Task 4 In groups, work out the meaning of the following: e the lines from songs in the Nigerian Janguage, [bo e the song which starts ‘Ten griz botr .... Task 8 Without using a dictionar
Trang 12 Skills training
Making inferences about characters
Task |
Read this account of how writers help their readers to form 4 picture
of their characters
One way in which novelists and playwrights can provide DO
about their cnaracte’s is by directly describing them They can Say, f
instance, samething like this:
Edward is middle-aged anda middle-class He is successful and has a
comfortable income He tends to become irritable very easily and is
something of a perfectionist He can easily be very authoritarian
Often, nowever, writers prefer to be more indirect They choose <9
suggest rather than to state leaving the reader to inver what their
characters are lixe - their personal background, their situation at the
moment, their personalities They do this by providing certain clues,
which the reader nas to pick up These clues might be the choice of
particular words, the way a sentence is pnrased or the inclusici of
information which implies other information For example Pinter i
A Slignt Ache does not describe his characters, Edward and Flora, to us
but rather nints at their personalities and the relationship between them
When tdward says, ‘i tell you | thought tt was convolvulus in the opening
lines af the olay, we Getect from the way this sentence is constructed
that:
Edward is irritatea by Flora telling him that he should kriow the flower
is honeysuckle, and so wants to insist that he really did think it was
convolvulus
and from this ‘reading’ of the line we can infer that:
Edward may be an irritable person, who does not like to be
contradicted,
lt would be wrong to make instant judgements abcut character based on
one or two clues, but we should form initial impressions and then see
whetner these are justified by further clues
Task 2
With a partner find each of the iellowing italicized lines in the text in
order to study therm in their context What inferences can you make
about the characters mA Slight Ache from these lines?
1 Edward Gite’ Wrai do you mean bite?
2 Edward Give me tne tid
Fiora = fil do ft
Edward Give i? tc me!
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15
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Edward Of course / slept Uninterrupted As always
4 Edward Well, let’s kill it for goodness’ sake
Flora Yes, /ef's But how?
Task 3 Read the extract below from Scott Fitzgerald’s May Day
Find evidence from the extract to support these inferences about Gordon Sterrctt:
He does not have much money
He has not always been poor
He is very worried about something
He lives in New York
Ife knows Phihp Dean well but is not a close friend
Ile has not seen Philip Dean for some time
He 1s feeling anxious about meeting Philip Dean
He may ask Philip Dean to lend him some money
When you have finished, compare your evidence with another student’s and explain how you can use it to support the inferences
At nine o'clock on the morning of the first of May 1919, a young man spoke to the room clerk at the Biltmore Hotel, asking if Mr Philip Dean were registered there, and if so, could he be connected with Mr Dean's rooms The inquirer was dressed in a well-cut shabby suit He was small, slender, and darkly handsome: his eyes were framed above with unusually long eyelashes and below with the blue semicircle cf ill nealth, this latter effect heightened by an unnatural glow which coloured his face like a low, incessant fever
Mr Dean was staying there The young man was directed to a telephone at the side
After a second his connexion was made; a sleepy voice hello'd from somewhere above
‘Mr Dean? -— this very eagerly - ‘it’s Gordon, Phil it’s Gordon
Sterrett I'm downstairs | heard you were in New York and | had a hunch you d be here.’
The sleepy voice became gradually enthusiastic Well, how was Gordy, old boy! Well, he certainly was surprised and tickled! Would Gordy come
right up for Pete's sake!
