Вступительный письменный экзамен по английскому языку. Учебные материалы, методические указания и рекомендации. Пособие для абитуриентов
.pdfTask 16с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
Dickens’ Vitality
Everybody is aware of the faults of Dickens — his inability to construct a convincing plot, his clumsy and sometimes ungrammatical prose, his sentimentality, his lack of real characters in the Shakespearian sense — but he is read still, while more finished artists are neglected. The secret of his popularity lies in an immense vitality, comparable to Shakespeare’s, which swirls round his creations and creates a special Dickensian world which, if it does not resemble the real world, at least has its own logic and laws and its own special atmosphere. Dickens is a master of the grotesque and his characters are really ‘humours’ — exaggerations of one human quality to the point of caricature. Mr. Micawber is personified optimism, Uriah Heep mere creeping hypocrisy, Mr. Squeers a monster of ignorance and tyranny — they are grotesques, not human beings at all. In a sense, Dickens’s world is mad — most of his characters have single obsessions which appear in practically everything they say or do, and many of them can be identified by catch-phrases or certain tricks of speech. (The heroes and heroines are, in comparison with the full-blooded comic monsters, anaemic, conventional, and dull.) The world created by Dickens is mainly a kind of nightmare London of chop-houses, prisons, lawyers’ offices, and taverns, dark, foggy, and cold, but very much alive. Dickens’s novels are all animated by a sense of injustice and personal wrong. If he has a doctrine, it is one of love.
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)Тебе никто никогда не говорил ничего подобного.
2)На завтрак я обычно съедаю пару бутербродов с чашкой кофе или чая.
3)Анна сказала, что эти упражнения уже исправлены нашим преподавателем.
4)Я думаю, вы могли бы уделить больше внимания правописанию.
5)Я написала письмо еще в прошлом месяце, а ответ получила только сейчас.
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Task 17с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
William Makepeace Thackeray’s Works
It is customary to group with Dickens a novelist who does not resemble him in the slightest — William Makepeace Thackeray (1811−1863). Dickens wrote of low life and was a warm-blooded romantic; Thackeray wrote of the upper classes and was anti-romantic. Thackeray started his career as a satirist, and wrote many humorous articles for the comic weekly Punch, also a couple of curious works which made fun of the pretensions of the upper-classes — and then wrote a novel in the manner of Fielding which makes a rogue complacently recount his wicked exploits as if they were thoroughly moral and lawful. Vanity Fair is still his most-read work: it tells of the careers of two girls with sharply contrasted characters — Becky Sharp, unscrupulous and clever; Amelia Sedley, pretty, moral but unintelligent — and draws clever — wickedly clever — portraits of officers and gentlemen of the time of Waterloo. His historical novels are very different in technique from those of Scott. The novel Esmond tells, in autobiographical form, of a man who lives through the age of Queen Anne and of the Georges who follow, and it shows a remarkable knowledge of the literature and life of the 18th century. In many ways, Thackeray is closer to the Age of Reason than to his own times, but his book for children — The Rose and the Ring — is one of the best-loved of all Victorian fantasies. Capable of tenderness, but never of sentimentality, Thackeray is in many ways the superior of Dickens, but he lacks that strange, mad glamour that Dickens shares with Shakespeare.
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)Работа по спасению пострадавших продолжалась до глубокой ночи.
2)Я не понимаю, о чем он говорит.
3)К тому времени, как я пришел на завод, мой отец работал там почти 15 лет.
4)Завтра президент открывает новый аэропорт.
5)Он спросил, что мы планируем делать в будущем году.
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Task 18с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling
Hedonism was the thesis of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde (1856−1900) seems, in the latter book, to be concerned with showing the dangers of asking for too much from life. The beautiful Dorian Gray wishes that he should remain eternally young and handsome, while his picture, painted in the finest flush of his beauty, should grow old in his stead. The wish is granted: Dorian remains ever-young, but his portrait shows signs of ever-increasing age and, moreover, the scars of the crimes attendant on asking for too much. Dorian, repentant, tries to destroy his portrait, symbolically quelling his sins, but — magically — it is he himself who dies, monstrous with age and ugliness. The sense of guilt — as much mediaeval as Victorian — intrudes into Wilde’s bright godless world unexpectedly, and this book prepares us for those later works of his — written under the shadow and shame of his prison-sentence — which contain a sombre seriousness.
