn by the thought of the poor food yet bitter when he remembered the feast. Feast to-day, and then to-morrow…

He argued unconvincingly that they would let him alone; perhaps even make an outlaw of him. But then the fatal unreasoning knowledge came to him again. The breaking of the conch and the deaths of Piggy and Simon lay over the island like a vapour. These painted savages would go further and further. Then there was that


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undefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never.

He paused, sun-flecked, holding up a bough, prepared to duck under it. A spasm of terror set him shaking and he cried aloud.

“No. They’re not as bad as that. It was an accident.” He ducked under the bough, ran clumsily, then stopped and

listened. He came to the smashed acres of fruit and ate greedily. He saw

two littluns and, not having any idea of his own appearance, wondered why they screamed and ran.

When he had eaten he went towards the beach. The sunlight was slanting now into the palms by the wrecked shelter. There was the platform and the pool. The best thing to do was to ignore this leaden feeling about the heart and rely on their common sense, their daylight sanity. Now that the tribe had eaten, the thing to do was to try again. And anyway, he couldn’t stay here all night in an empty shelter by the deserted platform. His flesh crept and he shivered in the evening sun. No fire; no smoke; no rescue. He turned and limped away through the forest towards Jack's end of the island.

(William Golding − Lord of the Flies) It was a bitter winter. The stormy weather was followed by sleet

and snow, and then by a hard frost which did not break till well into February. The animals carried on as best they could with the rebuilding of the windmill, well knowing that the outside world was watching them and that the envious human beings would rejoice and triumph if the mill were not finished on time.

Out of spite, the human beings pretended not to believe that it was Snowball who had destroyed the windmill: they said that it had fallen down because the walls were too thin. The animals knew that this was not the case. Still, it had been decided to build the walls three feet thick this time instead of eighteen inches as before, which meant collecting much larger quantities of stone. For a long time the quarry was full of snowdrifts and nothing could be done. Some progress was made in the dry frosty weather that followed, but it was cruel work, and the animals could not feel so hopeful about it as they had felt


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before. They were always cold, and usually hungry as well. Only Boxer and Clover never lost heart. Squealer made excellent speeches on the joy of service and the dignity of labour, but the other animals found more inspiration in Boxer’s strength and his never-failing cry of “I will work harder!”

In January food fell short. The corn ration was drastically reduced, and it was announced that an extra potato ration would be issued to make up for it. Then it was discovered that the greater part of the potato crop had been frosted in the clamps, which had not been covered thickly enough. The potatoes had become soft and discoloured, and only a few were edible. For days at a time the animals had nothing to eat but chaff and mangels. Starvation seemed to stare them in the face.

It was vitally necessary to conceal this fact from the outside world. Emboldened by the collapse of the windmill, the human beings were inventing fresh lies about Animal Farm. Once again it was being put about that all the animals were dying of famine and disease, and that they were continually fighting amongst themselves and had resorted to cannibalism and infanticide. Napoleon was well aware of the bad results that might follow if the real facts of the food situation were known, and he decided to make use of Mr. Whymper to spread a contrary impression. Hitherto the animals had had little or no contact with Whymper on his weekly visit: now, however, a few selected animals, mostly sheep, were instructed to remark casually in his hearing that rations had been increased. In addition, Napoleon ordered the almost empty bins in the store-shed to be filled nearly to the brim with sand, which was then covered up with what remained of the grain and meal. On some suitable pretext, Whymper was led through the store-shed and allowed to catch a glimpse of the bins. He was deceived, and continued to report to the outside world that there was no food shortage on Animal Farm.

Nevertheless, towards the end of January it became obvious that it would be necessary to procure some more grain from somewhere. In these days Napoleon rarely appeared in public, but spent all his time in the farmhouse, which was guarded at each door by fierce-looking dogs. When he did emerge, it was in a ceremonial manner, with an escort of six dogs who closely surrounded him and growled if anyone


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came too near. Frequently he did not even appear on Sunday mornings, but issued his orders through one of the other pigs, usually Squealer.

