Осознанное чтение тексты и задания = Mindful Reading texts and tasks. Учебное пособие = Textbook-1

PART 4: CULTURAL DIVERSITY

a)very powerful and effective

b)to capture imagination

c)to move from your current place of residence

d)a feeling of a need to travel

e)someone who competes with other people to try to win something

(We) discuss the mythical status that the Mississippi has in United States lore, literature and art. The river has exercised a grip on the American imagination from the earliest days of European settlement, finding its apotheosis in Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick’s only serious contender for the title Great American Novel. Perhaps that is why Americans come to the river itself so rarely, we decide. It functions as such a potent symbol that to encounter the real mud and water might only lead to disillusionment. But a symbol of what? Well, the Mississippi divides east from west, so in the imagination it becomes the frontier that separates civilization, law and authority from free-spirited, maverick pioneering. It is also a symbol of the American obsession with journeying, with moving on. America is a nation composed of people whose ancestors moved on, who had the restless desire to up sticks and leave their European homes. The itchy-footed need for the endless journey is in the American DNA and while it is now most often presented in its twentieth-century fictional form, the road movie, it found its first expression in Huck Finn and legends of Ole Man River. But the Mississippi also stands for a connection between north and south. With Chicago at one end and New Orleans at the other, so much of America’s traffic, cultural as well as commercial, has traveled down or up.

(taken from Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry)

Beyond the text: Cultural aspect

Maverick is an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party and acts in his own way. Initially it was used to denote an animal that was not branded, in other words, the name of the owner was not burned onto it. It goes back to the name of Samuel Maverick, Texas cattle owner, who was notoriously negligent in branding his calves.

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Tasks

1.Summarize the contents of the text in 1-2 sentences

2.Do you agree with the author that the need for the journey is ‘in the American DNA’? Prove or refute the idea. What other ‘needs’, in your opinion, may be found in the American DNA?

3.Who are Huck Finn and Moby Dick? Why does Stephen Fry call these books ‘the Great American Novel’?

4.Why do you thinks Americans refer to the Mississippi as ‘Ole Man River’? Comment on its symbolic status as presented by the author.

5.Specify the features of the road movie. Can you call this genre a cultural phenomenon which reflects American mentality? Why (not)?

Text 4.5

If I were asked to find one example of cultural life in the United States to use as proof of how different America is from Europe, I would choose college football. Until one can unravel all the signs and meanings, tribal codes and weird social nuances behind this powerful and bewildering phenomenon I do not believe one can come close to approaching an understanding and penetration of American life. But aside from what it means, there is the simple question of scale.

Imagine Leeds University paying two million pounds a year to a manager for coaching their student soccer team. Imagine Leeds University having a stadium big enough to seat ninety thousand. Imagine Leeds University’s annual match against Sheffield University drawing not just a full attendance to their ground (all their games would do that) but also hundreds and hundreds of thousands of others who would drive to the campus on the night of the match, park there and set up satellite equipment and barbecues and chairs and tents. Imagine that just about everyone in Yorkshire, for the weeks leading up the match, talked of virtually nothing else. Imagine people being unreservedly and proudly passionate in their support for Leeds or for Sheffield, despite never having gone to either university or even knowing anyone who has. It seems impossible to picture such an odd

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state of affairs. I suppose the closest one might have got to it in Britain would have been the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race some time in the 1920s. In America that is how college football is: the American variety, of course, not soccer. There are many states where no major National Football League professional team plays. College Football is all they have and it has become, over the last century, their chief outlet for sporting loyalty and passion.

Of all the great rivalries in America none is fiercer or more celebrated than that between the University of Auburn (the Tigers) and the University of Alabama (the Crimson Tide). The event, which always takes place in late in November, is known as the Iron Bowl and is taken very, very seriously all over the state of Alabama. …

Six hours before the game is due to begin it takes me the best part of an hour to drive the taxi through the dense traffic in the outer parts of the campus. On either side, every spare piece of land is already occupied with trailers, pick-up trucks and cars. But this is not the car park; this is where the ‘tailgaters’ come to watch the match, over the mile from the stadium. It is like some vast refugee camp. A refugee camp where everyone has beer, food, television, electric lights, a sound system, barbecue sauce and more beer. Down both sides of the road thousands march, chanting, cheering and waving scarves, as at Wembley. But this event is bigger than the FA Cup Final. It sounds absurd to make such a claim, but in terms of logistics, attendance, police presence and sheer hoopla it really is bigger than Britain’s biggest sporting fixture. And it is between two teams of student amateurs.

