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Файл:Academic English Theoretical and Practical Training of Graduate Students. Учебное пособие по практикуму английского языка для студентов 4 курса
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9. Insert the words from the box into the text
tricks ♦ hoaxes ♦ fool ♦fake ♦ jokes ♦ prankster ♦ a paper fish
♦ fiction ♦ pastime ♦ fame ♦ deception
A hoax is an act intended to trick or dupe somebody, a deliberately
fabricated lie. It is distinguishable from rumours and gossips, urban legends,
magic tricks, or _____ such as books, movies, theatre, etc.
Practical _____ have existed for thousands of years. Zhang Yingyu's The
Book of Swindles, published during the late Ming dynasty, is said to be China's
first collection of stories about fraud, swindles, hoaxes, and other forms of _____.
The communication of hoaxes can be accomplished in person, via word of
mouth, via words printed on paper, via chain letters, etc. As the technology of
communication has advanced, the speed at which hoaxes spread has also
advanced. During the 20th century, the hoax found a mass market in the form of
supermarket tabloids, and by the 21st century there appeared fake news websites
which spread hoaxes via social networking websites.
April Fool’s Day is the day in many countries when people play ______ on
each other. In UK radio and TV stations often include hoax news stories to try to
_____ listeners and viewers. In France on the 1st of April people try to attach
______ to other people’s backs. In Spanish-speaking countries tricks are played
on the 28th of December, the day of the Holy Innocents.
What are the reasons for hoaxes? A hoax is most often intended as a
harmless joke, just for fun. In 1965, a Copenhagen newspaper ran an April Fool
hoax claiming that the Danish parliament was going to require all black dogs to be
painted white, in order to increase road safety by making the dogs more visible at
night.
Hoaxes are also made up to gain _____. In 1974 Porky Bickar faked a
volcano eruption. He had air-dropped tires into the crater of Mount Edgecumbe,
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Alaska, lit them on fire, and made it seem as if the dormant volcano was rumbling
back to life.
Sometimes people make ______ not because of a special day but for
financial reasons. Such hoaxes contribute to wealth of ______. In 1983, the
German magazine Stern reportedly paid 10 million marks for the diaries of Adolf
Hitler. The diaries turned out to be a _____ .
Pranking the audience can also become one's favourite _____ . For instance,
Jeff Wysaski's hobby is putting up fake signs at various locations such as stores,
museums, or in the street. The very first fake sign he put up was in a park, listing
the Park Rules, which included that "Dogs must be clothed."
10. Put the lines in correct order to make a hoax story.
a Ger Heidemann who discovered them claimed the diaries had been
b diaries were little more than poor quality and rather obvious fakes. Not
c speeches. There were even historical errors. Within two weeks of
1 d In 1983, German magazine Stern published extracts from what they
e to be genuine in April 1985. However, it soon became apparent that the
f rescued from an aircrash in 1945, kept safe for many years until recently
being
g Konrad Kujai, a notorious forger responsible for creating them, and
h only were hey written on post-war whitened paper but some of the
i claimed were the diaries of Adolf Hitler. The magazine had paid $4 million
j entries had simply been plagiarized from a well-known book on Hitler’s
k smuggled out of the East Germany. While Heidemann was trying to find a
l Heidemann went on tial and were each sentenced to 42 months in prison.
m for sixty small books covering a period from 1932 to 1945. The journalist
n publication, Stern reluctantly admitted they had been duped and both
o buyer, he had them verified by leading historians and they were declared
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PART 1. HOCUS POCUS
SECTION 1. ACADEMIC READING
TEXT 1
HOAXES THAT FOOLED THE WORLD
Read the following text and say whether the statements below are True or
False. Prove your opinion by giving support from the text.
1) The Philippines government encouraged thousands of visitors to see the tribe.
2) After losing power, Manuel Elizalde gave some money to the tribe.
3) There have been many hoaxes connected with anthropology.
4) Piotr Zak, Sidd Finch and Nat Tate were all invented characters.
5) The public loved Piotr Zak’s and Nat Tate’s work, but the critics knew it was a
hoax.
In 1971, while he was working as a government minister in the Phillippines,
Manuel Elizalde announced a great discovery. He had found a Stone Age tribe
living in a remote part of the country. They lived in caves, used stone tools, and
ate any food they could find. This isolated tribe, just twenty-seven people, had
been living this way for many generations, and in fact they didn’t even speak the
same language as other people in the area. Journalists arrived from all over the
world, a documentary about the tribe was filmed for TV, and thousands of dollars
were spent on research trips. The Phillippines government, however, not wanting
to destroy a way of life that had existed for thousands of years, allowed only a few
people to visit them.
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It was only years later, when the government (and Elizalde) lost power, that
the truth came out. Researchers found the tribe living in villages, wearing Levi’s
jeans and communicating happily with other people. They explained that they had
been pretending all along; Elizalde had paid them to act like a Stone Age tribe.
And, what’s more, Elizalde had left the country, with all the money.
