Вступительный письменный экзамен по английскому языку. Учебные материалы, методические указания и рекомендации. Пособие для абитуриентов

and down in his yard and singing remarked, ‘There is a very proper gander’. An old hen overheard this and told her husband about it that night in the roost. ‘They said something about propaganda’, she said. ‘I have always suspected that’, said the rooster, and he went around the barnyard next day telling everybody that the very fine gander was a dangerous bird, more than likely a hawk in gander’s clothing. A small brown hen remembered a time when at a great distance she had seen the gander talking with some hawks in the forest. ‘They were up to no good’, she said. A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. ‘He said to hell with the flag, too’, said the duck. A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb. Finally everybody snatched up sticks and stones and descended on the gander’s house. He was strutting in his front yard, singing to his children and his wife. ‘There he is!’ everybody cried. ‘Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flaghater! Bomb-thrower!’ So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.

M o r a l . Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

Text 22

The Seal Who Became Famous

(by James Thurber)

A seal who lay basking on a large, smooth rock said to himself, ‘All I ever do is swim. None of the other seals can swim any better than I can’, he reflected, ‘but, on the other hand, they can all swim just as well’. The more he pondered the monotony and uniformity of his life, the more depressed he became. That night he swam away and joined a circus.

Within two years the seal had become a great balancer. He could balance lamps, billiard cues, medicine balls, hassocks, tabourets, dollar cigars, and anything else you gave him. When he read in a book a reference to the Great Seal of the United States, he thought it meant him. In the winter of his third year as a performer he went back to the large, smooth rock to visit his friends and family. He gave them the Big Town stuff right away: the latest slang, liquor in a golden flask, zippers, a gardenia in his lapel. He balanced for them everything there was on the rock to balance, which wasn’t much. When he had run through his repertory, he asked the other seals if they could do what he had done and they all said no. ‘O.K.’, he said. ‘Let’s see you do something I can’t do’. Since the only thing they could do was swim,

91

they all plunged off the rock into the sea. The circus seal plunged right after them, but he was so hampered by his smart city clothes, including a pair of seventeen-dollar shoes, that he began to founder at once. Since he hadn’t been in swimming for three years, he had forgotten what to do with his flippers and tail, and he went down for the third time before the other seals could reach him. They gave him a simple, but dignified funeral.

M o r a l. Whom God has equipped with flippers should not monkey around with zippers.

Text 23

On Shopping in Britain

(by George Mikes1)

The greatest difficulty in turning myself into a true Britisher was the Art of Shopping. In my silly and primitive Continental way, I believed that the aim of shopping was to buy things, moreover, those you needed or fancied. Today I know that (a) shopping is a social — as opposed to a commercial — activity and (b) its aim is to help the shopkeeper to get rid of all that junk.

Few British people go shopping because they need something, still less because they can afford it.

Shopping is a social occasion — an opportunity for a chat, an opportunity to display your charm, to show the world that you are on Christian-name terms with the butcher’s second assistant and not just a casual who has dropped in from the street. When your turn comes, the butcher’s full attention will be yours. No one exists but you. You are the centre of his universe and that’s quite something. You may get a little impatient, having already waited fifty-seven minutes in the queue, when the lady with the large family starts explaining to the butcher which of her children loves liver and which prefers kidney, or when she asks if the butcher’s younger daughter has already had her second baby. You should suppress this impatience. When your turn comes, the butcher will be yours and only yours. You can then discuss with him last night’s rain, your digestion, your children’s progress in arithmetic, the topless lady’s photo in today’s Sun (but not politics or indeed anything that a reasonably intelligent adult would like to discuss with his favourite butcher). In France they would interrupt you with some rude remark; in Italy they would start laughing; in Greece they

1 Mikes, George (1912−1987). Mikes [‘m kʃ] was a Hungarian journalist who came to London in 1938 to represent various Budapest newspapers and had stayed in England ever since, working as an author and journalist. His first and most popular book is How to Be an Alien. Among his other well-known books are How to Scrape Skies, Wisdom for Others, East is East.