(taken from Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry)

Beyond the text: Cultural aspect

Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race is an annual rowing contest between crews from Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Clubs, a highly popular sporting event drawing the support and attention of thousands of viewers.

American football, also referred to simply as football in the US and Canada, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players with an oval-shaped ball. Soccer, or Association football, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players with the use of a spherical ball.

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Tasks

1.What is the text concerned with?

2.What aspect of life does Stephen Fry use as an example of cultural differences between the United States and Europe or, specifically, Britain?

3.How does the attitude to college football in the United States characterize American mentality?

4.Pick out the examples of culture loaded vocabulary and comment on them

5.Why do you think the word ‘tailgaters’ is given in quote marks? Use the dictionary and explain the meaning of the expression ‘tailgate party’, can you give its equivalent in Russian?

Text 4.6

Beyond the text: Matching

1)unwarranted

2)threshold

3)to prod

4)dartingly

5)instant

6)lavish

7)gratification

8)upbeat

9)dogged

10)dreary

a)pleasure or satisfaction

b)like a dart, rapidly

c)happening immediately, without any delay

d)to encourage someone to take action

e)not having a good reason and therefore unfair

f)generous and impressive

g)boring

h)the level or point at which something starts

i)full of hope and happiness

j)very determined to continue doing something

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The British are so easy to please. It is the most extraordinary thing. They actually like their pleasures small. That is why, I suppose, so many of their treats – teacakes, scones, crumpets, rock cakes, rich tea biscuits, fruit Shrewsburys – are so cautiously flavourful. They are the only people in the world who think of jam and currants as thrilling constituents of a pudding or cake. Offer them something genuinely tempting – a slice of gateau or a choice of chocolates from a box – and they will nearly always hesitate and begin to worry that it’s unwarranted and excessive, as if any pleasure beyond a very modest threshold is vaguely unseemly.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t really,’ they say. ‘Oh, go on,’ you prod encouragingly.

‘Well, just a small one then,’ they say and dartingly take a small one, and then get a look as if they have just done something terribly devilish. All this is completely alien to the American mind. To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much sensual pleasure as possible into one’s mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright. You might as well say ‘Oh, I shouldn’t really’ if someone tells you to take a deep breath.

I used to be puzzled by the curious British attitude to pleasure, and that tireless, dogged optimism of theirs that allowed them to attach an upbeat turn of phrase to the direct inadequacies – ‘well, it makes a change’, ‘mustn’t grumble’, ‘you could do worse’, ‘it’s not much, but it’s cheap and cheerful’, ‘it was quite nice really’ – but gradually I came round to their way of thinking and my life has never been happier. I remember finding myself sitting in damp clothes in a cold café on a dreary seaside promenade and being presented with a cup of tea and a teacake and going ‘Ooh, lovely!’ and I knew then that the process had started. Before long I came to regard all kinds of activities – asking for more toast in a hotel, buying wool-rich socks in Marks&Spencer, getting two pairs of trousers when I only really needed one – as something daring, very nearly illicit. My life became immensely richer.

(taken from Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson)

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Beyond the text: Cultural aspect

Pick out all the names of dishes mentioned in the text and look them up in a dictionary, if possible use Google picture search. Do you share the author’s opinion that these ‘treats’ offer ‘small pleasures’?

Tasks

1.What is the central idea of the text?

2.Does this cultural information surprise you?

3.How does Bill Bryson contrast British and American attitudes and patterns of behavior?

4.What specific feature of British culture does the fragment characterize? Illustrate it with the examples from the text

5.What cultural value(s) of American people might the statement ‘gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright’ represent?

6.In what vein is the fragment written? How would you characterize the individual style of Bill Bryson?

7.Which words and phrases did you particularly like? Why?

8.Comment on the abundant role of adverbs in the text (cautiously flavored, immensely richer, terribly devilish etc.)

Text 4.7

Beyond the text: Matching

1)venerable

2)cunning

3)exuberance

4)GDP

5)per capita

a)the total value of goods and services produces by a country

b)the quality of feeling energetic

c)deserving respect because of age or high status

d)for each person

e)clever at planning something

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I spent two days in Geneva, wandering around with an odd, empty longing to be somewhere else. I don’t know why exactly, because Geneva is an agreeable enough place – compact, spotless, eminently walkable, with a steep and venerable old town, some pleasant parks and its vast blue lake, glittering by day and even more fetching at night with the multi-coloured lights of the city stretched across it. But it is also a dull community: expensive, businesslike, buttoned up, impossible to warm to. Everyone walked with a brisk, hunched, out-of-my-way posture. It was spring on the streets, but February on people’s faces. It seemed to have no young people enlivening the bars and bistros, as they do in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. It had no exuberance, no sparkle, no soul. The best thing that could be said for it was that the streets were clean.