A few minutes later Philip Dean, dressed in blue silk pyjamas, opened his decr and the two young men greeted each other with a hallf- embarrassed exuberance They were both about twenty-four, Yale graduates of the year before the war; but there the resemblance stcpped abruptly
Trang 3Working out the meaning of unfamiliar words
Task 1
Close your eyes and try to empty vour mind so that you are thinking
of nothing at all Then think of a teacher who has caught you Imagine
the teacher in a classroom that you once knew and get the teacher to
do something that you remember well
Task 2
Work in pairs and tell each other about the teacher you imagined in
‘Task 1 above You may like to try to impersonate the teacher
Tell each other about your earliest memories of going to school
Task 3
Read the following extract from a Nigerian short story called Chike’s
School Days, trom Gurls at War by Chinua Achebe, and try to picture
the teachers mentioned in the extract Try also to picture Chike in
each of his schools
But now to return to Chike who refused heathen food at the tender age
of four years, or maybe five
Two years later he went to the village school His right hand could now
reach across his head to his left ear, which proved that he was old
enough to tackle the mysteries of the white man’s learning He was very
happy about his new slate and pencil, and especially about his school
uniform of white shirt and brown khaki shorts But as the first day of the
new term approached, his young mind dwelt on the many stories about
teachers and their canes And he remembered the song his elder sisters
sang, a song that had a somewhat disquieting refrain:
Onye nkuzi ewelu itali piagbusie umuaka
One of the ways an emphasis is laid in Ibo is by exaggeration, so that
the teacher in the refrain might not actually have flogged the children to
death But there was no doubt he did flog them And Chike thought very
much about it
Being so young, Chike was sent to what was called the ‘religious class’
where they sang, and sometimes danced, the catechism He loved the
sound of words and he loved rhythm During the catechism lesson the
class formed a ring to dance the teacher’s question ‘Who was Caesar?’
he might ask, and the song would burst forth with much stamping cf feet
Siza bu eze Rome Onye nachi enu uwa dum
it did not matter to their dancing that in the twentieth century Caesar
was no longer ruler of the whole world
Jaw-breaking words
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35
40
45
OD
60
And sometimes they even sang in English Chike was very fond of Ten Green Bottles They had been taught the words but they only remembered the first and the last lines The middle was huimmed and hie-ed and mumbled:
Ten grin botr angin on dar war, Ten grin botr angin on dar war,
Hm hm hm hm hm
Hm, hm hm hm Am hin,
An ten grin botr angin on dar war
In this way the first year passed Chike was promoted to the ‘Infant
School’, where work of a more Serious nature was undertaken
We need not follow him through the Infant School it would make a full Story in itself But it was no different from the story of other children In the Primary School, however, his individual character began to show He
developed a strong hatred for arithmetic But he loved stories and songs
And he liked particularly {he sound of English words even when they conveyed no meaning at all Some of them simply filled him with elation
‘Periwinkle’ was such a word He had now forgotten how he learned it or exactly what it was He had a vague private meaning for it and it was
something to do with fairyiand ‘Constellation’ was another
Chike’s teacher was fond of long words He was said to be a very learned man His favourite pastime was copying out jaw-breaking words from his Chambers’ Etymological Dictionary Only the other day ne had raised an applause from his class by demolishing a boy's excuse for lateness with unanswerable erudition He had said: ‘Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology.’ The teacher's erudition showed itself in every subject he taught His nature study lessons were memorable Chike would always rernembery the lesson on the methods of seed dispersal
According to teacher there were five methods: by man, by animals, by
water, by wind, and by explosive mechanism Even those pupils who forgot all the other methods remembered ‘explosive mechanism’ Chike was naturally impressed by teacher's explosive vocabulary
But the fairyland quality which words had for him was of a different kind The first sentences in his New Method Reader were simple enough and
vet they filled him with a vague exultation: ‘Once there was a wizard He lived in Africa He went to China to get a lamp Chike read it over and
over again at home and then made a song of it It was a meaningless
song ‘Periwinkles’ got into it, and also ‘Damascus’ But it was like a window through which he saw in the distance a strange, magical new world And he was happy
Task 4
In groups, work out the meaning of the following:
e the lines from songs in the Nigerian Janguage, [bo
e the song which starts ‘Ten griz botr ’
Trang 5Task 5
Say whether the statements below are true, false or impossible to tell
Rewrite those statements that are not true so that they are correct
according to the passage
1 Chike started the Infant School when he was six or Seven
Chike was very good at learning and using long words
Chike was always very happy at school
Chike learned to read in Ibo before he learned to read in English
Chike first developed a liking for words when he learned such
words as ‘periwinkle’ and ‘constellation’ in the Infant School
Chike’s ‘learned’ teacher impressed his pupils by using long words
but he didn’t always use them appropriately
7 In Chike’s first class at school his teacher used a whip to punish
the pupils and he taught them to dance and sing
Task 6
In groups, answer the following questions Give evidence from the
text to Support vour views
1 What would you say were the educational aims of the schools that
Chike went to?