92

would set fire to the shop. But you are in England, among tolerant and understanding Britons who are waiting patiently not so much for their meat as for their turn to chat with the butcher.

2.4.Тексты для продвинутого уровня

Text 1

Accents in Speech

In 1912 Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion, which he described as an experiment to demonstrate that applied phonetics could undermine the British class system, partly held together by the way people speak. In 1990 the BBC broadcast a radio programme which showed that the class barrier is still largely a sound barrier, that it takes no more than a few vowels and consonants to signal the kind of school someone went to and the social background they come from. The signals are not always reliable but much of the time they convey remarkably accurate information.

How much has changed between the early years of the century and the last decade? There is a broader range of what ‘educated English’ sounds like. Even some of the younger members of the royal family, such as the Duchess of York and Prince Andrew, are more commonplace in the way they speak. Ted Hughes, the poet laureate, intones his poetry with a strong Yorkshire accent, and Dr. C.T. Onions, the last surviving editor of the original OED and for many years the foremost authority on the English language, spoke with a flat ordinary accent.

There is also a public school accent, a plummy style of speaking picked up at some (but not all) public schools. Then there is the well articulated standard English spoken by most BBC and ITN newscasters and actors in the Royal Shakespeare Company. This range of accents, with variations, is known as received pronunciation, which is supposed to define ‘educated speech’ in the south of England. Alongside RP, educated Scottish, Irish and Welsh have an equal status.

In the 1990s, there is a wider concept of what it means to ‘talk proper’, which is good news. How much does it matter? If you do not speak in the ‘right’ way, it could affect the impression you make at an interview or on the telephone, your credibility as a defendant in court, even the way your doctor treats you. There remains a conspiracy of silence about all this, but in Britain, perhaps more than in any other country, people are still often assigned to a social and educational category, and even to a level of intelligence, partly because of their accent.

93

Text 2

Education and RP

The emergence of Received Pronunciation (RP) — the outward and visible sign of belonging to the professional middle class — went hand in hand with the rise of an imperial Civil Service and its educational infrastructure. The Education Act of 1870 not only established the English public school as the melting-pot of upperand middle-class speech and society but also started a boom in English preparatory schools. Now the children (mostly boys) of country squires, city nobility, army officers, imperial civil servants, small-town lawyers, doctors, clergymen and suburban dentists could be brought together from the ages of eight to eighteen, drawn from many parts of the country, and educated in one confined space, often isolated market towns like Uppingham, Sherborne, Tonbridge and Worksop.

The contrast in the English speech of the educated elite before and after the Education Act is startling. Before 1870, many of the most eminent Victorians retained their regional accents throughout their lives. William Wordsworth was remembered by neighbours in Grasmere rehearsing his poetry in a Cumberland murmur. Frederick Temple, a headmaster of Rugby School, had a ‘marked provincial accent’ which his unruly boys loved to mimic as ‘Bies, yer getting ruude: this must cease’. But he was not scorned for his speech. Even at Eton, the shrine of English private education, the Reverend J.L. Joynes, one of the poet Swinburne’s tutors, is known to have pronounced ‘died’ as ‘doyed’, and to have attacked the ‘oidle’ in his sermons. All these idiosyncrasies were noticed, but they were not stigmatised.

Text 3

Differences between American and British Pronunciation

No one, thank goodness, has ever asked, ‘What is the difference between American and British English?’ But we get many enquiries on aspects of American English and, if someone were to ask the big question, this is the sort of answer they might get. This is a huge subject, and I can give you only a brief outline. American English differs from British English in hundreds of details, while maintaining a common grammar and vocabulary that allows the two nations to communicate. When discussing differences it should be remembered that American English has many dialects and variant forms, just as British English does, and that a Black New Yorker and a Californian might have as much difficulty understanding each other as a Devonshire farmer and a Glaswegian. The usages listed here as American are those in

94

widespread use which appear characteristically American to speakers of British English.

Pronunciation

The most noticeable characteristics are:

An [r] following a vowel (e.g. in bear, turn) is discernible in American English.