I suppose you have to admire the Swiss for their industriousness. Here, after all, is a country that is small, mountainous, has virtually no natural resources and yet has managed to become the richest nation on earth. (Its per capita GDP is almost twenty-five per cent higher than even Japan’s and more than double Britain’s.) Money is everything in Switzerland – the country has more banks than dentists – and their quiet passion for it makes them cunning opportunists. The country is land-locked, 300 miles from the nearest sniff of sea, and yet it is home to the largest manufacturer of marine engines in the world. The virtues of the Swiss are legion: they are clean, orderly, law-abiding and diligent – so diligent that in a national referendum in the 1970s they actually voted against giving themselves a shorter working week.

(taken from Neither Here Nor There. Travels in Europe by Bill Bryson)

Tasks

1.What is the text concerned with?

2.Can we call the description of Geneva objective? Prove your point

3.What feelings and emotions does the city arouse in the author?

4.What national characteristics of Swiss people are brought into focus? Do these observations confirm to your stereotypes of the Swiss?

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5.Comment on the phrase ‘It was spring on the streets, but February on people’s faces’, what stylistic device is used here?

6.Make a list of adjectives used in the fragment and speak on their role. Choose the adjectives you find particularly effective and explain why

Text 4.8

Beyond the text: Matching

1)proprietary

2)groaning shelves

3)wan

4)drift

5)over-the-counter drugs

6)to exhort

7)vehemence

8)candid

9)diverting

10)instantaneous

a)shelves full of products

b)pale and looking sad or tired

c)meaning

d)patented

e)entertaining

f)immediate

g)force and passion

h)frank, open and sincere

i)to advise strongly, to urge

j)drugs which are sold without a physician’s prescription

I’m thinking of an unexpectedly diverting documentary I chanced upon three or four years ago comparing the marketing of proprietary healthcare products in Britain and in the United States.

The gist of the programme was that the same product has to be sold in entirely different ways in the two markets. An advertisement in

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Britain for a cold relief capsule, for instance, would promise no more than that it might make you feel a little better. You would still have a red nose and be in your dressing gown, but you would be smiling again, if wanly.

A commercial for the same product in America would guarantee total, instantaneous relief. An American who took this miracle compound would not only throw off his dressing gown and get back to work at once, he would feel better than he had for years and finish the day having the time of his life at a bowling alley.

The drift of all this was that the British don’t expect over-the- counter drugs to change their lives, whereas Americans will settle for nothing else. The passing of the years has not, I can assure you, dulled the nation’s touching faith in the notion.

You have only to watch any television channel for ten minutes, flip through a magazine or stroll along the groaning shelves of any drugstore to realize that Americans expect to feel more or less perfect all the time. Even our household shampoo, I notice, promises to ‘change the way you feel’.

It is an odd thing about Americans. They expend huge efforts exhorting themselves to ‘Say No to Drugs’, then go to the drugstore and buy them by armloads. Americans spend almost $75 billion a year on medicines of all types, and pharmaceutical products are marketed with a vehemence and forthrightness that can take a little getting used to.

In one commercial running on television at the moment, a pleasantlooking middle-aged lady turns to the camera and says in a candid tone: ‘You know, when I get diarrhea I like a little comfort’. (To which I always say: ‘Why wait for diarrhea?’)

(taken from Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson)

Beyond the text: Cultural aspect

Find illustrations of culturally conditioned advertisements and comment on them. Do you know any examples of advertisements / commercials which failed for cultural reasons?

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Tasks

1.What is the subject matter of the fragment?

2.What national characteristics of American people does the fragment illustrate?

3.What is the object of Bill Bryson’s irony? How is the ironic effect achieved, both verbally and non-verbally?

4.Pick out words and expressions which are used most successfully in the fragment

5.Identify culture loaded words and explain their meanings

Text 4.9

Beyond the text: Matching

1)backwater

2)mediocrity

3)convention

4)to goad

5)ramshackle

6)to sift

7)to defer

8)inception

9)to receive the go-ahead

10)a call to action

a)to provoke

b)to make a close examination of all the parts

c)to delay, to postpone

d)a place that does not change

e)the quality of being not very good

f)badly made and likely to break or fall down easily

g)a large formal meeting

h)the beginning of an organization or official activity

i)speech or act that encourages people to do something about a problem

j)to get permission to start doing something

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