Idiom Box

5 (A) Guess the meaning of the idioms in bold from the context. Try to explain their etymology.

1. When the supervisors showed up at our dorm room, we were at sixes and sevens.

2. Despite a unique record of achievement is recent years, the President can never be accused of blowing his own trumpet.

3. Apart from teething troubles of the first freshman week, no major problems were expected.

4. Do not be deceived into throwing away a decent offer in pursuit of pie in the sky.

5. Paul would circulate with the top fraternity members oiling the wheels.

6. Professors often have to decide how much rope to give their students.

(b) Match the following definitions with the idioms from (b)

1. give someone a lot of freedom to do something in the way they want to do it

2. help something to work more smoothly and easily

3. disorganized and confused

4. talk a lot about your own achievements

5. small problems that you have when you first start doing a new job or using a new system

6. something good that someone says will happen, but which you think is impossible or unlikely

6. The Contradictions of Big-time College Sport

(a) Consider the vocabulary. Match the words and word combinations with their definitions.

1. big-time(adj.)	a. the one that takes the place of someone or smth else (adj)
2. dilemma	b. the crime of deceiving people in order to get smth
3. academia	c. made to seam real in order to deceive people
4. be superseded by	d. very important, famous
5. quest for smth	e. be replaced by
6. fraud	f. a situation in which it is very difficult to decide what to do, because all the choices seem equally good or bad
7. to make it to smth	g. succeed in achieving smth
8. surrogate	h. a long search for smth that is difficult to find
9. phantom (adj)	i. the activity and work done at universities and colleges

(b) Read the text, substituting the words and word combinations in bold for the synonymous ones from your functional vocabulary

The effect the big-time athletics can have on 1. the land and building of a university or college confronts us with fundamental dilemma. Positively, football and basketball offer entertainment, excitement, excellence. Negatively, the commercial entertainment function of big-time sport at 2. a large school where you can study after High School to get a degree has severely compromised academia. 3. Connected with education goals have been superseded by the quest for big money.

Coaches bring academically ill-prepared athlete-students to 4.the land and the buildings of the university or college, sometimes through fraud on 5.the test (in mathematics and verbal ability), taken in the 11^th grade in the High School, which scores are attached to the application pack examination. 1^st year athletes choose easy 6.subjects and areas of studies on which the student concentrate, sign up for easy 7.series of lessons or lectures in a particular subject from cooperative 8.staff members. But this is changed as they move through 9.the whole scope of subjects taught at the university, so they have a little chance to make it to 10.the time when you complete the university degree course and receive your diploma. Winning increases the pressure for the athlete-students, which may result in unethical cheating: scandals involve altering 11.official college documents that show the list of student courses and result they receive, hiring surrogate test-takers, taking phantom 12.series of lessons and lectures in a particular subject and the like.

At the heart of this contradiction is the fact that institutions of higher learning allow 13.the process of entering a college and subsidization through 14.an amount of money given by the college or other organization to pay for the studies of a person with great ability but little money of ill-prepared and uninterested students solely for the purpose of winning games.

(c) Consider the questions

1. What types of cheating are mentioned in the text? Have you ever resorted to some of them?

2. Should the universities be in quest for student-athletes or athlete-students?

3. Do the sport-academia relations bring forward such a dilemma in this country?

C heerleading

Cheerleading has become a popular competitive activity at both the high school and college level. Here, cheerleaders from the University of Texas perform a routine at a college cheerleading camp.

Just for Fun