A [t] between vowels (e.g. in tomato) is pronounced as [d]. Following d, n, s, and t, the sound [you] is pronounced [oo], giving

noo (new), rezoom (resume), Toosday (Tuesday), etc.

In words like clerk and derby, er is pronounced as in herd.

In words of four or more syllables with the main stress on the first or second, there is a strong secondary stress on the last syllable but one, and the vowel is fully enunciated, giving ‘necess-airy’ (necessary), ‘contem-plaitive’ (contemplative), etc.

Four vowels in British English, the [æ] of bat, the [ah] of dance and father, the [O] of hot, and the [aw] of law, are represented by three vowels, a, ah, and aw, used somewhat differently: [æ] in bat, dance, fasten, ah in father, hot, conflict, aw in law, long.

Words ending in -ile reduce the vowel in the last syllable, giving ‘missle’ (missile), ‘dossil’ (docile), ‘fertle’ (fertile) and ‘steral’ (sterile).

Many words are stressed differently, e.g. advertisement, laboratory, detail, research.

Some words adopted from other languages are pronounced differently, e.g. ‘dee-po’ (depot); ‘thee-ayter’ is sometimes heard for ‘theatre’.

Text 4

On the English Case System

Other than language teachers and classicists, how many people understand the case-system of language? And how much does it contribute to the good use of English? Some would claim that it is an essential part of English grammar, while others, for whom case is little more than a distant echo from their school days, would dismiss it as irrelevant.

Case defines the grammatical relationship of certain words in a sentence. For anyone who is interested, or needs to refresh their memory, look at this sentence: She sent him Mary’s letter.

‘She’ does the action and is in the nominative (or subjective) case; ‘letter’ is the object of the action and is in the accusative (or objective) case; ‘him’ is the recipient of the action and is in the dative case; ‘Mary’s’ denotes possession and is in the genitive (or possessive) case.

Old English, the language before roughly the mid 12th century, had a case-system as complex as Latin and Greek, with different forms of

95

words depending on how they related to other words in the sentence. But nearly all that system has dropped away and no one misses it. Even what is left of case in modern English is often arguable. Because the verb ‘to be’, for example, is a verb of ‘being’, it should properly be followed by the nominative case (I, she, he, etc.). Most grammarians concede that ‘it’s me’, ‘this is him’… sound natural when we are speaking, but require the nominative case (‘it is I’, ‘this is he’…) in writing. This is reasonable in formal writing but does written English always have to be so stiff-necked? There is also much argument about whether ‘as’ is followed by the accusative case (‘as me’) or the nominative case (‘as I’). This applies to the words following ‘than’, to say nothing of the notorious ‘between you and I’.

In the future development of English, case may well become increasingly irrelevant, although for the foreseeable future careful writers will continue to observe at least some of the rules. But if you spend too much time worrying about it you can end up as a suitable case for treatment.

Text 5

Differences between May and Might

According to some authorities, may and might can express such fine shades of uncertainty and doubt, politeness and deference, that we need a chart to guide us to what is intended. For example, it is suggested that ‘I may go to see him’ expresses a possible intention, while ‘I might go to see him’ indicates a possible doubt, that ‘Might I come in?’ is more deferential than ‘May I come in?’ Although these comments can be supported, they are stretching language beyond reasonable limits. It takes two to communicate, and it is asking a great deal of the other person to pick up such reading-between-the-lines nuances.

Some useful may or might rules can be extracted from the complexities:

May usually refers to the present, might to the past: ‘it may happen any moment now’; ‘it might never have happened’.

May is correct in a direct statement in the present, might is correct when something is reported: ‘it may rain’; ‘the weatherman said it might rain’.

After if statements, might should be used: ‘if she had married someone else, she might have been happier’. This also applies generally to statements of uncertainty: ‘without her help, he might not succeed’.

Conversationally, might is often a polite way of making a request, or alternatively a resentful complaint. ‘While you’re out, you might post these letters for me’, and that classic reproach of the pre-dishwasher era, ‘You might help with the washing up!’

