Grammar Clinic

10. Match the halves to make a meaningful whole. Translate the sentences into Russian paying attention to modal verbs.

1. Moira has 3 young children, that is why she isn’t able to work full-time now.	a. Can it be a case of reverse head-hunting?
2. According to the union representative pay increase must serve an incentive for the employees to work harder.	b. Yet she can’t become an outcast from the professional community. So she is working as a freelance.
3. George can’t be happy with his present job.	c. Mr. Carpenter had to act as a chair.
4. You should think twice before accepting this job offer.	d. So we can suggest that aggressive hiring should resume as well.
5. Though the British are notorious for working the longest hours in Europe, they are often not able to achieve a great deal.	e. We can’t be 100% per cent sure, though, as many workers today favor shifting to shorter working hours and lower pay to enjoy work-life balance.
6. The director couldn’t attend the meeting.	f. But don’t forget to notify the foreman.
7. Some labor experts note that severe economic downturns must be followed by powerful expansions.	g. Their companies can often be 25% less productive than their continental counterparts.
8. No problem, you may have your lunch later.	h. You can hardly think of anything more monotonous.

Speaking Springboard

11.How do you understand the following proverbs? Give reasons to prove your stance.

Reading 1

Extracts from

Nice Work

Vafter David Lodge

ictor Wilcox lies awake, in the dark bedroom, waiting for his alarm clock to bleep. Worries streak towards him like enemy spaceships in one of his younger son’s video games. He flinches, dodges, zaps them with instant solutions, but the assault is endless: the value of the pound, the competition from their rivals, the incompetence of his Marketing Director, the persistent breakdowns of the core blowers, the pressure from his divisional boss, last month’s accounts, the quarterly forecast, the annual review …This is Victor Eugene Wilcox, 42, the Managing Director of J.Pringle& Sons Casting and General Engineering, married, with three children, the man who earns a living in the family.

***

Now let’s meet a very different character: Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge*, in her thirties, single. She rises somewhat later than Vic Wilcox, but, unlike Vic, sleeping invariably until woken by her alarm clock. Then worries rush into her consciousness, as into his, but she deals with them in a rational, orderly manner. This morning she gives priority to the fact that it is the first day of the winter term, and that she has a lecture to deliver and two tutorials to conduct. Although she has been teaching now for some eight years, on and off, although she enjoys it, feels she is good at it, and would like to go on doing it for the rest of her life if possible, she always feels a twinge of anxiety at the beginning of a new term. This does not disturb her self-confidence: a good teacher, like a good actress, should not be immune to stage fright.

***

Robyn Penrose is making her way to Lecture Room A, along corridors and down staircases thronged with students changing classes. They part before her, some fall in behind her, and follow her to the lecture theatre. She carries under one arm her folder of lecture notes, and under the other a bundle of books from which to read illustrative quotations. No young man offers to carry this burden for her. Such gallantry is out of fashion. Robyn herself would disapprove of it on ideological grounds, and it might be interpreted by other students as creeping.

Robyn arranges her notes on the lectern, waiting for latecomers to settle in their seats. She taps on the desk and clears her throat. A sudden hush falls, and a hundred faces tilt towards her – curious, expectant, sullen, apathetic – like empty dishes waiting to be filled.

***

Vic Wilcox is in a meeting with his technical and production managers. They file into the office and sit round the long oak table, slightly in awe of Vic, serious men in chain-store suits. Vic sits at the head of the table, dominating the audience not by his stature, which is short, but by his aggressive manner.

‘My point is simply this,’ says Vic. ‘We’re producing too many different things in short runs, meeting small orders. We must rationalize. Offer a small range of standard products at competitive prices. Any questions?’

‘Just one point, Vic,’ says the Works Manager. ‘If we rationalize production like you say, will this mean redundancies?’

‘No,’ says Vic, looking him straight in the eye. ‘Rationalization will mean growth in sales. Eventually we’ll need more men, not fewer.’ Eventually perhaps, but some redundancies are inevitable in the short term.

***

As Robyn is winding up her lecture, and Vic is commencing his tour of the machine shop, the Dean of the Arts Faculty of Rummidge University is given a memorandum on the subject of ‘INDUSTRY YEAR SHADOW SCHEME’ to the following effect: ‘… each Faculty should nominate a member of staff to ‘shadow’ some person employed at senior management level in local manufacturing industry in the course of the winter term. A shadow, as the name implies, is someone who follows another person about all day as he goes about his normal work. In this way a genuine, inward understanding of that work is obtained by the shadow, which could not be obtained by a simple briefing or organized visit. Ideally, the shadow should spend an uninterrupted week or fortnight with his opposite number, but if that is impracticable, a regular visit of one day a week throughout the term would be satisfactory. Shadows will be asked to write a short report of what they have learned at the end of the exercise.’

After some discussions, the most junior member of the Department, Robyn Penrose, is assigned the nomination, as it’s right up her street, with her having written a book on the Victorian industrial novel.

In his turn, Vic Wilcox gets a call from the administration acknowledging him of a shadow, a lecturer in English literature, arriving at the factory the next Wednesday.

***

So, ten days later, Robyn Penrose set off in a snowstorm and ill humour to begin her stint as the University of Rummidge Faculty of Arts Industry Year Shadow.