Rudyard Kipling (1865−1936) was the great singer of Empire. Born in India, Kipling knew the British Empire from the inside, not merely, like so many stay-at-home newspaper-readers, as a series of red splashes on the map of the world. This concern with Empire expresses itself in many forms — the sympathy with the soldiers who fought the frontier wars, kept peace in the Empire, did glorious work for a mere pittance and the reward of civilian contempt; the stress on the white man’s responsibility to his brothers who, despite difference of colour and creed, acknowledged the same Queen.
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)Пройдя половину расстояния, они решили повернуть обратно.
2)Я остановилась, так как была не в состоянии двигаться дальше из-за глубокого снега.
3)Он настаивал на том, чтобы я перевела эту статью.
4)У тебя осталось не так много времени, ты должен поторопиться.
5)Я почувствовал, что она что-то от меня скрывает.
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Task 19с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
Popular Views on Points of Usage
Thinking about such matters, I decided to note some of my own reactions to language. As a linguist interested in the social uses of language, I try to attend closely to what I hear and read. However, I concerned myself on this occasion with my non-linguistic reactions, those judgmental responses I make to the use of language around me. Let me illustrate. One of the items that caught my attention was a series of letters in a Toronto newspaper the Globe and Mail. A columnist’s sentence Victory can go to he who yells loudest brought a letter from a correspondent who insisted that the he should be him. This letter brought still another letter, which said that the original he was correct, and then a final letter appeared arguing for him once more. Every grammar of standard English tells us that the original sentence should have read Victory can go to him who yells loudest because, as the final letter writer stated, the pronoun him is the grammatical object of the preposition to, and who yells loudest is a relative clause modifying that pronoun. What is surprising about the whole incident, apart from the linguistic insecurity of the original writer and of the second letter writer, is that a newspaper such as the Globe and Mail, with the claims it makes about its being Canada’s ‘newspaper of record,’ printed the original ‘error,’ that letter-writing to newspapers on points of usage is such a popular sport, and that those who write such letters are often poorly informed but nevertheless quite sure they are correct in their views.
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)Меня очень удивляет, что он сделал это.
2)Он возражал против того, чтобы я пользовалась его авторучкой.
3)Этой осенью стоит замечательная погода.
4)Если ты вдруг встретишь в продаже этот словарь, купи мне его, пожалуйста.
5)Мы опоздали на автобус и были вынуждены идти пешком.
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Task 20с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
Language and Political Correctness
My vocabulary and grammar are less problematic than my pronunciation. So far as vocabulary is concerned I long ago gave up using coloured, Negro, and black in favour of Afro-American, but I am now in the process of replacing the latter with African-American. I try to write ‘non-sexist’ prose but must have failed at that task when a strongly feminist student from an American university sent me a critique of one of my books, which she claimed was thoroughly ‘sexist’ in its language and orientation. I must confess that I could not see her point. We were obviously using words very differently. Although I had tried to be ‘politically correct,’ I had apparently failed. However, can any language, except that of pure mathematics, be thoroughly neutral? I must confess too that a lot of prose I read is just as impervious to interpretation as that critique. As I wander through bookstores looking at what is for sale, I can make little sense of much of what I see and no sense at all of some. In particular, the so-called New Age and occult sections are a complete mystery to me. I can parse the sentences but there is no other meaningful connection. So many words, words, words! And yet such books sell.
We are surrounded by language. We use it, we hear it, and we comment on it. We cannot escape language and probably would not want to. But words exact a price. We should know what that price is. What we have learned about language is part of our knowledge of language. It is not an unimportant part to be dismissed as unworthy of serious study and informed comment.
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)Они гуляют в парке вот уже два часа.
2)Нам должны выдать стипендию в начале месяца.
3)«А где они сейчас? Ты с ними переписываешься?» — «Да, конечно. Но что-то давно от них не было писем».