One Sunday morning Squealer announced that the hens, who had just come into lay again, must surrender their eggs. Napoleon had accepted, through Whymper, a contract for four hundred eggs a week. The price for these would pay for enough grain and meal to keep the farm going till summer came on and conditions were easier.

When the hens heard this, they raised a terrible outcry. They had been warned earlier that this sacrifice might be necessary, but had not believed that it would really happen. For the first time since the expulsion of Jones there was something resembling a rebellion. Led by three young Black Minorca pullets, the hens made a determined effort to thwart Napoleon’s wishes. Their method was to fly up to the rafters and there lay their eggs, which smashed to pieces on the floor. Napoleon acted swiftly and ruthlessly. He ordered the hens’ rations to be stopped, and decreed that any animal giving so much as a grain of corn to a hen should be punished by death. The dogs saw to it that these orders were carried out. For five days the hens held out, then they capitulated and went back to their nesting boxes.

(George Orwell − Animal Farm) The matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women's

tea was over and Maria looked forward to her evening out. The kitchen was spick and span: the cook said you could see yourself in the big copper boilers. The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks. These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea. Maria had cut them herself.

Maria was a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin. She talked a little through her nose, always soothingly: ‘Yes, my dear,’ and ‘No, my dear.’ She was always sent for when the women quarrelled over their tubs and always succeeded in making peace. One day the matron had said to her:

‘Maria, you are a veritable peace-maker!'


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And the submatron and two of the Board ladies had heard the compliment. And Ginger Mooney was always saying what she wouldn't do to the dummy who had charge of the irons if it wasn't for Maria. Everyone was so fond of Maria.

The women would have their tea at six o'clock and she would be able to get away before seven. From Ballsbridge to the Pillar, twenty minutes; from the Pillar to Drumcondra, twenty minutes; and twenty minutes to buy the things. She would be there before eight. She took out her purse with the silver clasps and read again the words A Present from Belfast. She was very fond of that purse because Joe had brought it to her five years before when he and Alphy had gone to Belfast on a Whit-Monday trip. In the purse were two half-crowns and some coppers. She would have five shillings clear after paying tram fare. What a nice evening they would have, all the children singing! Only she hoped that Joe wouldn't come in drunk. He was so different when he took any drink.

Often she had wanted her to go and live with them; but she would have felt herself in the way (though Joe's wife was ever so nice with her) and she had become accustomed to the life of the laundry. Joe was a good fellow. She had nursed him and Alphy too; and Joe used often to say:

‘Mamma is mamma but Maria is my proper mother.’ After the break-up at home the boys had got her that position in

the Dublin by Lamplight laundry, and she liked it. She used to have such a bad opinion of Protestants but now she thought they were very nice people, a little quiet and serious, but still very nice people to live with. Then she had her plants in the conservatory and she liked looking after them. She had lovely ferns and wax-plants and, whenever anyone came to visit her, she always gave the visitor one or two slips from her conservatory. There was one thing she didn't like and that was the tracts on the walks; but the matron was such a nice person to deal with, so genteel.

When the cook told her everything was ready she went into the women's room and began to pull the big bell. In a few minutes the women began to come in by twos and threes, wiping their steaming hands in their petticoats and pulling down the sleeves of their blouses over their red steaming arms. They settled down before their huge


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mugs which the cook and the dummy filled up with hot tea, already mixed with milk and sugar in huge tin cans. Maria superintended the distribution of the barmbrack and saw that every woman got her four slices. There was a great deal of laughing and joking during the meal. Liz Fleming said Maria was sure to get the ring and, though Fleming had said that for so many Hallow Eves, Maria had to laugh and say she didn't want any ring or man either; and when she laughed her grey-green eyes sparkled with disappointed shyness and the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin. Then Ginger Mooney lifted up her mug of tea and proposed Maria’s health while all the other women clattered with their mugs on the table, and said she was sorry she hadn't a sup of porter to drink in it. And Maria laughed again till the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin and till her minute body nearly shook itself asunder because she knew that Mooney meant well though, of course, she had the notions of a common woman.

