andreeva_ln_volkovinskaia_lv_korziuk_nn_liudi_i_obshchestvo

2.The owner refused to rent an apartment because …

a)the apartment had already been leased.

b)the Williams had refused to pay rental deposit.

c)he didn’t like the Williams family.

3.The Williams family has won their case in the federal court because …

a)there’s no racial discrimination in the USA.

b)there’s a special paper prohibiting racial discrimination in the USA.

c)the attorney for Mr. Wexler turned out to be a low professional.

4.Americans have gathered to …

a)celebrate the 50th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King.

b)to commemorate the 40 years of the death of Martin Luther King.

c)to commemorate the anniversary of the death Martin Luther King.

5.Dr. King was …

a)killed during his last sermon in the church.

b)assassinated two weeks after his last sermon.

c)assassinated some hours after his last sermon in the church.

6.Dr. King came to Memphis because …

a)he had been invited by the church.

b)his arrival to Memphis had been caused by the invitation of the American Federation of State.

c)his arrival had been caused by the striking garbagemen.

Task 2. Listen to the news again and answer the following questions.

1.What was the Williams family looking for and why?

2.Why did Mr. Thorton Williams have to appeal to the court?

3.Why is the Williams’ case the top story of the news programme?

4.What was Dr. Martin Luther King?

Post-listening Activity

Task 1. Express your opinion on the reasons of discrimination over ethnic minorities in different countries.

Task 2. Work in groups of 3 or 4 and discuss possible ways of solving the problems of ethnic discrimination.

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TAPESCRIPT 3

AMERICA AS SEEN BY BRITONS

Pre-listening Activity

1.What do people pay attention to when they arrive in a foreign country?

2.When you visit some new place do you observe positive or negative features first of all?

Listening Activity

Task 1. Listen to the tape “America as seen by Britons” and tick the right sentences.

a)They moved to the USA two years ago.

b)Despite of some drawbacks they enjoyed their staying in New York.

c)Sheila appreciates the possibility of doing shopping late in the evening.

d)New York subway impressed them very much.

e)All nationalities living in New York settle in a certain area.

f)It’s more difficult to make friends in the USA because the Americans are too imposing.

Task 2. Listen to the tape for the second time. Make a list of positive and negative sides of the life in New York for Sheila and Bob.

Postlistening Activity

Answer the following questions.

Why do both Sheila and Bob think that the life is easier in America than in England?

Why was it much easier for Sheila and Bob to make friends in New York?

TAPESCRIPT 4

ENGLAND AS SEEN BY AMERICANS

Pre-listening Activity

1.Where do you think the difference between closely related nations may lie first of all?

2.In what spheres of life do the Americans and the English differ most of all to your mind?

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Listening Activity

Task 1. Listen to the tape “England as seen by Americans” and tick the right variants.

A

General attitude of Terry Tormsha to living in England is:

a)positive;

b)negative.

B

According to Terry Tomsha the differences between two countries are in:

a)the geographical position;

b)the people;

c)the historical background;

d)the language;

e)the standards of living;

f)the attitude towards work;

g)the weather.

Task 2. Listen to the tape for the second time. Find the facts to prove the following.

a)It’s easier to start a conversation in the street in America.

b)Life is a lot easier in America.

c)Job goes first for Americans.

Post-listening Activity

Answer the following questions.

1.Why is it sometimes difficult for the Americans to get quick reaction from the English?

2.What do you think about the preferences between private life and work for the Americans and the English?

3.What is your personal attitude to the priorities of work and private life?

SPEECH PRACTICE

Task 1. Read the quotation opening this unit “Our own society is the only one, which we can transform and yet not destroy, since the changes, which we

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should introduce, would come from within”(Claude Levi-Strauss). Discuss it and see whether you properly understand the meaning of it.

Task 2. Comment on the following

1.“Our own society is the only one, which we can transform and yet not destroy, since the changes, which we should introduce, would come from within.”

2.“There is no sorrow above the loss of a native land.” (Euripides, 485—406 B. C.) Do you support this statement?

Task 3. Give sound arguments to your opponent on the following theme

“Few of us like to be told that we are average. Generalization about nationalities is usually not welcomed, even when basically accurate.”

Task 4. Role play the international conference “National Stereotypes and Economical Progress”.

You need:

a spokesman;

representatives of a scientific laboratory of a research institute presenting the results of their 5 year investigations of the problem of the influence of some typical national traits of character on the speed and efficiency of economical development;

journalists presenting different types of mass media;

representatives of the executive branch responsible for the economic development of the Republic.