4)Как можно усидеть дома в такую чудесную погоду!
5)Я давно собиралась зайти к вам, да все как-то не было времени.
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Task 21с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
Pessimistic Views
on Language Development
When we look closely at statements made about ordinary language use, we see that they are almost always filled with forecasts of doom and gloom. Commentators on the state of the language find nothing to praise in what they see and much that should cause us to despair. If each language has a golden age, unfortunately that age for English lies far in the past, either in Shakespeare’s time or somewhat later during the reign of Queen Anne in the early 18th century. If we are to believe what we are told, the language has been degenerating ever since. Such opinions have been voiced constantly, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson — at least until the latter did some serious work on the language for his famous dictionary — being two of its most famous exponents. Every reasonably sized bookstore will have books written by the latest language down-sayers, and newspapers print from time to time the letters of a ‘Disgusted’ or an ‘Outraged,’ someone who has become incensed at one or other usage. But has the world degenerated linguistically? Is there any evidence to suggest that all the complaints made about the ‘linguistic decline and fall’ of the language and all the caring about ‘standards’ that has been expressed have had the slightest effect on the language itself?
If we prize facts rather than opinions, we must ask whether we can accept conclusions such as Richard Grant White’s in 1870 in his very influential book Words and Their Uses: ‘There is a misuse of words which can be justified by no authority, however great, by no usage, however general.’
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)Какая спелая малина! Дай мне еще немного.
2)Он вышел из гаража, где все утро пытался починить машину.
3)Кто занимается покупками в вашей семье?
4)Она только что переехала в новую квартиру и еще не купила мебель.
5)Несколько окон в доме было разбито ветром.
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Task 22с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
Spelling and Its Significance
It is possible to focus on discrete parts of the language and look at the level of public interest there. Let us take English spelling as a simple example. Why has correct spelling assumed the importance it has in our society? Poor spelling was ridiculed as long ago as the 16th century. In his Preface to The English Schoole-Maister of 1596 Edmund Coote mentioned how some people are so ‘ashamed’ of their spelling that they will not write to their friends. Two centuries later Lord Chesterfield in Letters to His Son warned the young man against misspelling words because of the social consequences. Why do we place so high a value on the ability to spell? Should an inability to spell certain words mark a person as being uneducated? Or is the ability to spell a trivial accomplishment after all?
A former colleague of mine freely admits to being a terrible speller. He has written several successful books but realizes that spelling has nothing to do with writing ability and that correct spelling can safely be left to his publishers. This view distinguishes the important, scholarly, creative task from one that takes no great skill at all, that is, seeing that the words used are eventually spelled correctly, a task many otherwise uneducated teenagers are able to do quite well. President Kennedy was also an abysmal speller but we would not know that from reading his published works. (Of course, like many others in similar circumstances, Kennedy did not write much of what he is credited with, but that is another issue.)
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)В горах Северной Шотландии мало растительности.
2)Отец думал, что если в комнате будет темно, то я не смогу найти свои вещи.
3)Неужели они ждали нас все это время?
4)В часы пик лондонская «подземка» переполнена, поэтому я вам советую ехать автобусом или взять такси.
5)Этот шкаф сделан из натурального дуба.
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Task 23с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
Utterances, Phonemes and Morphemes
To study language we usually begin with utterances. An utterance is a stretch of talk by one speaker beginning after silence and ending with silence. Obviously, an utterance thus defined can be as short as a single word or as long as a speech. For our present purposes in understanding language this is satisfactory.
Utterances can transmit an almost infinite number of meanings and combinations of meanings, yet all the meanings conveyed through language in any utterance are transmitted through a limited number of different sounds (or written symbols). The minimum sound unit that can change one utterance into another in a language is called in linguistics a phoneme. Phonemes are therefore units not letters, although in alphabetic writing a letter sometimes represents a phoneme.
We have thus far pointed out the largest unit of language that we need to deal with, the utterance, and the smallest unit of language that we need to handle at this stage, the phoneme. Between these two extremes lies the whole range and hierarchy of language units and their patterns of arrangement.