(James Joyce − Dubliners) Stephen’s mother and his brother and one of his cousins waited at

the corner of quiet Foster Place while he and his father went up the steps and along the colonnade where the Highland sentry was parading. When they had passed into the great hall and stood at the counter Stephen drew forth his orders on the governor of the bank of Ireland for thirty and three pounds; and these sums, the moneys of his exhibition and essay prize, were paid over to him rapidly by the teller in notes and coin respectively. He bestowed them in his pockets with feigned composure and suffered the friendly teller, to whom his father chatted, to take his hand across the broad counter and wish him a brilliant career in after life. He was impatient of their voices and could not keep his feet at rest. But the teller still deferred the serving of others to say he was living in changed times and that there was nothing like giving a boy the best education that money could buy. Mr Dedalus lingered in the hall gazing about him and up at the roof and telling Stephen, who urged him to come out, that they were standing in the house of commons of the old Irish parliament.

− God help us! he said piously, to think of the men of those times, Stephen, Hely Hutchinson and Flood and Henry Grattan and


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Charles Kendal Bushe, and the noblemen we have now, leaders of the Irish people at home and abroad. Why, by God, they wouldn’t be seen dead in a ten-acre field with them. No, Stephen, old chap, I’m sorry to say that they are only as I roved out one fine May morning in the merry month of sweet July.

A keen October wind was blowing round the bank. The three figures standing at the edge of the muddy path had pinched cheeks and watery eyes. Stephen looked at his thinly clad mother and remembered that a few days before he had seen a mantle priced at twenty guineas in the windows of Barnardo’s.

− Well that’s done, said Mr Dedalus. − We had better go to dinner, said Stephen. Where? − Dinner? said Mr Dedalus. Well, I suppose we had better, what? − Some place that’s not too dear, said Mrs Dedalus. − Underdone’s? − Yes. Some quiet place. − Come along, said Stephen quickly. It doesn’t matter about the

dearness. He walked on before them with short nervous steps, smiling.

They tried to keep up with him, smiling also at his eagerness. − Take it easy like a good young fellow, said his father. We're

not out for the half mile, are we? For a swift season of merrymaking the money of his prizes ran

through Stephen’s fingers. Great parcels of groceries and delicacies and dried fruits arrived from the city. Every day he drew up a bill of fare for the family and every night led a party of three or four to the theatre to see the Ingomar or The Lady of Lyons. In his coat pockets he carried squares of Vienna chocolate for his guests while his trousers’ pocket bulged with masses of silver and copper coins. He bought presents for everyone, overhauled his room, wrote out resolutions, marshalled his books up and down their shelves, pored upon all kinds of price lists, drew up a form of commonwealth for the household by which every member of it held some office, opened a loan bank for his family and pressed loans on willing borrowers so that he might have the pleasure of making out receipts and reckoning


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the interests on the sums lent. When he could do no more he drove up and down the city in trams. Then the season of pleasure came to an end. The pot of pink enamel paint gave out and the wainscot of his bedroom remained with its unfinished and ill-plastered coat.

His household returned to its usual way of life. His mother had no further occasion to upbraid him for squandering his money. He too returned to his old life at school and all his novel enterprises fell to pieces. The commonwealth fell, the loan bank closed its coffers and its books on a sensible loss, the rules of life which he had drawn about himself fell into desuetude.

How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a break-water of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interests and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him. Useless. From without as from within the waters had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole.

He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother.

He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realize the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore cynically with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and humiliating sense of transgression.