What do you think of the education that Chike received?
3 What do you think the writer’s attitude 1s towards Chike’s
education
Task 7
Do one of the following
e Imagine you are an inspector of schools watching a lesson in
Chike’s primary school class Create the lesson in your mind and
then write your inspector's report on the lesson
e Write an extract from a short story in which you briefly describe
your own early education
Task 8
Without using a dictionary find words which are used in the passage
to mean:
something to write on
concentrated on
WOrrving
beaten
moved up
great happiness
way in which something works
great knowledge
Trang 628 Unit 4
Task 9
In groups, discuss how you worked out
e the meaning of words you did not know in the passage
e the views of the author
Which of the following techniques helped you to find the meanings of unfamiliar words in the passage?
L] a Looking them up ina dictionary
L] b Looking for clues in the situation they: are being used to describe
Looking for clues in the words used immediately before and after the unfamiliar words
Looking for clues in the form of the words (e.g the endings) Reading on and looking for ‘new’ information which refers back to the unfamiliar words
2 Skills training
Discovering the meaning of new words
Task 1
If you look up every new word in a dictionary you will take a long time
to read a passage and you'll find it difficult to remember what the passage is about It’s better to use the following procedure:
a_ If you are reading a passage and come across an unfamiliar word, carry on reading; it might not be important or it might be explained later on in the passage
b If you come across the word again in the passage (or it is referred back to) and you still don’t understand it
e look for clues in the word itself (e.g in ‘predict’, ‘pre’ means before and ‘dict’ has got something to do with saying)
e look for clues in the words immediately before and after the unfamiliar word (e.g ‘He dug up a huge marrow and gave it to them to eat with their chicken `)
e look for clues in the situation being described or referred to (e.g ‘He went on vacation to Hawau for the sun `)
c If after checking for clues you think the word 1s important in the passage but you are still not sure of its meaning
e look the word up in a dictionary
e look for a definition which fits your guess about the meaning of the word in the passage
Trang 7Task 2
In each of the following passages the words underlined do not really
exist in English
Use the context of the passage, and any other clues, to work out the
correct English words
1 | bought another dozen tads from the farm yesterday They were not
as fresh as the ones | bought last week but they made lovely
omelettes nevertheless
2 The gregit broke down this morning and had to be pulled by the
steam locomotive it had been brought to replace | was told it had
run out of fuel
3 If you have light skin you have to be very careful not to get sligged
when you go on the beach Make sure that you only take your shirt
off for about fifteen minutes on the first day and that you rub some
grild all over before you go into the sun
Task 3
For each of the following passages
e list the words you don’t know the meaning of
e say which of these words are important in the passage
e work out the meaning of the words you believe are important to
the meaning of the passage
1 Samuel Joyner, aged eighteen, battled for half an hour to escape
from his mauve coloured Jaguar which was trapped in three feet of
water Eventually, he took the only escape route available to him —
the boot He found a 1p coin on the floor of the car and used it to
unscrew the back seat so that he could get into the boot
2 | was so famished that | began to rummage in the garbage bin for bits
of food | found lots of empty bottles and empty jars, many dirty
paper bags and boxes, a few old letters, some tea leaves and at last a
mouldy piece of bread, which | gobbled up as fast as | could to
appease my hunger and to avoid the sight and smell of its green
decay
3 It had rained nearly all day, and Tauilopepe Mauga had remained in
the main fale plaiting sinnet Now it was evening, time for prayers,
and the throbbing chorus of cicadas ached through Sapepe village
Masina, Tauilopepe’s mother, came in from the kitchen fale where
she had been helping cook the evening meal, opened the large
wooden trunk, got out the Bible which had been in her aiga since the
missionaries came, and sat down at the front of the fale, facing her
son Tauilopepe stopped plaiting and put on the shirt that was lying
beside him The rest of the Aiga Tauilopepe, his wife and three
children and numerous other relatives, entered and sat down at the
back posts of the fale
Trang 8J0 Unit 4
Task 4
If the following words existed what do you think they would mean?