An hour or so passed, and they were back in Vic Wilcox’s office after what he had referred to as 'a quick whistle round the works'. Robyn sank down on to a chair, confused, battered, exhausted by the sense-impressions of the last hour. For once in her life, she was lost for words, and uncertain of her argumentative ground. She had always taken for granted that unemployment was an evil; but if this was employment then perhaps people were better off without it. What had she expected? Nothing, certainly, so like the satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution. Robyn's mental image of a modern factory had derived mainly from TV commercials and documentaries: deftly edited footage of brightly coloured machines and smoothly moving assembly lines, manned by brisk operators in clean overalls, turning out motor cars or transistor radios to the accompaniment of Mozart on the sound track. At Pringle's there was scarcely any colour, not a clean overall in sight, and instead of Mozart there was a deafening demonic cacophony that never relented. Nor had she been able to comprehend what was going on. There seemed to be no logic or direction to the factory's activities. Individuals or small groups of men worked on separate tasks with no perceptible relation to each other. Components were stacked in piles all over the factory floor like the contents of an attic. The whole place seemed designed to produce, not goods for the outside world, but misery for the inmates. What Wilcox called the machine shop had seemed like a prison, and the foundry had seemed like hell.

`There are two sides to our operation,' he had explained, when he led her out of the office block and across a bleak enclosed courtyard towards a high windowless wall of corrugated iron. `The foundry, and the machine shop. We also do a bit of assembly work - small engines and steering assemblies, I'm trying to build it up - but basically we're a general engineering firm, supplying components to the motor industry mostly.’

‘Couldn’t all the work be done automatically?’ asked Robyn. ‘Or at least you could move the workers to other jobs occasionally, just to give them a change from the monotonous labour.’

‘They don’t like being shunted about,’ said Vic. ‘And machine work is the thing of the future. But then we’ll have to make men redundant, because we won’t need them any more. We’re caught in a double bind here. If we don’t modernize we lose competitive edge and have to make men redundant.’

‘What we should be doing is spending more money preparing people for creative leisure,’ said Robyn. ‘People could get used to life without work.’

‘Men like to work. It’s a funny thing, but they do. They moan about it every Monday morning, they may agitate for shorter hours and longer holidays, but they need to work for their self-respect,’ answered Vic.

***

The new term at University began with a spell of fine weather. Students disported themselves on the lawns of the campus, and some tutors elected to hold their classes outdoors, and sat cross-legged on the grass, discoursing on philosophy or physics to little groups. But this idyllic appearance was deceptive. The students were apprehensive about the forthcoming examinations, and the world of uncertain employment that lay beyond that threshold. The staff were apprehensive about the forthcoming changes in the educational system.

* **

Yet, the second stage of the Shadow Scheme was due to start in order to improve relations between industry and the University, so now Vic Wilcox found himself at the Senior Common Room, where he and Robyn Penrose had to join a short queue for coffee. Vic looked about him in a puzzled way.

`What's going on here?' he said. Are these people having an early lunch?'

`No, just morning coffee.'

`How long are they allowed?'

Robyn looked at her colleagues lounging in easy chairs, smiling and chatting to each other, or browsing through the newspapers and weekly reviews. She suddenly saw this familiar spectacle through an outsider’s eyes, and almost blushed. ‘We all have our work to do – discussing University business, settling committee agendas, exchanging ideas about our research, or consulting about particular students. Things like that,’ she said. ‘It’s up to us how we do it.’

‘If I was in charge,' said Vic, ‘I'd shut this place down and have that woman behind the counter going up and down the corridors with a trolley.’

‘You see,’ said Robyn, ‘in industry, management decides who shall be made redundant in the labour force, senior management decides who shall go from junior management, and so on. Universities don’t have that pyramid structure. Everybody is equal in a sense, once they pass probation. Nobody can be made redundant against their will. Nobody will vote to make their peers redundant.’

‘Then you’ll soon be bankrupt. Surely the answer is to change the system,’ said Vic.

‘No!’ said Robyn hotly. ‘That’s not the answer. If you try to make universities like commercial institutions, you destroy everything that makes them valuable. Better the other way round. Model industry on universities. Make factories collegiate institutions.’

‘We wouldn’t last five minutes in the marketplace,’ said Vic.

‘So much the worse for the marketplace,’ said Robyn. ‘Maybe the universities are inefficient, maybe we do waste a lot of time arguing on committees because nobody has absolute power. But that’s preferable to a system where everybody is afraid of the person on the next rung of the ladder above them, where everybody is out for themselves, because they know that if it suited the company they could be made redundant tomorrow and nobody would give a damn.’

‘Well,’ said Vic, ‘it’s nice work if you can get it.’

Note

*Rummidge is an imaginary city, with imaginary universities and imaginary factories, inhabited by imaginary people, which occupies, for the purpose of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world.

David Lodge was born in London in 1935. He was educated at University College London, where he took his BA degree in 1955 and his MA in 1959. In between he did National Service in the British Army. He holds a doctorate from the University of Birmingham, where he taught in the English Department from 1960 until 1987, when he retired to become a full-time writer. He retains the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham and continues to live in that city. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

David Lodge's novels include The Picturegoers (1960); Ginger, You're Barmy (1962); The British •is Falling Down (1965); Out of the Shelter (1970); Changing Places (1975), for which he was awarded both the Hawthomden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize; How Far Can You Go?, which was Whitbread Book of the Year in 1980; Small World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984; Nice Work, which won the 1988 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Paradise News (1991); and Therapy, regional winner and finalist for the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize.