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

children were quite common — the towns were soon bursting. In a single century London increased its population by four and a half times, Birmingham and Coventry by seven times, Liverpool and Manchester by eight times, and Derby and Glasgow by ten times. By 1905 there were thirty cities in Britain with between 100,000 and 300,000 people, and a further ten with between 300,000 and a million.

This had a dramatic effect on the distribution of the population of the country. In 1805 perhaps seventy-five out of every hundred lived in the countryside and only twenty-five in the towns; by 1905 the situation had been completely reversed, and three-quarters of the people were now town-dwellers. In all the previous centuries the townsman belonged to the minority of the population, and his way of life was different from that of most people in the country. Now, in 1905, town life was the normal one for the majority; this time it was the countryman who was different.

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Houses and Homes

Every country has its distinctive housing. Cross from England into Scotland or from France into Germany or Spain, and you know instantly that you are in another country. It’s partly a matter of architecture, partly a matter of the way people choose to domesticate their immediate surroundings. (I write ‘choose’. Some readers may protest that they have no choice about what they do inside their homes and around their homes, just like French, German and British flat-dwellers. The effects vary from nation to nation.)

The English are distinctive in their aversion to flats and their devotion to rows of small brick houses. Travel from Western France across Europe to the Urals and you will see cities surrounded by modern blocks of high-rise flats. The details of architecture will vary, but all countries have found that the obvious solution to cheap new housing to accomodate families moving in from the countryside or demanding improved conditions within the towns is to build blocks of flats. They stand in rows and clusters, not beautiful, nor spacious, but convenient and efficient. The problems are similar: noise, cramped public areas, unpredictable water supplies, broken lifts… but they are homes for millions of people who prefer them to the more primitive conditions they have left.

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British Law

…The core of our law is what we call ‘common law’, a collection of practices used to solve disputes and deal with offenders over the

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centuries. Slowly the collection grew bigger and bigger, acquiring bits and pieces rather as a snowball accumulates gravel and bits of grass in its course. It was not and is not a tidy system. As society became more complex, it was obvious that we needed all sorts of legislation to cope with developments, changes, huge alterations to our social structure. So Parliament began to enact laws — dealing with every aspect of our life: our finances; homes; working practices; personal relationships; educaton; obligations in war-time; travel rights; taxes, and so on. The legislative programme grows every year larger. In 1990, 46 public Acts became law, together with nearly 2,700 regulations. I described in the chapter on politics how drafts of new laws are proposed, debated, examined in committees, re-debated in detail, considered by the house of Lords, re-analysed, and finally debated for the third time.

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A Holiday in Great Britain

A man was spending his holiday in England and one day he was invited for tea with an English family. He found, as it sometimes happened, that his tea was not sweet enough, and he told the hostess about it. The latter pointed to the sugar bowl and said: ‘Help yourself!’

Then the man went to Wales. He happened to be at a tea party with a Welsh family and found his tea was not sweet enough. When he remarked on this to the hostess, she thought for a moment and then said: ‘Could you please pass me your cup and I’ll sweeten it for you.’ Towards the end of his holiday the fellow went to Scotland, and one day he happened to be having tea at the house of a Scottish friend of his, and, what a funny coincidence! Again his tea was not sweet enough. He addressed the hostess and said: ‘Excuse me, my tea is not sweet enough.’ She looked at him suspiciously and asked: ‘Are you

sure you have stirred your tea properly?..’

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Geoffrey Chaucer’s Works

The Canterbury Tales total altogether about 17,000 lines — about half of Chaucer’s literary production. A party of pilgrims agree to tell stories to pass the time on their journey from London to Canterbury with its great church and the grave of Thomas á Becket. There are more than twenty of these stories, mostly in verse, and in the stories we get to know the pilgrims themselves. Most of them, like the merchant, the lawyer, the cook, the sailor, the ploughman, and the miller, are

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ordinary people, but each of them can be recognized as a real person with his or her own character. One of the most enjoyable characters, for example, is the Wife of Bath. By the time she tells her story we know her as a woman of very strong opinions who believes firmly in marriage (she has had five husbands, one after the other) and equally firmly in the need to manage husbands strictly. In her story one of King Arthur’s knights must give within a year the correct answer to the question ‘What do women love most?’ in order to save his life. An ugly old witch knows the answer (‘To rule’) and agrees to tell him if he marries her. At last he agrees, and at the marriage she becomes young again and beautiful.

Of Chaucer’s other poems, the most important are probably Troylus and Cryseyde (1372−137?); and The Legend of Good Women (1385). The former of these is about the love of the two young people. Shakespeare later wrote a play on the same subject, but his Cressida is less attractive than Chaucer’s.

