5.8 Famous lives

Reading

Work in three groups.

1. Read your own passage, and decide who it is about.

2. Practise retelling the life story without looking at the passage.

3. Form new groups (one A, one В and one C). Tell the others the story, so that they can guess who it is about.

Group A: He was born in the United States at the turn of the century. As a young man, he was very active, and spent a lot of time hunting and fishing. He started working as a journalist, but during the First World War he was an ambulance driver in Italy, where he was badly wounded in 1917. After fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he worked as an army correspondent until 1945, when he went to live in Cuba. In 1954 he won a Nobel Prize. He stayed in Cuba until the Castro Revolution in 1959, and then returned to live in the United States. He was married four times, and later in his life became physically and mentally ill. On 2 July 1961, he committed suicide.

Group В: She was born into a wealthy family in Philadelphia in 1930, and she had her first part on the stage when she was 12 years old. Five years later, after visiting Europe with her family, she was admitted to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. While she was there she did some modelling and TV commercials to earn some extra money. She first appeared on Broadway in 1949. In 1951, after appearing in several plays on stage and on TV, she played the hero’s wife in the film High Noon. She then had star roles in two Alfred Hitchcock films, and later won an Oscar for her role in The Country Girl. In April 1956 she left Hollywood and got married. She had a daughter in 1957, followed by a son 14 months later, and another daughter in 1965. She lived in Monaco until her death in 1982.

Group С: She was born in September 1890 in Torquay, in the southwest of England. She married in 1914, just before the beginning of the First World War. During the War, she worked first as a nurse, and then in a hospital dispensary, where she learnt all about drugs and poisons. Her husband returned from France at the end of the War, and they had a daughter in 1919. Eight years later, in 1927, she got divorced, and after two or three years’ work, she went on holiday to Baghdad, where she joined a British archaeological expedition. There she met her second husband: they travelled back to England together on the Orient Express, and got married in September 1930. They went on two more archaeological expeditions in Syria, and during the Second World War she again worked in a dispensary. After more travels to the Middle East in 1947 and 1949, she and her husband moved back to the southwest of England, where she worked until her death in 1976. In 1971 she was made a Dame of the British Empire.

Writing

Write a similar paragraph about yourself.

Unit 5 Summary of language In this unit you have learnt how to: relate and ask about past events say when events happened tell the history of people and places KEY POINTS 1. ‘Sequence’ expressions He left university in i960. A year |later / after that| he became a teacher, university, he became a teacher. A year after |leaving / he left| university, he became a teacher. He became a millionaire after he went to Australia, when/while he was in Australia. before he left Australia. He didn’t become a millionaire till/until he went to Australia. 2. Past Simple tense: negatives and questions I met Susan in 1950. I didn’t meet Susan till 1950. When did you meet Susan ? 3. Time expressions with and without prepositions at 6 p.m. at Easter At 6 p.m. at Easter on Sunday evening on 6 July in 1960 in September in the autumn in Roman times last Monday yesterday five years ago 4. Past Simple Passive They built the house in the 19th century. The house was built in the 19th century. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. Don Quixote was written by Cervantes.

Unit 6 Talking about now