Elizalde’s hoax was just one in a long line. Anthropology has been a
particularly rich field for hoaxes, with stories ranging from the famous Piltdown
Man hoax – a supposedly ancient skull that was actually made of the bones of a
medieval human and an orangutan, and chimpanzee teeth – to Fujimura Shinichi,
the Japanese archaeologist who faked vital discoveries for years before being
found out in 2000.
But perhaps the most interesting hoaxes are those that involve fictitious
people. Piotr Zak was a Polish composer. An avant-garde modernist, he was not
well-known among public. At least not until 1961, when the BBC broadcast his
piece Mobile for Tape and Percussion. Some music critics hailed it as a great
work. Unfortunately for them, the piece had consisted of BBC staff making silly
noises edited by BBC technicians. It was a classic hoax.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, another great hoax was to shake the world
of American sports. It was 1 April, April Fool’s Day, which is a day for playing
practical jokes. Sports Illustrated ran an article about Sidd Finch, a truly
extraordinary baseball player. The subheading of the article read: ‘He’s a pitcher,
part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent lifestyle, Sidd’s
deciding about yoga – and his future in baseball’. Read the first letters of these
words again, carefully. They spell out ‘Happy April Fool’s Day’. On 15 April, the
magazine came clean: Finch was an invention. The writer of the article, George
Plimpton, then extended his article into a novel, published in 1987.
Just a year later, British writer William Boyd published Nat Tate: American
Artist, 1928-1960, the tragic biography of a New York painter. A number of
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prominent critics claimed to remember Tate’s work, claiming that he had been one
of the greatest artists of the century. He had never existed. The name Nat Tate is
derived from two of Britain’s most famous art galleries: The National Gallery
(Nat) and the Tate Gallery (10, p. 36).
Answer the following questions:
1) What was special about the tribe?
2) What happened when the discovery of the tribe wa announced?
3) Why was the truth revealed?
4) Why do you think people were so excited about the discovery of the Stone Age
tribe?
5) Why do you think people in the text ran these hoaxes? Did they have different
reasons?
6) Why do intelligent people such as journalists and academics fall for hoaxes?
7) What is your own experience with pranks, hoaxes and tricks?
8) How do you feel about them? How easily do you think you fall for tricks?
9) Do you ever pull your own practical jokes or pranks on your family or friends?
TEXT 2
MORE THAN MEETS THE LENS…
1. Read the text and match the highlighted words/phrases in the passage with
their synonyms: appeared•collective•death•deception•ghostly•indisputable•joke
•not noticed•supposedly
Hundreds of people claim to have captured spooks and poltergeists in
snapshots. But is a picture really worth a thousand ghost stories? Or is there more
to these photogenic phantoms than meets the eye? We investigate five paranormal
photos...
A. The Brown Lady of Raynham
This picture of the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall is among the best known
of all alleged ghost photos. The ‘spirit’ is that of Dorothy Walpole, a one-time
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resident of the manor located in Norfolk, England. First sighted in 1835, the ghost
was reported on several subsequent occasions, making Raynham Hall a favourite
spot for ghost hunters. In 1936, magazine photographers Captain Provand and
Indre Shira were on a shoot at Raynham when Shira reportedly saw the ghost on
a staircase. Provand then took the picture shown here. This is unlike the majority
of ghost photos, in which the ghost is generally undetected by the photographer
until the film has been processed. The Brown Lady photo has been widely hailed
as one of the most undeniably authentic ghost photos ever taken. But many
experts, including investigative writer and photo analyst Joe Nickeli, have agreed
that the picture was faked by superimposing one image on another.
B. The Ghost of Lincoln
William Mumler was a 19th century Boston engraver who dabbled in the
then recent technological advance called photography. In 1861, less than forty
years after the world’s first photograph, Mumler noticed a strange, ethereal face
next to his in a self-portrait he had taken. He discovered that an accidental double
exposure caused the effect, and he figured out how to duplicate it. Mumler began
a new career as a spirit medium. Sitters were willing to pay exorbitant fees to have
him take their picture, which Mumler would doctor with surrounding ghostly
images. The added faces were often interpreted as deceased loved ones or
celebrities. In the photo shown here, Mumler has inserted the image of the recently
assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Mumler’s trickery inspired a long line of
successors. Photographers used similar techniques through the early 20th century
to great fanfare. However, things began to crumble when word got out that many
of the ghostly spectres in his photos were recognizably living Boston townsfolk.
This led him to move his operations to New York, but he was brought to trial in
1869 and charged with fraud.
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C. Flora Louden
In spite of Mumler’s proven dishonesty, a few of the ghost pictures that
surfaced in the decade following when he worked are worthy of attention. For
example, there is the work of Ed Wyllie. The ghosts in his photographs have the
same familiar pasted-in appearance as other spirit extras, but the stories behind his
pictures are compelling. In 1901, Wyllie’s claims were investigated by Reverend
Charles Cook, a reputed skeptic. The picture shown here is a portrait of Cook taken
by Wyllie and developed under Cook's supervision. Cook reported that Wyllie had
no opportunity to introduce a fake spirit extra to the negative. More importantly,
Cook recognized the girl whose image appeared next to his as Flora Louden, his
college classmate from 1866, who had died in Ohio in 1873. Cook also revealed that
the flower, the cross and the heart were symbols of private meaning in his
relationship with Louden. But this is not irrefutable proof. Cook was not the most
reliable of debunkers, since we know that on another occasion he was deceived by
disingenuous spectre photographer Alex Martin. He could well have been
deceived here, by his faded memories of a long-lost love.