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Shakespeare’s Biography

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, on 23 April 1564, the son of a prosperous wool and leather merchant. Very little is known of his early life. From parish records we know that he married Ann Hathaway in 1582, when he was eighteen, and she was twenty-six. They had three children, the eldest of whom died in childhood.

Between his marriage and the next thing we know about him, there is a gap of ten years. Probably he became a member of a travelling company of actors. By 1592 he had settled in London, and had earned a reputation as an actor and playwright.

Theatres were then in their infancy. The first (called The Theatre) was built in 1576. Two more followed as the taste for theatre grew: The Curtain in 1577 and The Rose in 1587. The demand for new plays naturally increased. Shakespeare probably earned a living adapting old plays and working in collaboration with others on new ones. Today we would call him a ‘freelance’, since he was not permanently attached to one theatre.

In 1594, a new company of actors, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men was formed, and Shakespeare was one of the shareholders. He remained a member throughout his working life. The company regrouped in 1603, and was re-named The King’s Men, with James I as their patron.

Shakespeare and his fellow-actors prospered. In 1598 they built their own theatre, The Globe, which broke away from the traditional

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rectangular shape of the inn and its yard (the early home of travelling bands of actors). Shakespeare described it in Henry V as ‘this wooden 0’, because it was circular.

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The Fate of Shakespeare’s Plays

Shakespeare’s plays were not all published in his lifetime. None of them comes to us exactly as he wrote it.

In Elizabethan times, plays were not regarded as either literature or good reading matter. They were written at speed (often by more than one writer), performed perhaps ten or twelve times, and then discarded. Fourteen of Shakespeare’s plays were first printed in Quarto (17 cm x 21 cm) volumes, not all with his name as the author. Some were authorized (the ‘good’ Quartos) and probably were printed from prompt copies provided by the theatre. Others were pirated (the ‘bad’ Quartos) by booksellers who may have employed shorthand writers, or bought actors’ copies after the run of the play had ended.

In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, John Hemming and Henry Condell (fellow-actors and shareholders in The King’s Men) published a collected edition of Shakespeare’s works — thirty-six plays in all — in a Folio (21 cm x 34 cm) edition. From their introduction it would seem that they used Shakespeare’s original manuscripts (‘we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers’) but the Folio volumes that still survive are not all exactly alike, nor are the plays printed as we know them today, with act and scene divisions and stage-directions.

A modern edition of a Shakespeare play is the result of a great deal of scholarly research and editorial skill over several centuries. The aim is always to publish a text (based on the good and bad Quartos and the Folio editions) that most closely resembles what Shakespeare intended. Misprints have added to the problems, so some words and lines are pure guesswork. This explains why some versions of Shakespeare’s plays differ from others.

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America

For over 200 years, European colonists fought for control of American territory and for independence. Sadly, while fighting for their own freedom, they also destroyed the ancient American civilizations that had flourished before they arrived.

Laws for a New Land

After Independence, the United States no longer paid British taxes, or obeyed British laws. American politicians drew up a Constitution — a

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list of principles designed to ensure a fair and democratic system of government. It still rules America today.

Native Americans

People had been living in America for over 10,000 years before the first European colonists arrived. Around 100 different tribes — or nations — of Native Americans were scattered across America’s vast lands. They spoke many different languages and followed different ways of life — hunting, fishing, or farming — depending on local climate, plants and soils. But they all shared similar religious beliefs, including a profound respect for the environment and a wish to live in harmony with the natural world.

New Communities

The earliest colonists in America were undoubtedly brave and daring. They risked their lives out of a sense of greed or adventure, or because, like the Pilgrim Fathers, they wanted to build a new community based on their religious beliefs.

The first European colonies in America, in the late 16th century, were dismal failures. To this day, we do not know what happened to the colonists who settled in Roanoke in 1587. Successful colonization really started with Jamestown (British, founded 1607) and Quebec (French, founded 1608). By 1700, there were around 250,000 European settlers in North America, with numbers rising fast.

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America. The Wild West

United States’ territory doubled in size in 1803 when the American government purchased former colonies from France. Before long, millions of European settlers moved westwards, in search of farmland, gold and freedom. To them, the western territories seemed empty, and ripe for exploitation. Land was cheap, and they set up townships, houses and farms. But the ‘Wild West’ was not ‘empty’ land. Native Americans lived there, and they resented the settlers. There were bitter wars as the settlers clashed with local people. But the Native Americans had little hope of success. Many died from European diseases. Others were weakened by whisky, sold by European traders. Bows, arrows and old-fashioned guns (also sold by traders) were no match for new, fast-loading, deadly accurate weapons like the Colt 45 revolver. These settlers fought against one another, as European wars ‘spilled over’ on to American soil. They also fought — and killed — many Native American people (whom they called Red Indians, because the men painted their faces with red and yellow earth for war, or on festival

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days). Europeans had guns and horses, and could easily drive the Native Americans from their ancient tribal lands.

The Rebel Thirteen

By the mid-18th century, there were thirteen British colonies in North America. They joined with Britain to defeat the French, but then (as Britain saw it) turned on their natural rulers, and demanded the right to govern themselves. The colonies particularly disliked having to pay English taxes, as they received no benefit from them, and had no say in how they were spent. Eventually they decided to declare an ‘economic war’. They stopped paying taxes and banned all British goods except tea.

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Henry James

(1843−1916)

Henry James was a realist, but not a naturalist. Unlike Howells and the naturalists, he was not interested in business, politics or the conditions of society. He was an observer of the mind rather than a recorder of the times. His realism was a special kind of psychological realism. Few of his stories include big events or exciting action. In fact, the characters in his last (and finest) novels rarely do anything at all. Things happen to them, but not as a result of their own actions. They watch life more than they live it. We are interested in how their minds respond to the events of the story. What do they see? How do they try to understand it? The changing consciousness of the character is the real story. Henry’s older brother, the philosopher William James, gave this kind of literature a name. He called it ‘stream-of-consciousness’ literature. In the late nineteenth century, most readers were not ready for such a new approach and so Henry James’s greatest novels were not very popular. But in twentieth-cen- tury literature, the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ method has become quite common. Thanks to modern psychology and writers like Henry James, we are now more interested in the workings of the mind. We know that events inside one’s head can be as dramatic as events in the outside world.

We usually divide James’s career as a writer into three stages: early, middle and mature. James developed toward his mature — or fully developed — style rather slowly. The novels of his early period deal with his thoughts and feelings as an American living in Europe. James himself spent most of his life in England and, in 1915, he finally became a British citizen.

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Text 19

Theodore Dreiser’s Themes

As in all of his novels, Dreiser’s real theme in Sister Carry is the purposelessness of life. While looking at individuals with warm human sympathy, he also sees the disorder and cruelty of life in general. While one character, Carrie, gains fame and comfort, another character in the novel, Hurstwood, loses his wealth, social position and pride. This character’s tragedy is just as accidental as Carrie’s success. Dreiser does not try to explain why these things happen. In his form of naturalism, the workings of fate can never be explained. In Jennie Gerhardt (1911), his next novel, the theme is the same. One character puts it this way: ‘The individual doesn’t count much in the situation… We are moved about like chessmen… we have no control.’ It is a ‘most terrible truth’ that ‘the purposes of nature have no relation to the purposes of men’.

In romantic novels, characters often earn rewards — sometimes money, sometimes glory by having a good moral character. In the pure naturalist novel, goodness is punished more often than it is rewarded. It is almost a kind of weakness in the character. Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt has good intentions and a good character. But these are not enough to reward, or even save her. The accidents of life have made her immoral in the eyes of society. Actually, the reader does not see her that way at all. Christian morality demanded that she act in one way. Life itself made it necessary for her to live in another way. Christian morality has created a false sense of guilt. The morality is wrong, not Jennie. The morality itself causes Jennie’s tragedy. Therefore Dreiser sees such morality as evil.

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Postwar American Literature

After the war, America entered an ‘Age of Anxiety’. The politics of America were influenced by two great fears. First, there was the fear of the Bomb; many Americans were sure there would be a war with the Soviet Union using atomic bombs. Also, in the late forties and early fifties, fear of Communism became a national sickness. Senator Joseph McCarthy often appeared on television, telling Americans that American Communists were destroying the nation. He led the country on a ‘witch hunt’ against ‘Communist’ intellectuals, writers and Hollywood figures. McCarthy seriously hurt the lives and careers of many Americans who were not really Communists.

American authors in the fifties show that they are very uncomfortable in the post-war world. The new political fears (of Communism and the Bomb) are less important to them than their own psychological

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problems in the new American society. It is not a period of important experiments in style. Rather, the most interesting authors are developing new and important themes. Many writers in this period try to find new answers to the old question, ‘Who am I?’ Many black American and Jewish-American writers find the answer by looking at their own cultural and racial backgrounds. Others explore the ideas of modern philosophy and psychology. The young ‘Beat’ writers use Oriental religion for the same purpose. The new writers of the South, however, seem a little less ‘modern’. In their work, we still feel the sad, heavy weight of the past. The central theme of their work, however, is often loneliness and ‘the search for the self’. This makes their work deeply interesting to modern readers everywhere.

In the forties and fifties the South continued to produce some of the finest American writers. A new generation joined Faulkner and the Fugitive writers in a ‘Southern Renaissance’.

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The Root of All Evil?

‘There are few ways’, thought Samuel Johnson, ‘in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money’. Many thought otherwise. For much of the millennium, the church preached, with St. Paul, that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’, — even if it notoriously practised the opposite. Likewise:

1597, Francis Bacon: ‘Money is like muck, not good except it be spread’ (as he himself spread it lavishly, especially on his own grand houses, having got it, often enough, in ways that were hardly innocent).

