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

PART 4: CULTURAL DIVERSITY

It is the Opera House that gets all the attention, and you can understand why. It’s so startlingly familiar, so hey-I’m-in-Sydney, that you can’t stop looking at it. Clive James once likened the Opera House to ‘a portable typewriter full of oyster shells’, which is perhaps a tad severe. In any case, the Opera House is not about aesthetics. It’s about being an icon.

That it exists at all is a small miracle. It’s difficult to conceive now just what a backwater Sydney was in the 1950s, forgotten by the world and overshadowed even by Melbourne. As late as 1953, there were just 800 hotel rooms in the city, barely enough for one medium-sized convention, and not a thing to do in the evenings; even the bars closed at 6 p. m. The city’s capacity for mediocrity cannot be better illustrated than by the fact that where the Opera House now stands, on as fine a situation as water and land afford, was then the site of a municipal tram garage.

Then two things happened. Melbourne was awarded the 1956 Summer Olympics – a call to action for Sydney if ever there was one – and Sir Eugene Goossens, head of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, began to agitate for a concert hall in a city that didn’t have a single decent orchestral space. Thus goaded, the city decided to tear down the ramshackle tram shed and build something glorious in its place. A competition was held for a suitable design and a panel of local worthies convened to select a winner. Unable to reach a consensus, the judges sought the opinion of the Finnish-born American architect Eero Saarinen, who sifted through the offerings and selected a design that the jurors had rejected. It was by a little-known 37-year-old Danish architect named Jorn Utzon. Possibly to the panel’s relief, certainly to its credit, it deferred to Saarinen’s opinion and Utzon was cabled with the news.

‘The plan’, in the words of John Gunther, ‘was bold, unique, brilliantly chosen – and trouble – from its inception.’ The problem was the famous roof. Nothing so daringly inclined and top-heavy had ever been built before and no one was sure that it could be. In retrospect, the haste with which the project was begun was probably its salvation. One of the lead engineers later noted that if anyone had realized at the outset how nearly impossible a challenge it would be, it would never

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have received the go-ahead. Just working out the principles necessary to build the roof took five years – the whole project had been intended to last no more than six – and construction in the end dragged on for almost a decade and a half. The final cost came in at a weighty $102 million, fourteen times the original estimate.

(taken from Down Under by Bill Bryson)

Beyond the text: Cultural aspect

1.Look at the picture of the Sydney Opera House. How do you like the image of ‘a portable typewriter full of oysters’? Do you agree with Bill Bryson that it is ‘a tad severe’? Can you come up with your own metaphoric description of this cultural icon?

2.Can you give examples of other cultural icons of Australia?

Tasks

1.What is the focus of Bill Bryson’s attention in the fragment?

2.Is the information about the Sydney Opera House presented explicitly or implicitly? Can it be verified?

3.Compare this fragment with Text 4.8, is the author’s tone similar?

4.Concentrate on the linguostylistic characteristics of the text, what features capture your attention?

5.What stylistic device is used in the sentence “The city decided to tear down the ramshackle tram shed”?

Text 4.10

Beyond the text: Matching

1)vapidity

2)inordinately

3)crux

4)quibble

5)to adorn

6)conspicuous

7)vivacity

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PART 4: CULTURAL DIVERSITY

a)to add something decorative

b)the most important part of the matter

c)a complaint which is not very important

d)the quality of being unsophisticated

e)the quality of being energetic and enthusiastic

f)very noticeable

g)excessively

… I had thought of Australia as a kind of alternative southern California, a place of constant sunshine and the cheerful vapidity of a beach lifestyle, but with a slight British bent – a sort of Baywatch with cricket, as I thought it. But this was nothing like that. Melbourne had a settled and gracious air that was much more European that North American, and it rained, rained the whole week, which delighted me inordinately because it was so totally not what I expected.

What’s more, and here we come to the real crux of things, I liked it, straight off, without quibble or doubt, in a way I had never expected to. Something about it just agreed with me. I suppose it helped that I had spent half my life in America and half in Britain because Australia was such a comfortable fusion of the two. It had a casualness and vivacity – a lack of reserve, a comfortableness with strangers – that felt distinctly American, but hung on a British framework. In their optimism and informality Australians could pass at a glance for Americans, but they drove on the left, drank tea, played cricket, adorned their public places with statues of Queen Victoria, dressed their children in the sort of school uniforms that only a Britannic people could wear without conspicuous regret. I felt extremely comfortable with this.

(taken from Down Under by Bill Bryson)

Beyond the text: Cultural aspect

Baywatch is an American television series about lifeguards who patrol the beaches of California and Hawaii, which was very popular in mid-1990s.

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Tasks

1.What is the fragment devoted to?

2.Is the perception of Australia objective or subjective? What makes you think so? Which words are repeated to make the author’s idea more conspicuous?

3.What cultural information can you find in the text?

4.Compare this fragment with Text 4.9, is the author’s tone similar? How is it different?

5.Do you trace irony in the fragment? Is it verbal or non-verbal?

6.Comment on the culture loaded vocabulary used in the fragment

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LIST OF AUTHORS

WHOSE TEXTS WERE USED IN EXERCISES

Banks, Iain

Bryson, Bill

Campbell, Nairne

Cisneros, Sandra

Crystal, David

De la Mare, Walter

Farjeon, Eleanor

Fry, Stephen

Gardner, Robert

Gilbert, Elizabeth

Hood, Thomas

Lear, Edward

Lodge, David

Kaufman, Bel

McGoagh, Roger

Nash, Ogden

Rowling, Joanne

Shakespeare, William

Silverstein, Shel

Simon, Roger

Slater, Nigel

Terson, Peter

Ware, Ruth

Updike, John

Wilde, Oscar

Yule, George

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