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He returned to his wanderings. The veiled autumnal evenings led him from street to street as they had led him years before along the quiet avenues of Blackrock. But no vision of trim front gardens or of kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence upon him now. Only at times, in the pauses of his desire, when the luxury that was wasting him gave room to a softer languor, the image of Mercedes traversed the background of his memory. He saw again the small white house and the garden of rose-bushes on the road that led to the mountains and he remembered the sadly proud gesture of refusal which he was to make there, standing with her in the moonlit garden after years of estrangement and adventure. At those moments the soft speeches of Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest. A tender premonition touched him of the tryst he had then looked forward to and, in spite of the horrible reality which lay between his hope of then and now, of the holy encounter he had then imagined at which weakness and timidity and inexperience were to fall from him.

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.

He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling and the


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drawling of drunken singers. He walked onward, dismayed, wondering whether he had strayed into the quarter of the Jews. Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns traversed the street from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim. The yellow gas-flames arose before his troubled vision against the vapoury sky, burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and in the lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries.

He stood still in the middle of the roadway, his heart clamouring against his bosom in a tumult. A young woman dressed in a long pink gown laid her hand on his arm to detain him and gazed into his face. She said gaily:

− Good night, Willie dear! Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs

apart in the copious easy-chair beside the bed. He tried to bid his tongue speak that he might seem at ease, watching her as she undid her gown, noting the proud conscious movements of her perfumed head.

As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and embraced him gaily and gravely. Her round arms held him firmly to her and he, seeing her face lifted to him in serious calm and feeling the warm calm rise and fall of her breast, all but burst into hysterical weeping. Tears of joy and relief shone in his delighted eyes and his lips parted though they would not speak.

She passed her tinkling hand through his hair, calling him a little rascal.

− Give me a kiss, she said. His lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly

in her arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his lips would not bend to kiss her.

In a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but


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the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than the sound or odour.

(James Joyce − Portrait of the Artist) “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow, ” said Mrs. Ramsey. "But

you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added. To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it

were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsey, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the landmower, the sound of poplar-trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling − all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

“But,” said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, “it won’t be fine.”

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsey excited in his children’s breasts by his mere


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presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsey would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

“But it may be fine − I expect it will be fine,” said Mrs. Ramsey, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it to night, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows, who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were − if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not to be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked, addressing herself particularly to her daughters. So she added, rather differently, one must take them whatever comforts one can.

(Virginia Woolf − To the Lighthouse)


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Romanian source texts

CEA MAI GREA ÎNDELETNICIRE Care ar fi performanţa cea mai dificilă în domeniul literaturii?

Care e branşa cea mai chinuitoare în munca de scriitor? Avem la dispoziţie răspunsuri conformiste şi previzibile, date de cei care doresc să pară pe cât de culţi, pe atât de subtili: aceştia ne vor demonstra că eseul filozofic pe teme literare ori poezia ar fi speciile superioare (nu ne-a învăţat romantismul că nimic nu egalează Poezia, cu majusculă?). Alţii, mai „moderni”, vor pleda pentru virtuţile romanului, amintindu-ne că secolele XIX şi XX au fost secolele romanului şi că numai în jurul lui găsim marea concentrare de cititori şi de comentatori. Până la urmă, grupurile se vor pune de acord asupra preeminenţei „marilor” specii în raport cu celelalte.

De-a lungul a zece ani am încercat să scriu în toate speciile literare cunoscute – din vocaţie, din simpatie, din simplă curiozitate. Întocmind, retrospectiv, o ierarhie a dificultăţilor, ajung la o concluzie de aparenţe ciudate, bazată însă pe proprie experienţă: îndeletnicirea literară cea mai riscantă şi cea mai grea o reprezintă traducerea poeziei. Ea reprezintă pragul încercării supreme. Ea reprezintă obstacolul infernal, la depăşirea căruia nouăzeci la sută din amatori şi-au frînt gîtul. În ochii mei, traducerea perfectă a unei bune poezii înseamnă poate mai mult decît crearea poeziei originale: pe lîngă talentul nativ de a scrie versuri, rămîne absolut obligatorie calitatea, rareori existentă, a posedării profunde a unei culturi şi a pătrunderii în universul închis al unor mari creatori. Condiţii aproape imposibile!…