More persuasively:

1667, John Milton: ‘Riches grow in hell.’ 1807, William Wordsworth:

‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’ 1840, French economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: ‘Property is theft.’

1884, Karl Marx:

‘Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence.’ 1891, Leo Tolstoy:

‘Money is a new form of slavery.’

1928, Bertolt Brecht, via a character in his Threepenny Opera: ‘What is robbing a bank compared to owning a bank?’

1940s, Mahatma Gandhi:

‘Honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.’ To which it is fair to add the comment of Sarojini Naidu, one of

Gandhi’s fellow-marchers for Indian liberation:

‘If you knew, Bapuji (father), how much it costs us to keep you in poverty.’

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2.3.Тексты для базового уровня

Text 1

Parts of Speech

A complete list of grammatical terms, including such arcane ones as ablative absolute and non-finite subordination, has no place in a guide to English in the 1990s. Mostly it is only grammarians who are aware of them: for many others they are, at best, echoes of distant thunder from their schooldays. This is not to say they do not have a place in the academic study of form and structure of language, but it is to say they are not part of using English creatively and effectively.

It is useful to be clear about what are referred to as the eight parts of speech, for one of these terms applies to nearly every word we use, and they provide the rudiments for talking about language. Those in bold type in the following list have a more detailed entry in The Good

English Guide:

A noun is a word for a person, an object, a place, an action or a concept: woman, book, town, walking, imagination…

A verb is a word for any kind of action or activity: walk, talk, think, love…

An adjective is referred to as a descriptive word, because it describes a noun: good, bad, large, small, beautiful…

An adverb is to a verb what an adjective is to a noun, that is it describes an action: to walk slowly, to think quickly, to do well…

A pronoun takes the place of a noun. The most common ones are she, he, it: ‘I saw the woman, as she left the house’; ‘the train was late but it arrived eventually’.

A preposition is a word defining the relationship between two other parts of speech: ‘she went into the house’; ‘he stood before her’; ‘wine goes well with cheese’.

A conjunction links two words or two groups of words together. The most common one is and: ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’; ‘Jack is clever but Jill is pretty’; ‘Do you want tea or coffee?’

An interjection is anything from a howl (Ouch!), to a greeting (Hello!), to any word used to express irritation, frustration or any other emotion (Oh dear!, Ha! Ha!). A more logical term is exclamation, since interjections are always followed by exclamation marks.

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How to Practice Your Pronunciation

Films or radio programmes have the disadvantage that you can’t stop them and ask for something to be repeated. Gramophone records

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and tapes do not have this disadvantage. With them you can repeat any part of the text as often as you need, and you must do this: it is much better for your ear if you listen to the same passage six times than if you listen to six different passages; but be careful — listen closely each time, don’t relax after two or three hearings, try to keep your ears as closely concentrated on the sound of the passage at the sixth hearing as at the first. In this way you will build up a store of sound-memory which will form a firm base for your performance.

Now, performance. When you practice (aloud, of course), you must listen carefully and accurately. If you have listened properly in the first place, you will know what the English words and sentences sound like, and you must compare as closely as you can the sounds that come out of your mouth with the sounds that you are holding in your head, in your sound-memory. Don’t be satisfied too easily, try to match your sounds exactly with the sounds that you have listened to.

Some of you may be able to make use of a tape-recorder; if you can, you will be able to hear what you sound like to other people and this is very helpful. If you can, record on the tape-recorder a sentence or a longer passage with which you are familiar through hearing it said by an English speaker. Then listen to it, closely and carefully, and see where your performance does not match the original; mark the places where you are dissatisfied, and practice these bits until you think you have them right; then record the passage, listen critically again, and repeat the sequence.

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The -nik Suffix

This Russian suffix was carried by Yiddish into American English, and thence back across the Atlantic to Britain. It gathered momentum when Russia launched the first artificial satellite in October 1957, and named it Sputnik (‘travelling companion’). In the 1960s, -nik became a multipurpose suffix to attach to a noun, verb or descriptive word (with never a glimpse of a hyphen), as a name for someone who loves something, believes in something, or is closely linked to an attitude, or way of life: beatnik, peacenik, refusenik. Used for Jews in Russia, who were refused permission to emigrate to Israel, refusenik was later, tongue- in-cheek, attached to people, such as Peter Jay and Shirley Williams, who had refused honours. The Independent took -nik into outer space again, when its literary editor welcomed Stephen Hawking’s best-seller, A Brief History of Time, as written by ‘a spacenik who spoke English’.

No discussion of this expressive suffix can leave out no-goodnik, the New York equivalent of ‘good-for-nothing’, someone who is unreliable, does not earn an honest living, or is a cheap-jack crook. Admittedly,

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