4 accommodatable 9 videogram
5 unlaughable 10 dishette
Task 5
Find a passage (in a book, magazine, newspaper, etc.) which interests you but which contains a lot of words you don’t know Read the passage using the procedure described in Task 1 to help you understand the meaning of all the important words
Trang 9Reading for information
Task 1
In groups find out what tsetse flies are and what damage they do
Use your dictionaries and any other relevant reference books you
have available
a bog ‘
BEAL A RTP Reg a Ỉ Ảo
L3 To
i R ban Sd
Ta nh Fe
oe Es
Task 2
Share your information about tsetse flies with another group and \W ar on tsetse f| y
discuss with them the benefits that could be gained from eradicating
the tsetse fly
Task 3
You are going to read a newspaper article about a campaign to
eliminate the tsetse fly in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and
Mozambique The headline for the article begins, Billion-dollar war
on tsetse fly
In groups discuss a possible ending for the headline kemember that
newspaper headlines are always short headings Their main function
is to attract the reader’s attention
Compare your headline with those of the other groups
Task 4
The headline actually reads, Billion-dollar war on tsetse fly could be
disastrous for Africa
In groups discuss in what ways you think the campaign could be
disastrous for Africa
Task 5
Imagine that your group is campaigning against the tsetse fly
elimination programme and is preparing a case to present to the
people and parliaments of the four African countries mentioned
above
Use the article on the following page to help you to make notes as
part of your preparation for presenting your case against the tsetse
fly campaign
Trang 1032 Init 5
Billion-dollar war on tsetse fly
could be disastrous for Africa
by Marcus Linear
APOTENTIALLY disastrous campaign to open
up huge areas of Africa to cattle ranching is
about to get a multi-milfion-pound shot inthe arm +
trom the EEC A programme which will involve
widespread use of pesticides in four Alrican “gi EE
countries - Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and gaa
Mozambique - is due to be approved at a }
finance committee meeting in Brussels this Res a
week,
The aim is to eliminate the tsetse fly, which ~
intests 10m square kilometres of Africa, mostly ;'
tropical forest and wooded savannah Thetsetse * `
Carries a parasite thal infects humans with sleep- ome:
ing sickness and cattle with a debilitating
disease called nagana, and has long been
regarded as a block to developing great ex- FY —_
panses of the continent
Ten years ago the UN Food and Agriculture
Organisation launched a campaign against the -
fly, aiming to clear 7m square kilometres of
woodland and forest to make way for 120m cattle
producing 1.5m tonnes of beef a year So far
the programme has cost nearly a billion dollars
But it has run into serious trouble
Critics say that at best the tsetse war is a colos-
Sal waste of money, which could be spent on
making better use of existing land, and that at
worst it will accelerate the process of turning
much of Africa into desert
Opinion is divided as to whether the tsetse war
can be won Despite gains, notably in Nigeria
and Cameroon, some experts claim the tsetse
infests more land today than it did before the
FAO got involved Others believe eradication
could be achieved but would take billions more
dollars and require co-operation and controls
that do not exist in Africa
More seriously, there are doubts whether
tsetse eradication is aven desirable
Tha FAO admits in internal papers, that much
of the infested land contains some of the best
dry season pastures in Africa precisely because
“it has been ‘protected’ by the tsetse fly from
the ravages of over-grazing and heavy short-
term, agricuitural exploitation” Critics say much
of this land is unsuited to long-term cattle pro-
duction and that ranching would turn it into
desert
Furthermore, the scheme involves drenching
land with chemicals, some of which are banned
inthe EEC And Or Walter Ormerod, an experi
at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine, adds that eradicating tsetse will rot
necessarily get rid of sleeping sickness or
nagana The trypanosome parasite could be car-
ried by other insects, such as the horse-fly,
Fata ak RS people ges iF
⁄ eke ob +
The tsetse fly and map showing the spraying area
which the spraying programmes will not eliminate, and forms of trypanosomiasis are found in both Latin America and Asia, where there is no tsetse fly
The EEC scheme was drawn up by Dr Des-
mond Lovemore, a specialist in tsetse control
in Zimbabwe It calls for chemical spraying of the tsetse belt of the four countries at an even- tual cost of $180m The first stage, to be approved this week, will cost $21m and involves both aerial spraying and field trials of fly-traps impregnated with dieldrin, a chemical so deadly that it is banned in the west The environmental effects will be monitored by four institutes which are known advocates of chemical spraying