În accepţiunea sugerată de mine, traducerile reuşite de poezie nu au nimic a face cu aproximările bîlbîite la care se rezumă majoritatea exerciţiilor de acest fel, cu ritmările stupid-mecanice şi, desigur, cu infamele traduceri în proză, atît de la modă în secolul al XIX-lea, dar absolut ucigaşe pentru imaginea şi reputaţia poetului tradus. Aşa cum concep traducerea de poezie, ea trebuie să îndeplinească, fără excepţie, cîteva reguli simple şi clare: să refacă exact formula prozodică a originalului; să nu admită nici o licenţă la capitolul metrului, ritmului ori rimei; să sugereze (prin zeci de detalii greu codificabile) atmosfera culturală în care poezia a luat naştere; în fine,


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să fie, poetic, la fel de bună ca originalul. Luînd contact cu ea. cititorul să perceapă textul original pînă la capăt. Să aibă şocul primordial. Doar astfel cîteva dintre Florile răului au atins, sub pana lui Al. Philippide, strălucirea baudelairiană, iar cititorul român al multor strofe din Faust l-a citit cu adevărat pe Goethe în cuvintele lui Şt. Aug. Doinaş.

La prima vedere, îndeplinirea draconicelor exigenţe de mai sus pare himerică, dar nu e aşa! Dacă strivitoarea majoritate a traducerilor de poezie nu răspunde acestor doleanţe, va exista întotdeauna – cu precizie matematică – un infim procent de inspiraţi-erudiţi care să atingă marea performanţă. Nici nu ne trebuie mai mulţi! Poezia se cere citită în limba în care a fost scrisă; a o citi în traducere înseamnă dovadă de lene ori exerciţiu de alexandrinism pervers. Dacă, pe parcursul a două sau trei secole, principalii poeţi ai lumii vor găsi, prin miracol, un echivalent perfect în marile limbi, atunci truda celor mai inspiraţi dintre intelectualii acestei lumi nu se va fi cheltuit în zadar.

Severa tablă a legilor traducerii schiţată mai sus datează de foarte puţină vreme, de numai cîteva decenii; dar providenţiala ei apariţie a orientat rapid lumea elitei traducătorilor, care a aderat instinctiv la noul cod.

Traducerea versurilor rămîne cea mai grea dintre arte şi pentru alt motiv: este vorba de echivalarea lumilor culturale, fapt la care poetul propriu-zis nici nu se gîndeşte. Traducătorului în versuri nu îi este suficientă „inspiraţia”, el nu se bazează doar pe tradiţionalul „daimon” interior; translatorul trebuie să execute echilibristică mentală în urma căreia va afla ce a fost în conştiinţa intimă a poetului atunci cînd şi-a compus poezia. Dar asta nu-i suficient: el mai trebuie să reconstituie atmosfera spirituală a epocii (pe care poetul o respiră, dar n-o înregistrează în chip conştient), atmosferă ce a făcut posibilă ţîşnirea textului. Traducătorul e obligat să devină istoric al culturii, istoric al limbii, hermeneut, psiholog. Şi, mai presus de toate, să fie poet el însuşi, la o altitudine comparabilă cu cea a originalului.

O poezie se poate compune într-o oră, sub fulguranţa inspiraţiei; traducerea ei presupune însă zeci ori sute de ore, zeci de variante succesive pînă la atingerea echivalentului fericit. Ceea ce poetul execută într-o rapidă joacă înaltă, traducătorul realizează printr-un


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efort poetic de factură valéryană, construind ecuaţii de cuvinte şi aflîndu-le rezolvarea.

Să mai precizăm un fapt de obicei ignorat: pentru a fi un bun traducător (mai ales de poezie), cunoaşterea perfectă a limbii din care traduci, calitatea de om de cultură, răbdarea sisifică rămîn obligatorii; vitală însă este cunoaşterea cuprinzătoare, „de la origini pînă în prezent”, în lung şi-n lat, a propriei tale limbi. A limbii în care traduci.Traducătorul perfect trebuie să fie (vai!) şi un scriitor extraordinar el însuşi. Dacă nu există echivalentul absolut, la milimetru, între variantele culturale ale celor două idiomuri, puntea reprezentată de traducere se prăbuşeşte.

În ceea ce mă priveşte traduc poezie de peste patruzeci de ani, avîndu-i ca obiect obsesiv de admiraţie şi de chin pe marii poeţi francezi, englezi, germani, italieni, spanioli sau portughezi. Am făcut publice un număr infim din traducerile mele, am publicat încă şi mai puţine; dar echivalarea perfectă a versurilor a rămas, pînă astăzi, contactul meu privilegiat cu eternitatea.

(Mihai Zamfir, Dilema, nr.456, 23-29 noiembrie 2001) […] Itinerariul prevedea un mare şi încîntător înconjur. La

început de aprilie, porneam din gara Braşov – spre … Predeal. După o oră depăşeam frontiera maghiaro-română fără de a fi fost sîcîiţi de către vameşi.

Şi-am ajuns la Bucureşti. În capitala României, unde aveam să stăm numai cîteva ore, am

fost purtaţi prin muzee de artă şi de ştiinţă naturală, pe străzi şi bulevarde. Mai tîrziu nu-mi mai aminteam decît de-o vizită la Academia Română, unde profesorul Ion Bianu a deschis un sanctuar, din care scotea manuscrisele lui Eminescu. Nu m-am dat bătut pînă nu am luat şi eu în mînă un caiet. Îmi croisem loc cu coatele, printre ceilalţi. Grupul pleca, dar eu am mai rămas aplecat deasupra manuscrisului, prin care răsfoiam cu încordare. Mă emoţiona nespus de mult acest contact cu hîrtiile şi scrisul marelui poet. Şi-am zîmbit copilăreşte şi intrigat, cînd – în marginea unei poezii – am remarcat şi nişte desene de-ale poetului: erau nişte schiţe obscene, care-mi arătau că există anumite spaţii intime, în care poezia şi proza se învecinează fără a se stînjeni. Am fugit pe urmă după caravană. În poarta


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Academiei, unul dintre elevii mai vîrstnici îmi zice: „Ce-ai întîrziat, măi, te-ai întins aci ca la tine acasă!” „Uite aşa ca să mă deprin cu Academia!” răspunsei rîzînd, şi mai adăugai ceva foarte prezumţios. Mi-am dat însă cu palma peste gură cînd observai că unchiul mă auzise. Dar unchiul m-a învăluit c-o privire plină de bunătate: „Mai ştii … De ce nu?”.