96

Text 6

The in-, unand nonPrefixes

There is no reliable set of rules to tell us whether it is undetectable or indetectable, inexperienced or unexperienced and so on (undetectable and inexperienced are correct). It is true that in- is a Latin prefix and should be attached to words derived from Latin, while un- is English and should go with words of English origin. But we have to know which is which, and even then there are too many exceptions to make this a useful guide. When in doubt over in- or un-, it is best to turn to a dictionary.

There are a few words which take either in- or un-. Five common ones are:

inadvisable/unadvisable (Note that unadvisable can have an alternative meaning, describing a person who will not listen to or take advice.)

indecipherable / undecipherable indisciplined / undisciplined inessential / unessential inescapable / unescapable

The tendency is for the in- forms to take over and the alternative un- forms may eventually become obsolete (except for the separate meaning of unadvisable).

Non- is not simply an alternative prefix to in- or un-: it can carry a different meaning. For non- often means no more than something is not so, without any suggestion of criticism, whereas in- or un- often carry a pejorative meaning: it is a statement of fact that a Jew or a Moslem is a non-Christian, but to call them unchristian suggests they do not care about other people; a form of treatment that is non-medical doesn’t belong to recognized medical practice, but to call it unmedical suggests it is contrary to medical advice and knowledge; non-scientific is not connected with science, but unscientific can mean slipshod or misguided because science has not been taken into account.

On the other hand, some words have been coined, particularly since World War II, using non- as a strong put down: there is nothing neutral about a non-starter, for example. It can refer to a listed horse that does not run, but usually means someone or something that doesn’t stand a chance.

Text 7

English Vocabulary

English vocabulary has a remarkable range, flexibility and adaptability. Thanks to the periods of contacts with other languages and

97

its readiness to coin new words out of old elements, English seems to have far more words in its core vocabulary than other languages. For example, alongside kingly (from Anglo-Saxon) we find royal (from French) and regal (from Latin). There are many such sets of words, which add greatly to our opportunities to express subtle shades of meaning at various levels of style.

Of course, not everyone likes the rate at which English vocabulary continues to expand. There is often an antagonistic reaction to new words. Computer jargon has its adherents, but it also has its critics. Old rural dialect words may be admired, but the new words from urban dialects are often reviled. The latest slang is occasionally thought of as vivid and exciting, but more often it is condemned as imprecise and sloppy. The news that fresh varieties of English are developing throughout the world, bringing in large numbers of new words, is seen by some as a good thing, adding still further to the expressive potential of the language; but many people shake their heads, and mutter about the language going downhill.

People take vocabulary very personally, and will readily admit to having ‘pet hates’ about the way other people use words. Vocabulary — and especially change in vocabulary — is one of the most controversial issues in the field of language study. Some people are simply against language change on principle. Others, more sensibly, become worried only when they perceive a usage to be developing which seems to remove a useful distinction in meaning, or to add an ambiguity.

Text 8

The Spread of English

The best-known current example of external influence causing language change is the ‘Americanization’ of world culture, which has caused English words to appear prominently in city streets all over the world, reflecting the dominance of that culture’s popular songs, films, television, high finance, food and drink, and consumer goods. The American way of life is considered modern, fashionable, and desirable to the younger, trend-setting generations of society found in all developed countries, and the language associated with these trends is eagerly taken up. The effect is most noticeable in popular music. Foreign groups (such as the Swedish pop-stars Abba) often record in English, and the words are picked up and rehearsed in the same language everywhere, even by children who otherwise have little or no command of the language. I once met a Brazilian child of about ten who could count ‘one, two, three’, but only by adding the words ‘o’clock, four o’clock rock’ at the end.