WRITING PRACTICE

Task 1. Find some information about ethnic minorities in the Republic of Belarus, their position in our society and compare them with those of the USA and Britain. Write an essay on the issue “Ethnic minorities in the Republic of Belarus and their position in our society”.

Task 2. Write an essay on the following theme: “At the beginning of the 21st century, a place for each country has not yet been specified according to its resources — financial or human — or according to its military potential. The main factor in characterizing these roles in the world processes has become the utilization of achievements by the human minds in each state.”

(Prof. V. Gaisenok)

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ACHIEVEMENT TEST

I. Give the term to the following definition.

a)opinion favoring one side;

b)considering other people inferior;

c)an offspring of a certain ascestor, family or group;

d)a stable community of people with a territory, history; culture and language in common;

e)behaviour typical of a person or a group;

f)a safe place;

g)a mass departure.

II. Match the synonymous pairs.

III. Choose the most suitable work to complete the sentence.

1. High rents have led to the … of ordinary people from inner cities a) exodus b) access c) exit

2.Nation building in the Third World during the twentieth century has created mass … on an unprecedented scale.

4.There is a considerable agreement between different people in any nation regarding the most … traits of other nations.

5.Opposite to the English the Americans are … characterized by the “spirit of adventure”.

6.Belarusians are generally characterized by an innate respect for other people, and … towards those who hold a different opinion.

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APPENDIX

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

UNIT I

T E X T 1

WE’RE ALL MIDDLE CLASS NOW

Here we go again. “I’m middle class,” says John Prescott. “No, you’re not” responds his dad, and off we all go asking each other, “What are you?”

It ‘s a tricky question because there is no right answer. Karl Marx, never the snappiest of writers, dreamed up relationship to the means of production’s as the key factor. So an engineer earning more than 40,000 a year would be working class because he doesn’t own the company he works for — he is just a prole like the rest of us.

It was left to another German, Max Weber, to point out that how people identify themselves, and how others see them, is as important as wealth or ownership.

Teachers have always earned a pittance but are regarded as middle class because they are “educated”. It is lack of formal education that identifies plumbers as working class although some earn as much as any City blue-blood.

Before the 1994 Education Act it was pretty straightforward. There was the aristocracy, the middle class and the workers. There were exceptions: bright working-class boys (girls rarely got a look-in) who won scholarships; self-made entrepreneurs who emigrated to suburbia and modified their vowel sounds.

The end of the war changed all that. Clever working-class boys and girls took the 11-plus and there was a huge expansion in white-collar employment. By the 1980s, higher and further education had exploded and one in every three 16to 19-year-old enrolled.

Back in the 1960s, John Cleese, Dudley Moore and Ronnie Barker parodied class on black-and-white television. Cleese with a bowler, Moore a flat cap and Barker a middle-class trilby. They were poking fun at the old certainties, the old snobberies.

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Twenty years on and Margaret Thatcher began selling off council houses. After job and income, home ownership had always been a sure sign of class. Thatcher’s message was crystal clear — you too can be middle class. The willingness of the building societies to lend and extended this trend.

But the Thatcher years saw the return of snobbery. It never went away completely but, for a long period, it was not respectable.

It is impossible to define class. Even the statisticians of the Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys have given up. It is abandoning the famous A, B, C, D categories used by market researchers and trying to devise a completely new scale — so far without success.

OPCS could try sporting affiliations. Twenty years ago, belonging to a golf club was a guarantee of middle-class status, now it’s the favourite sport of taxi-drivers. Soccer was the preserve of the Sunreading classes, today you can’t get in at Arsenal without showing your Guardian. Cricket, once the preserve of the blazer brigade, has been colonised by the hooligans no longer welcome on the soccer terrace. So what are you? And does it matter?

Standard marketing definitions of social grading

AUpper middle class. Higher managerial, administrative or professional.

BMiddle class Intermediate managerial administrative or professional.

C1 Lower middle class. Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional

C2 Skilled working class. Skilled manual workers.

DWorking class Semi and unskilled manual workers.

EThose at lowest levels of subsistence. State pensioners or widows (no other earner), casual or lowest grade workers.

(Barry Hugill

“The Individual in Society” 2000)

T E X T 2

CONSUMER SOCIETY AND IDENTITY

Post modernist theory promotes the idea that we now live in a media-saturated environment in which we are constantly encouraged by the media to spend money (consume). The theory suggests that we now live in a new era, in which the importance of production or work activities in shaping identities (by helping to from class instance) has declined. Some postmodernist theorists argue that class, as meaningful sociological category, no longer exists. It is claimed that we now live in a period of affluence and that it is what we buy which now determines membership of social groups and our social identity. It is

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these bonds of consumption — in buying Nike trainers or Prada clothes, for example — which create our sense of identity.