În după-amiaza zilei luam trenul spre Constanţa, unde în aceeaşi seară urma să ne îmbarcăm pe-un vapor românesc spre Constantinopol. Era noapte, tîrziu, cînd am ajuns la Constanţa, şi n-am văzut aproape nimic din cele ale oraşului şi ale portului. Îmi amintesc doar că marea era foarte agitată. După ce-am intrat în pîntecul vaporului, într-o încăpere mare cuprinsă de bănci de lemn, nu ne-am mai gîndit decît să ne găsim un locşor de dormit. De unde să poţi însă închide pleoapele! Îmi era frig. Şi altora la fel. Cineva ne poftea să ne luăm pături de acoperit de pe bord. Am urcat nişte trepte, ne-am strecurat prin coridoare labirintice, şi-apoi, ca printr-un horn căptuşit cu o scară în spirală, am ieşit pe bord. Marea Neagră nu-şi desminţea numele, căci o beznă de nepătruns stăpînea pe întinsurile de vuiet şi valuri. Sufla un vînt să ne ia de pe picioare. Departe, în zare, se mai vedeau lumini slabe în port. Eram în larg. Am smuls o pătură dintr-un teanc şi cu prada în braţe am alunecat iarăşi în pîntecul vaporului. Dar nici pătura nu mi-a fost de nici un folos, ca să adorm. M-am zvîrcolit toată noaptea. Cum vaporul se legăna, mă lua din capul pieptului şi pînă-n ceafă o senzaţie de slăbiciune; era întîiul semn al răului de ape mari. Dimineaţa am urcat pe bord în speranţa că răcoarea curată de deasupra îmi va domestici măruntaiele. Paseri albe, cu sunete, în care se ghiceau pustietăţi marine, zburau după vapor. Uneori, rămînînd în urmă, descindeau în dîra de spumă a vaporului. Apoi văzduhul se limpezi treptat, iar la orizont întrezărirăm maluri gălbui, sterpe. Ne apropiam de strîmtori. Înviau în noi dulceţi sentimentale culese din Alecsandri şi Bolintineanu. Limanurile asiatice se întrupau apărate de fortificaţii străvechi şi de nenumărate guri de tunuri. Intram în strunga dintre continente pe ape mai liniştite, şi într-un climat domol. Se iveau, cît bătea ochiul, tot alte şi alte vapoare, corăbii, şalupe, luntre. Am debarcat la Constantinopol încă înainte de amiază. Aveam răgaz de cîteva ore să vizităm capitala Imperiului Otoman. Şi prinseserăm arta de a consuma cît mai multe privelişti în cît mai puţin timp. Pe


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străzi, în Constantinopol, un miros fetid ne izbi nările şi tot corpul, cel puţin în apropierea portului. Numai un cadavru istoric putea să miroasă aşa de cumplit. Forfotea în jur împrejurul nostru o lume pestriţă apucată de duhul unei paradoxale mişcări stagnante. Căutam să ieşim din vîrtejurile mulţimei şi din zgomotul asurzitor al clipei, făcînd în timp un drum invers. Grăbiam pasul spre veacul al şaselea: spre Agia Sofia. Cred că eram insuficient pregătit pentru cutremurul de farmec, de frumuseţe şi de măreţie, al acestei catedrale, în care geniul bizantin a izbutit să rostească, creînd un sacru arhetip pentru toată lumea răsăritului. După o noapte de nesomn, simţurile şi-au închis zăvoarele şi şi-au pus peceţi. Căldura solară, ce mă lovea în creştet, goana pe străzi şi apoi înfăţişarea de iarmaroc dezlănţuit a capitalei otomane, mă făcuseră aproape impermeabil pentru noi impresii. Şi cînd am intrat în Agia Sofia, nu mi-aşi fi putut închipui că peste douăzeci şi atîţia de ani aveam să scriu cu entuziasm postum despre ceea ce vedeam şi nu simţeam atunci.

(Lucian Blaga – Hronicul şi cîntecul vîrstelor) […] În Note zilnice străbate, ca o temă constantă, tema

agresiunilor morale. Aceasta pare a fi rana cea mai adîncă a sensibilităţii sale. Agresiunile vin de peste tot şi pe toate planurile, de la cel mărunt existenţial la cel spiritual. O posibilă definiţie psihologică a lui Camil Petrescu ar suna astfel: Camil Petrescu este un spirit agresat, cu mari crize de orgoliu şi replieri uluitoare în atitudini polemice. Spiritualiceşte, el este obsedat de cîteva idei (autenticitatea gîndirii, substanţialismul, noocraţie necesară etc.) şi, fără să aducă date noi faţă de operă, Jurnalul arată o continuitate şi o voinţă remarcabilă de coeziune intelectuală. Într-un loc, scriitorul mărturiseşte că schema gîndirii lui era definitiv fixată în 1915, în momentul în care a început să scrie Jocul Ielelor: „Odată cu descoperirea că timpul e a patra dimensiune a spaţiului şi, în acelaşi timp, cu analiza apriorismului kantian, expusă în Ultima noapte … Ambele acestea găsite într-un sfîrşit de iunie într-o dimineaţă, ascultînd leneş în pat tic-tacul ceasornicului deşteptător …”

