Discussion Points

Ex.3. Read these interesting facts and express your opinion about them:

1. University professors often give good-looking girls better marks in exams; male students tend to overestimate the intellectual qualities of pretty female students.

2. Attractive people are seen by others as having a better personality, higher status, more likelihood of getting married, and being happier.

3. Beautiful girls rarely become scientists; they tend to choose subjects such as languages, law and medicine.

4. Women who have beautiful bodies often have less self-confidence – they worry too much about keeping their body perfect.

5. Short men are less likely to get jobs than tall men and they receive lower starting salaries. In US presidential elections, the taller candidate nearly always wins. There may even be a connection between height and intelligence, as it seems that the same genes are involved in both aspects.

Ex.4. Guess the following riddles:

1. What, by losing an eye, has nothing left but a nose?

2. Why can’t your nose be 12 inches long?

3. What contains more feet in winter than in summer?

4. What has a hand, but can’t scratch itself?

5. Why does a man’s hair usually turn grey sooner than his moustache?

6. What is it which never uses its teeth for eating?

Skim Reading Work

Ex.5. Read the text which describes Mona Lisa’s personality on the basis of her facial features.

Text III

There is an endless speculation as to who Mona Lisa was and what her character might have been. It has even been suggested that the lady with the enigmatic smile could be a self-portrait of the artist Leonardo Da Vinci dressed as a woman. Her smile is the most famous in the world. it is a slightly crooked smile because it is stronger on her left (on the right of the painting). The smile suggest that she told lies and traded insults whenever it best suited her or when she lost her temper, which probably occurred frequently.

The hint of a smile playing around those much-admired lips and the distinct glint in her eyes attest to her fun-loving ways and a bawdy sense of humour. But the fact that these lips are “bloodless” warns the face watcher of her callousness.

If you examine her lips in the portrait, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, you will notice a small mole on her top lip. A mole anywhere on the lips or immediately above the corners of the mouth signals indigestion and flatulence. Whatever embarrassment this might have caused it does not detract from the appeal of her pretty, elongated rosebud mouth, a shape which normally testifies to a romantic, dreamy lover.

Mona Lisa holds her head and face straight and as erect as a pillar, her steady and unflinching gaze affirming her dominant personality and worldly ways. She was probably a woman of high status, a gifted abstract thinker, and would therefore in modern times be considered eminently employable.

It would appear from the angle of her jaw that it “dropped” straight and below the ears. Mona Lisa’s jaw suggests that she would have been very successful in a sales career, or in publicity, public relations or in the hotel or travel industry. Moreover, a deep, smoothly rounded jaw such as hers exhibits firmness and optimism, but the beginnings of flab developing below the chin together with those plump cheeks, disclose her fondness for pasta, rich Italian food, and the local, full-bodied Italian wines. Yes, she was definitely greedy.

No face reading can be complete without a thorough study of ears, which in her case are hidden.

That she was spendthrift is evident from her nostrils, for nostrils which are visible when the face is viewed full-on, indicate their owner has a scant understanding of money, and so she should not have been given the control of the family (or company’s) budget. The nostrils, moreover, are narrow and the sides of her nose are flat, both features pointing to a rather untidy woman, who probably dropped her clothes, shoes, hairnets (in the portrait she wears one that flattens the top of her head) all over the parquet floor in the bedroom of a townhouse or palace near to Leonardo’s hometown of Vinci, between Pisa and Florence, in Tuscany.

Because the hairnet sweeps the hair off her forehead, we can see how smoothly rounded and curved her hairline grows. This type of perfectly rounded hairline spells out a clear message: Mona Lisa was fickle, an “unreliable” friend. Her forehead is longer and wider than the part of the face known as the low zone, which consists of the area between the nose tip and the jaw-line. This facial trait tells us that she had an IQ above average, that she was a fast learner, but being impractical and not wanting to spoil her elegant hands, she would not have been able to mend a broken vase or set a mousetrap.

A nose that is straight, long, thin and with a high bridge in addition to Mona Lisa’s peculiar type of nostrils generally belongs to a witty and engaging conversationalist, but one who is impatient with those unable to keep up with the wide range of topics discussed.

A final word about her eyes: very few of us have identically-shaped eyes, but she is an exception. The eyes are narrow and elliptical, signaling jealousy, and if she suspected that another woman was after her lover (or husband), she would punish the enemy by any means, foul or fair. Mona Lisa was most definitely a sneak, but one who needed at least nine hours’ sleep every night, judging by the puffy eyelids which are clearly shown in the Leonardo portrait.

Ex.6. Write out from the text words of parts of body.

Ex.7. Provide definitions for the following words and phrases from the text. Use them in sentences of your own.

Callousness, mole, unflinching gaze, flab, dominant personality, spendthrift, enigmatic, greedy, engaging conversationalist, bawdy.

Ex.8. Fill in this chart according to the text. Summarize the text with the help of this chart.

Facial feature	Its meaning
1) Slightly crooked smile	Ability to tell lies

Ex.9. Look at the meanings of facial features above. Divide them into positive and negative qualities. Note down those character traits that attract you and those that put you off. Do you agree with this analyses of Mona Lisa’s personality?