The chemical to be sprayed, endosulfan, 1s considered “safe” by Lovemore, yet its manufacturer, Hoaschst AG of West Germany, Says endosulfan should not be used anywhere near rivers, swamps, streams or lake-shores - which the scheme will cover Some tests in the Okavango delta in Botswana have shown that
a single spraying can kill 70% of year-old fish
While the immediate impact of spraying mat- ters, notleast because fish and wild animals are important food sources for rural people, the longer-term effects both of chemical spraying and changes in land-use will not be assessed
by the EEC Yet Zimbabwe's own tsetse con- trol department, in a 1982 report gives warn- ing of the “severe degradation of pastures and woodlands which will follow tsetse eradication
in areas of low rainfall and poor soil” It admits that ‘‘our operations have been severely criti-
cised by an informed public for exposing the land first to pollution and then to devastation by the uncontrolled introduction of cattle’’
The programme will include game areas, with Serious effect on wildlife While the expiicit aim 1S to provide food for the rural poor, who in prac- tice cannot afford commercially produced beef
it will not onty damage the game parks’ ecology
but will also reduce supplies of game meat - which the poor do eat This is planned just as experiments with ‘game farming’ are demonstrating that antelope and buffalo, for ex- ample, can be reared for meat much more economically than cattle Largely immune to trypanosomiasis wild animals co-exist with the tsetse fly They need much less drinking water and graze more selectively than cattle
The main charge against the tsetse war is that itis Clearing land which is mostly too fragile to Support intensive cattle ranching for more than
a few years Cattle trample the grass round water holes, disturbing thin topsoil Herders regularly burn the bush to provide fresh grazing and use foliage from surviving trees as emer- gency fodder in the dry season, so forest and woodland disappear AS trees are removed in areas of low raintall, the water table drops and ine land returns to desert
An international bank has become so alarmed
by the economic damage to Africa of clearance and cattle-ranching that it is backing a film en- titled The End of Een The bank is concerned that the opening up of Africa to unsuitable forms
of exploitation - such as large-scale cattle rais-
ing - will, in destroying its ecology, destroy its economic viability in the long term The poor, the film will claim, do not benefit in Botswana Nineteen people, 11 of them in the government, own 80% of the cattle One man profits from a third of Botswana's beef exports
In any case, according to leading Climatologists, the total production of cattle in Airica will not increase because, with the open- ing up and deforesting of large areas in the cen- tres land will be turned to desert much jaster
in areas such as the northern Sahel region, the
belt south of the Sahara desert which is tradi- tonally a cattle-raising area but is now serious-
ly threatened
Studies using satellite photography confirm that removal of trees and grass cover increases the reflectivity of the earth's surface, reduces the formation of rain-clouds and affects the winds that blow them towards the already arid
Sahara Reflectivity increases wherever, south
of the Sahara, there are cattle
Critics of the tsetse programme argue that no more money should be spent until there has been a satellite assessment of areas so far treated, to check on the degradation of the sails and the continent-wide effects on rainfall
So far, they say, the FAO has done no such survey They say that it would be highly ir- responsible of the EEC to go ahead without one The EEC's Jan Mulder, in charge of the pro- posal, says that it will look at whether itis worth doing a long-term study a year after the pro- gramme begins
So much money has already been spent on
the tsetse war that it has developed a momen- tum of its own: thousands of scientists have made it their life's work, the chemical companies are heavily involved, and it has become an un- questioned axiom of aid donors that getting rid
of tsetse is good for Africa - the key toa “‘study for survival’’, Airican governments, who are not known for their respect for the environment and whose senior men are often heavily involved in Cattle-raising, put the tsetse war near the top of their requests for western aid
After 10 years of heavy spending, aid officials admit that the tsetse war is still “something of
a step into the unknown’, but argue that the choice is ‘between the costs of doing nothing and trying, at great risk, to boost people's standards of living’’
Yet the net result of spending a sum solarge that it already equals the World Bank's special fund to tackle all aspects of the ailing econo- mies of Africais likely to be that, in the long term, less and less of Africa will be able to sustain its qrow:ng population