Amănuntul trebuie reţinut, puţini scriitori pot arăta o obstinaţie mai mare şi mai pozitivă, de-a lungul întregii cariere literare, în susţinerea unor idei. Camil Petrescu gândeşte unitar, spiritul lui


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tracasat, fragmentat în viaţa de toate zilele, urmează sistematic cîteva concepte regăsite şi în opera de ficţiune şi în eseistică. Jurnalul dezvăluie într-o oarecare măsură secretul moral al acestei îndîrjite consecvenţe.

Dar Notele zilnice arată şi un alt Camil Petrescu: închipuit, cu înverşunare utopic. Cînd izbucneşte războiul din Abisinia, el propune o schemă militară şi, după oarecare vreme, soluţiile lui se adeveresc. Prozatorul primeşte telefoane, e felicitat, gîndul că este un mare strateg militar nu mai întîlneşte în mintea lui nici o împotrivire. Cînd Franţa este în primejdie, Camil Petrescu scrie d-lui Dupront, directorul Institutului francez (actualmente preşedintele Universităţii Paris IV, Sorbona) o scrisoare în care, iarăşi, propune scheme tactice salvatoare. Unui om politic român îi scrie în acelaşi sens, oferindu-şi serviciile pentru salvarea României. Tactica lui se bazează pe metoda substanţialistă, care dacă înţeleg bine, presupune o operaţie specială de „descifrare logică” şi, ca primă treptă, „analiza informatorilor”. Paginile acestea, serioase şi grave, pline de formule complicate, reactualizează imaginea anecdotică a unui Camil Petrescu stăpînit de un patologic sentiment al întîietăţii. Dar, curios, această imagine nu ne mai pare astăzi atît de ridicolă, spiritul nostru nu se arată deloc scandalizat că autorul Patului lui Procust se considera un mare strateg al războiului … Închipuirile de acest fel îi completează admirabil portretul psihologic.

Dezamăgirea pe care ne-o produce Jurnalul vine din altă direcţie: scriitorul nu vorbeşte decît foarte puţin de literatura lui, iar cînd vorbeşte nu spune decît lucruri pe care le putem afla şi în revistele epocii (reacţiile criticii etc.). Pentru Camil Petrescu literatura este o experienţă fundamentală, dar experienţa nu transpune în nici un fel în aceste note zilnice care se mărginesc să înregistreze altfel de fapte, mai simple. Am pierdut , astfel, şansa de a avea în literatura română un jurnal de felul aceluia lăsat de Gide, jurnal pe care, nu mai încape vorbă, numai Camil Petrescu l-ar fi putut scrie. […]

(Eugen Simion – Scriitori români de azi, Ed. Cartea Românească, Buc., 1976, p.196,197, 201-202.)


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Baughman, M. Dale, Teacher’s Treasury of Stories for Every Occasion, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.

2. Chiţoran, D., Elements of English Structural Semantics, Bucureşti, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, 1997.

3. Collins, V.H., A Book of English Idioms, 1966, Longmans.

4. Duţescu-Coliban, T., Aspects of English Morphology, Editura Fundaţiei România de Mâine, 2000.

5. B.D.Graver, Advanced English Practice, Oxford University Press, 1995.

6. László Budai, Gramatica engleză, Editura Teora, 1997.

7. Leon Leviţchi, Gramatica limbii engleze, 1995, Editura Teora.

8. Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, A University Grammar of English, 1993, Longman Group UK Ltd.

9. Roget, P.M., Roget’s Thesaurus of Synonyms and Antonyms, London: Roydon Publishing Co. Ltd., 1987.

10. Stanton, A. and Morris, S., CAE Practice Tests, Edinburgh: Pearson Education Ltd., 2000.

11. Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman Group UK Ltd., 1992.


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