98

Depending on your point of view, therefore, English loan words are a good or a bad thing. People who do not approve of American values or who are disturbed by rapidity of change are often strongly critical of the impact of English on their language — especially when an English word supplants a traditional word. For example, in Spanish, planta (‘plant’, in the sense of ‘factory’) is often used where fabrica (factory) was used before, and this has been criticized in the press and on television. Similarly, in Dutch mistletoe is now often found where maretak was used before. In 1977, France passed the law banning the use of English words in official contexts if an equivalent French expression existed — but the law seems to be honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

Text 9

Foreign Place-Names

The old British arrogance of pronouncing foreign place-names in the English manner is giving way to internationalism. The pronunciation of many place-names has been brought into line with a closer approximation to the way they are said in the countries they belong to. Nowadays, for example, it would seem unworldly, if not downright uneducated, to say anything other than ‘LEEonn’ for Lyons (instead of letting it rhyme with ‘lions’), and ‘mahSAY’ for Marseilles (instead of ‘mahSAYLZ’). Since the English spelling Majorca is being replaced by the Spanish Mallorca, the pronunciation is changing from ‘maJORKa’ to ‘maYORKa’. Not everyone agrees with all this, and a plaintive letter to The Times asked ‘Why can’t I say ‘Lyons’ as in ‘pride of’ without sounding a complete wally?’

Some place-names resolutely hold on to their Englishness: it would be arch to say ‘Paree’ for Paris, ‘Napoli’ for Naples, and Bruxelles has been resisted even by most ardent Europeans, perhaps because the Flemish name is Brussel (or because of Brussels sprouts…?).

The names of some cities have a historical context. Ancient Byzantium was renamed Constantinople in 330, when the emperor Constantine made it the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, then renamed Istanbul when it was captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703, was secularized to Petrograd in 1914, renamed Leningrad in 1924, reverting to St. Petersburg after the downfall of the Communists in 1991.

The best way to keep abreast of changing fashions in pronouncing place-names, as well as dealing with the more obscure places in the news, is to listen to news-casters. They rehearse pronunciations carefully to be sure of saying any name that comes up with a cosmopolitan nonchalance. New spellings are laid down by a UN group of experts

99

and pronunciations are recommended by the BBC pronunciation unit. We can defy them if we wish, and insist on saying, for example, Peking, rather than Beijing, for the capital of the People’s Republic of China, or Cambodia instead of Kampuchea, the official name for the republic since 1979. But our children, or at least our grandchildren, may not understand us.

Text 10

Euphemisms in Languages

Euphemism means a substitution of a mild or vague or periphrastic expression for a blunt or harsh or indecent one. We do it for various reasons ranging from religious relevance and common decency to prudery and genteelism. We all do it, not just the hypocritical Brits. In the Fiji Islands when the natives practised cannibalism, they used to call human flesh ‘long pig’ to distinguish it from the other staple of their diet, ‘short pig’ or pork. In Italy, when poisoning was a common form of getting one’s way, and a snobbish Roman might say, ‘I am dining with the Borgias tonight’, but no Roman was ever able to say, ‘I dined with the Borgias last night’, it was considered bad form to speak bluntly of veleno. What you said was that a certain death had been assisted, aiutata. In France the lethal but inconspicuous medicine used by impatient heirs to remove those who stood between them and the inheritance they coveted was called poudre de succession, inheritance powder.

The matter of euphemism changes from age to age and from society to society, depending on what topics are found so dangerous that they demand the substitution of a favourable for a more accurate but offensive expression. According to Bronislaw Malinowski, the pioneer structuralist anthropologist, the Trobriand Islanders of the early twentieth century were unashamed in word and deed about sex, but bashful and euphemistic about the dangerous act of eating, which they preferred to do in private and refer to obliquely by innuendo. But, generalising widely, we can assert that most societies, especially primitive ones, are euphemistic about God and religious affairs; that many of them, particularly Victorians, have linguistic taboos about sex and all that.

The opinion that we are becoming less euphemistic as we become more civilized will not survive a moment’s consideration.

Text 11

On the Use of Girl, Boy, Woman and Lady

Girl and boy are by no means precise equivalents. Boy refers of course to a young male person, but many people feel uncomfortable about using it to refer to anyone older than early teenage, and it is certainly

100