Phonemes have specific meaning. They identify particular utterances which have meaning. The smallest language unit that has specific meaning is the morpheme. The word cap is a morpheme since it cannot be made smaller and keep any part of its meaning. The prefix un- in uncap is a morpheme since it has a meaning and cannot be cut any further in this word without losing its identity and meaning. The plural ending — s of caps is also a morpheme.
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)Моя подруга имеет привычку опаздывать на занятия. Из-за этого у нее вечные неприятности.
2)Нас не будет в Москве в августе. Мы будем гостить у родственников в Великом Новгороде.
3)Я надеюсь, что напишу дипломную работу к концу учебного года.
4)Будь у них больше общих интересов, их жизнь была бы интереснее.
5)Он пришел домой после того, как мы ушли.
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Task 24с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
The Arts and the Science of Language
Language, in its developed literary and scientific functions, is an instrument of thought and of communication of thought. The art of properly using this instrument is the most obvious aim of the study of language. Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic have been in the past and still are taught under the name of Arts and studied predominantly from the practical normative point of view. The laying down of rules, the testing of their validity, and the attainment of perfection in style are undoubtedly important and comprehensive objects of study, especially as Language grows and develops with the advancement of thought and culture, and in a certain sense even leads this advancement.
All Art, however, which lives by knowledge and not by inspiration, must finally resolve itself into scientific study, and there is no doubt that from all points of approach we are driven towards a scientific theory of language. Indeed, for some time already, we have had, side by side with the Arts of Language, attempts at posing and solving various purely theoretical problems of linguistic form and meaning, approached mainly from the psychological point of view. It is enough to mention the names of W. von Humbold, Steinthal, Henry Sweet, Wundt, Jespersen and many others to show that the Science of Language is neither new nor unimportant. In all their works, besides problems of formal grammar, we find attempts at an analysis of the mental processes which are concerned in Meaning.
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)Язык неразрывно связан с мышлением.
2)Как бы плохо она ни водила машину, в отличие от тебя она ни разу не попадала в дорожное происшествие.
3)Эта реклама утверждает, что если пользоваться пастой «Бленд-а-мед», то у вас будут красивые здоровые зубы.
4)Это был грандиозный обед, были приглашены многие знаменитости.
5)Он всегда говорит очень тихо.
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Task 25с
1. Переведите следующий текст на русский язык.
Foreign and Native Words
in English
The English vocabulary consists of three types of words; the boundaries, to be sure, are not absolute. Foreign words are characterized by phonetic or phonologic peculiarities; they are isolated or else occur in very small morphologic sets; some of the nouns have a foreign plural. Examples are mirage, intelligentsia, alumnus (alumni), alumna (alumnae). The rest of the vocabulary divides itself into a normal (‘native’) and learned (semi-foreign) type. For instance: Normal: sing (sang, sung), song, singer, songster. Learned: deceive, perceive, receive.
To a large extent, these two types of words are made up of different constituents; normal roots combine with normal affixes, learned roots with learned affixes. The learned type uses more prefixes (con-, de-, per-, re-, etc.) than the normal; many learned words accent another than the radical syllable. These and many other differences enable us to recognize learned affixes even in the cases where they are added to a normal root (reshape, righteous)…
The present mass of English learned words does not entirely coincide with the words that the historian recognizes as borrowings; thus, the words chair and cheer, which, historically, are loans from French, are today normal words, showing none of the learned peculiarities. The grouping of English learned words into morphologic sets will perhaps often disagree with that of French or Latin. The grouping of learned words will be difficult, because the meanings are largely abstract and vague.
2.Изложите основное содержание текста своими словами на английском языке в 5−6 предложениях.
3.Сформулируйте 5 вопросов, ответы на которые отразили бы основное содержание текста.
4.Переведите следующие предложения на английский язык.
1)Василий не может найти жилье рядом с работой.
2)Предостерегать водителей от превышения скорости — одна из основных обязанностей автомобильной инспекции.
3)К сожалению, мало людей знают иностранные языки.
4)Он сказал, что если бы он был голоден, то пошел бы в ресторан.
5)За ним послали двадцать минут назад. Он должен скоро прийти.
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