D. Faces in the sea
In December 1924, an accident at sea took the lives of two crewmen of the
S.S. Watertown. James Courtney and Michael Meehan succumbed to toxic gas
fumes in the cargo tank, and were given traditional burials at sea. The following
day, the Watertown’s captain and crew saw two ghostly faces in the water trailing
behind the ship. Everyone agreed that the faces were plainly visible, remaining
intact for long moments before dissipating. The captain got a camera and took six
pictures of the heads. Once they were developed, five of them showed nothing but
blank waves. The sixth, shown here, contained rough outlines that approximate
two sets of human features. The Watertown crew may have been suffering from
mass hysteria following the sudden demise of their fellow seamen. In times of
stress, a tightly-knit group of people can become easily suggestible and even share
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communal delusions. Like clouds, swirls of ocean foam provide an excellent
canvas on which the human mind may imagine patterns where there are none.
E. The Hollywood Ghost Boy
The honour of being the best known ghost picture of recent years probably
goes to an unlikely candidate: the so-called ‘ghost boy’ in the movie Three Men
and a Baby. The comedy had its cinematic release in 1987, and it wasn’t until it
had been out on home video for a while that the ghost stories surrounding the
film began to circulate. In one of the final scenes, a figure is briefly visible behind
the curtains of a window. It looks like a motionless young boy. The popular
rumour is that a boy had died in the house where the movie was filmed, and his
ghost returned to haunt the film crew. However, the scene in question was shot on
a Hollywood soundstage, not in a real home where anyone ever lived or died. And
the ‘boy’ everyone has seen was not a ghost – he was cardboard. According to the
cast and crew, the mysterious figure was a life-size cardboard cutout of the
movie’s star, Ted Danson. Someone on the set propped it up in front of the window
as a prank (9, c. 200-201).
For questions Choose from A-E to answer the questions below. You
might have to choose some photographs (letters) more than once.
Which photograph(s)...
(1)• was taken by a confirmed hoaxer?_____
(2)• is widely accepted as genuine?_____
(3)• was taken by someone in a state of anxiety?_____
(4)• was taken by a photojournalist?_____
(5)• are of people who died in circumstances that we know about? _____
(6)• are quite famous?______ ______
(7)• was the result of a joke?_____
(8)• depict two people that knew each other?_____ _____
(9)• gave rise to a myth?______
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(10)• was certified as genuine by an unreliable witness?_____
(11)• was taken after a ghost was spotted?_____
(12)• probably earned the photographer a lot of money?_____
(13)• is said to be the result of natural phenomena?_____
SECTION 2. LISTENING
Task 1. Listen and fill in the gaps.
1. In 1957, a news programme called Panorama ___________ about
___________________in _____________. While the reporter was telling the
story, Swiss farmers ______________ were picking spaghetti from trees.
Following this, thousands of people called the show, asking
________________________.
2. In 1998, large numbers of Americans went to Burger King asking for
_____________. The food company had published an ad in ________ announcing
the new _________________, a burger designed for left-handed people. The
following day, Burger King admitted that they _____________.
3. Swedish technician Kjell Stensson had been working on the development
of ___________ for many years when he announced in 1962 that everyone could
now ___________ their black-and-white TV sets into colour. The ___________
was simple: you had to put ________________ over _________________.
Stensson demonstrated, and _______________.
4. Pretending that it had been developing the product for some time, a
___________________ announced in 2002 that it had invented a
_________________. Using _______________________, the carrot grew with
________________, and, when cooked, it __________________.
Task 2. Listen to three jokes and complete the sentences:
Joke 1.
1. The driver was stopped because he was ____________________.
2. There wasn’t a gun in the ____________ or a body in the __________.
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Joke 2.
1. A man wanted to __________of a cat.
2. The man needed ___________ to get home.
Joke 3.
1. The second note said ‘_______________ everytjing on me’.
2. The manager’s final problem was that the workers were on _______.
Mark the sentences that are sarcastic (SA), show surprise (S), those which are
calm (C). Then listen again and repeat the sentences paying attention tot he
rising and falling intonatin and the words which are emphasised.
'You stole it?! You have a gun in the glove box?!' _____
'I put it there just before I threw the car ownr's body into the boot.' _____
'Sir, may I see your licence?' _____
'So no gun in the glove box?' _____
'Gun? Of course not!' _____
'My police officer told me you had a gun in the glove box and a body in the
boot.' ______
'Yeah, and I bet the liar told you I was speeding, too' _____
SECTION 3. ACADEMIC SPEAKING
1. Go to the website www.museumofhoaxes.com, choose any other example of
famous hoax or April Fool's Day trick and tell about it in class.
2. Read the following article. Comment on grammar constructions in
highlighted parts of the text. Get ready to render the article.
The Martians Have Landed!
Radio Play Threw America Into a Panic
Daily nation (Barbados)
8 August, 2011
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