The typical British household now enjoys a standard of living beyond the grasp of any previous generation. And we are not alone. Most Britons are members of a global consumer society which embraces most North Americans, West Europeans; Japanese and Australians, together with the inhabitants of the Middle East oil sheikdoms and the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore. As we hover around the cusp of the 10th and 21st century, the consumer class is on the rise, too, in Eastern Europe, Latin America and South and East Asia. Germans bought one million used Western cars in 1991 alone, while in Chinese cities, two-thirds of households now own washing machines.

Half a century after the end of the Second World War, the American consumer society provides the model to which ordinary citizens in every corner of the global aspire. In America itself, the average couple owns twice as many cars, covers 25 times as much distance by air, and 21 times as much plastic as their parents did in 1950. Today, the consumer society can be summed up by “shopping-mall mania” and “fast-food frenzy”. About 60 % of food Americans eat is bought ready-made in supermarkets, at takeaway outlets or in restaurants.

Japan, Western Europe and Australasia are not far behind. In the past 50 years the British, French and West Germans have tripled the amount of paper per person they counsume. In the eighties the amount of processed and package food eaten per individual doubled, while consumption of soft drinks per person shot up by 30 % between 1985 and 1990.

Now, perhaps more than ever before, we are wondering what life is all about, what it’s for. We are searching for meaning and balance. Many are turning to alternative ways of living and downshifting is one of them. Indeed, in Western societies downshifting is one of the fastest-developing social trends of the late nineties, as more of us yearn for simpler, more fulfilling lives and the time to enjoy the good things in life. In the United States, the word downshifting is already common parlance.

What meaning does downshifting hold in nineties Britain? Are we turning to it for the same reasons as in America? Ian Christie, an associate director at the Henley Center for Forecasting, defines it as follows: “ It’s taking a deliberate decision to opt out of the culture of consumerism and the career rat race. It’s about cutting back on purchasing, reducing working hours, and perhaps bailing out of conventional work in search of greater quality of life and control over one’s work”.

Professor Ray Pahl, one of Britain’s foremost sociologists, has been studying our work practices, our attitudes to work and its role in our lives for the past three decades. He sums up the key elements of downshifting in these terms: “Conventionally, it is a conscious attempt to live at a quieter pace in order to

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spend more time away from employment. On the one hand, it is a response to greedy and thoughtless institutions, and one the other a pull to a more attractive activity than simply maintaining one’s identity at the world of work”.

T E X T 3

A MOBILE SOCIETY

On my travels across America, I saw more and more of these mobile homes, pulled specially designed trucks. Than I began to be aware of the parks where they sit down. In Main I took to stopping the night in these parks, talking to the dwellers in this new kind of housing, for they gather in groups of like to like.

They are wonderfully built homes, sometimes as much as forty feet long, with two to five rooms, and are complete with air conditioners, dishwashers, refrigerators, toilets, baths and invariably television. The fact that these homes can be moved does not mean that they do move. Sometimes their owners stay for years in one place.

The school buses pick the children up right at the park and bring them back. The family car takes the head of the house to work and the family to a drive-in movie at night. It’s healthy life out in it country air. Nowhere else could they afford to rent such a comfortable ground-floor apartment; nowhere else could the kids have a dog.

I’ve never had a better or a more comfortable dinner than one of the dinners that I shared in a mobile home. The husband worked as a garage mechanic about four miles away. I said: “One of our most treasured feelings concerns roots, growing up rooted in some soil or some community”. How did they feel about raising their children without roots? Was it good or bad? Would they miss it or not?

The father answer me. “How many people today have what you are talking about? What roots are there in an apartment twelve floors up? What roots are in a housing development of hundreds and thousand of small dwelling almost exactly alike? My father came from Italy”, he said. “He grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived maybe a thousand years. That’s roots for you. No running water, no toilet, and they cooked with charcoal or vine clippings. They had just two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, where everybody slept, grandpa, father, and all the kids. No place to read, no place to be alone, and never had had. Was that better? I bet if you gave my old man the choice he’d cut his roots and live like this”. He waved his hands at the comfortable room. “Fact is, he cut his roots away and came to America. Then he lived in a tenement in New-York — just one room, cold water and no heat. Now you take my wife. She’s Irish descent. Her people had rots too.”

“In a peat bog”, the wife said. “And lived on potatoes.”

(John Steinbeck)

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