- •Unit 5 on the move
- •Lead-in
- •1. Match the lines to make quotations about travelling. Do it in figures and letters.
- •Reading comprehension
- •2. A) You are going to read the essay ‘Walking Tours’ by r. L. Stevenson. Before you start reading, make sure you can read and understand the following:
- •3. Read the biography of r. L. Stevenson and focus on the three main points:
- •Language focus
- •5. Study the numbered options in the text. Write out the correct options. Note that in one case both options are correct.
- •6. Supply the appropriate form of the participles for the following sentences. The first one has been done as an example.
- •Vocabulary practice
- •8. A) Do the crossword ‘Travelling by train’.
- •10. Read the text and decide which answer (a, b, c or d) best completes each collocation or fixed phrase. Do it in figures and letters.
- •11. A) To be ready to translate some sentences into English look through the topical vocabulary in the box below.
- •Variant 1
- •Variant 2
- •Variant 3
- •12. Choose one of the statements and agree or disagree with it. Motivate your answer in 5 sentences. Do it in written form.
- •Appendix 5
- •2. A) Read an article about the future of tourism paying special attention to the statements given below.
- •3. A) Read the article concentrating on the changes in the ways of spending holidays.
- •4. A) Read the letter of giving information (advice). Take notes putting them in the flow diagram given below. The first one has been done for you as an example.
- •5. A) Read the dialogue about the journey to Paris.
2. A) Read an article about the future of tourism paying special attention to the statements given below.
1) The need to protect nature and historic buildings is becoming more and more urgent.
2) Many beautiful places are already being destroyed by crowds of tourists.
3) Tourism is a major source of income for this country.
4) Some of the most famous places are so heavily protected that visitors can no longer enjoy them.
5) Let the tourist market develop without restrictions: everything will be all right in the end.
6) Governments should make sure that as many people as possible can visit tourist sites.
7) The only way to keep our heritage for future generations is to limit the number of tourists.
THE CHALLENGE OF THE FUTURE
The issue of how our heritage is to survive ever greater inundations of tourists becomes more and more pressing. More than 600 million tourists a year now travel the globe, and vast numbers of them want to visit the world’s most treasured sites: the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge, the national parks of Kenya.
The inundation is happening here and now. London has run out of hotel rooms, Heathrow has run out of tarmac. Think of the impact made already, and multiply all that by 10: that gives some indication of the mighty tide of tourism we will face in the early years of the next century. They will flock through Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, and the effect will be merely decorative. But they will also go to the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Stratford-on-Avon and Stonehenge. A minority - but a stunning number of people all the same - will go to the Lake District, too.
But this is not just a problem for the future. Under the press of numbers, many tourist experiences are already being destroyed. More than 4,000 tourists a day tramp through rocky tombs of ruined temples of Petra in Jordan. They wear away the soft red sandstone to powder and scratch their names into the rock. Everyone gets to see the picture, the monument, the palace - but no one gets to see it properly. Everyone goes to Venice, but all you can think about while you are there are the jams of people seeing it with you. On one hot, historic day in 1987, the crowds were so great that the city had to be closed to all visitors.
The result is the progressive closing-off of sensitive sites. No one today can climb the tower of Pisa, walk among the columns of the Parthenon, or explore freely the colleges of Oxford. To our children, such experiences will be as mythic and improbable as driving on traffic-free roads or looking round unlocked country churches. The danger is that more and more of the planet's cherished places will suffer the same fate: disappearing under immense crowds, then being "rescued" with the result that no one is able to enjoy them at all.
Allowing the tourist market to take its course unimpeded makes no more sense than allowing loggers to have their way in Amazonia. For any particular monument, the natural or man made, there is an optimum number of people who can enjoy it to the full any given time. Mona Lisa, 5; Stonehenge, 50; Venice, perhaps 10,000. The task ahead for those who administrate such places is devising ways that will permit access to the right sorts of numbers, so that each person who pays their entrance fee will do so confident that they will be able to enjoy it to the full, in the same way that they enjoy the theatre or cinema, confident of having a seat with a view.
The challenge of the future will be to allow all who want it the most intimate possible contact with our heritage, while making sure that future generations will be able to enjoy it in the same way. Those twin goals will be impossible without a widespread and intelligently administered form of time ticketing.
b) Look again at the seven statements in a). Put a tick against the items which the author of the article agrees with. Are the opinions ticked for you the same as those put forward in the article?
c) Answer the following questions.
a. What are the most visited places in your country? Make a list.
b. What are the benefits of having tourists visiting those places? What are possible disadvantages?
c. What do you feel about tourism? Are its advantages greater than disadvantages?