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Тексты для дополнительного чтенияMALADIES OF THE 21st CENTURY Pre-reading task I. You are going to read about the maladies of the 21st century. - What do you think are the main maladies? - Why are they dangerous? II. Read the text to see how close your predictions were. We entered the 21st century with such maladies as heart and vascular system diseases, environmental diseases, cancer, AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). The risk factors causing these diseases are poor environment (especially after Chernobyl disaster), constant stress and bad habits. We witness more and more cases when people suffer from such environmental diseases as food allergies, chronic fatigue syndrome, asthma, thyroid gland. They all have a huge impact on the quality of life, darken our prospects for future. Alcohol, drugs, smoking, AIDS have also become the reality of our life, especially among young and middle-aged people. Today we will read the text about the diseases which have come as result of people’s ignorance and lack of healthy habits. Smoking is very dangerous. Most young people smoke because their friends pressure them to do so. They may be copying their parents who smoke, or other adults they respect. At one time this would have been accepted as normal. But in the past 30 years attitudes about smoking have changed. Smoking is now banned in many places so that other people do not have to breathe in smokers’ shocking tobacco smoke. Passive smoking, when you are breathing someone else’s smoke, can damage your health just like smoking can. Smoking becomes addictive very quickly, and it’s one of the hardest habits to break. What is it in cigarette smoke that is harmful? A chemical called nicotine is a substance that causes addiction. It is a stimulant that increases the pulse rate and a rise in the blood pressure. Cigarette smoke also contains tar – a major factor for causing cancer. Gases in cigarette smoke increase your blood pressure and pulse rate. This can contribute to heart disease. Smokers as twice as non-smokers are likely to have heart trouble. If you have ever watched an adult try to give up smoking, you know how hard it can be. It is easier, healthier and cheaper never to start. Another poison of many young people is alcohol. Remember, alcohol is a drug. It can make you sick, and you can become addicted to it. It is a very common form of drug abuse among teenagers. Do not let anyone at a party pressure you into drinking if you do not want to, especially if you are legally under age. For years we have been told not to drive after we have drunk alcohol, which weakens our sense and clouds our judgеment. And yet people still do. Young people, who are drunk are less likely to wear their seat belts, and are less experienced when a problem occurs. The alcohol makes them think they are brilliant drivers and can take risks without getting hurt. But, more importantly, they become a risk to other drivers and pedestrians – potential killers. Alcohol is a drug. In fact, it is a mild poison. It is absorbed quickly into the bloodstream, within four or 10 minutes of being drunk. Absorption is slower if there is food in the stomach. Once inside the body it passes through the bloodstream to the liver, where poisons are digested. But the liver can only process 28 grams of pure alcohol each hour. This is a small amount – just over half a glass of beer. Anything else you drink is pumped round the body while it waits its turn to enter the liver. When alcohol reaches your brain, you may immediately feel more relaxed and light-hearted. You may feel you can do crazy things. But after two or three drinks, your actions are clumsy and your speech is slurred. If you over-drink, you might suffer from double vision and loss of balance, even fall unconscious, hangover. In facts, all medicines are drugs. You take drugs for your headache or your asthma. But you need to remember that not all drugs are medicines. Alcohol is a drug, and nicotine is a drug. There are many drugs that do you no good at all. There is nothing wrong with medicinal drugs if they are used properly. The trouble is that some people use them wrongly and make themselves ill. Most of the drugs are illegal but some are ordinary medical substances that people use in the wrong way. People take drugs because they think they make them feel better. Young people are often introduced to drug-taking by their friends. Many users take drugs to escape from a life that may seem too hard to bear. Drugs may seem the only answer but they are no answer at all. They simply make the problem worse. Depending on the type and strength of the drug all drug-abusers are in danger of developing side effects. Drugs can bring on confusion and frightening hallucinations and cause unbalanced emotions or more serious mental disorders. First-time heroin users are sometimes violently sick. Cocaine, even in small amounts, can cause sudden death in some young people due to heartbeat irregularities. Children born to drug-addicted parents can be badly affected. AIDS is sickness that attacks the body’s natural system against disease. AIDS itself does not kill, but because the body’s defence system is damaged, the patient has a reduced ability to fight off many other diseases including flu or common cold. It has been reported that about 10 million people worldwide may have been infected by the virus that causes AIDS. It is estimated that about 350 thousand people have the disease and that another million (!) may get it within the next five years. Africa and South America are the continents where AIDS is most rampant although in the States alone about 50 000 people have already died of AIDS. So far there is no cure for AIDS. We know that AIDS is caused by a virus which invades healthy cells including the white blood cells that are part of our defence system. The virus takes control of the healthy cells genetic material and forces the cell to make a copy of the virus. The cell then dies and the multiplied virus moves on to invade and kill other healthy cells. The AIDS virus can be passed on sexually or by sharing needles used to inject drugs. It also can be passed in blood products or from a pregnant woman with AIDS to her baby. Many stories about the spread of AIDS are false. One cannot get AIDS by working with someone who has got it or by going to the same school, or by touching objects belonging to or touched by an infected person. Nobody caring for an AIDS patient has developed AIDS and, since there is no cure for it at present, be as helpful and understanding as possible to those suffering from this terrible disease. III. Look through the text and note down: a) the reasons for smoking, drinking and taking drugs; b) harmful consequences of these hard habits; c) the most likely diseases caused by smoking; d) the examples showing the effect of drugs on a human being; e) the way the virus that causes AIDS can be passed on. IV. Here are some answers about hard habits. Ask the questions. a) Why _______? Because their friends pressure them to do so. b) What _______? A chemical called nicotine causes addiction. c) Why _______? Because they become a risk to other drivers and pedestrians. d) When _______? Absorption is slower if there’s good in the stomach. e) How _______? You may feel you can do crazy things. f) Why _______? People take drugs because they think they make them been better. g) How many _______? About 10 million people worldwide may have been injected by the virus that causes AIDS. h) What ________? AIDS is a sickness that attacks the body’s natural system against disease. Speaking V. Discuss in the group. Express your attitude towards the habits you have learnt from the text and prove your arguments. Speak on the topic Young Generation and its Problems. English as a world language Pre-reading I. Answer the questions using the list below. 1) Which language in the world is spoken by most people? 2) Which language has the largest vocabulary? 3) Which is the oldest written language? 4) Which sub-continent has the largest number of languages? 5) Which language has no irregular verbs? 6) Which language has the most letters in its alphabet? 7) In which language is the largest encyclopedia printed? Is it … Spanish – Cambodian – English – Egyptian – Esperanto – Mandarin – Chinese – Indian? II. Work in pairs. Do you think the following statements are true or false? 1) English was already an important world language four hundred years ago. 2) It is mainly because of the United States that English has become a world language. 3) One person out of seven in the world speaks perfect English. 4) There are few inflections in modern English. 5) In English, many words can be used as nouns. 6) English has borrowed words from many other languages. 7) One-third of the world’s population speaks English. 8) German is a promising language in the world. 9) In the future, all other languages will probably die out. Reading III. Skim reading. Read the article on “English as a World Language”. Find out the answers to the true/false statements. ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE English is one of the major languages in the world. In Shakespeare’s time, though, only a few million people spoke English, and the language was not thought to be very important by the other nations of Europe, and was unknown to the rest of the world. English has become a world language because of its establishment as a mother tongue outside England, in all the continents of the world. The exporting of English began in the seventeenth century, with the first settlements in North America. Above all, it is the great growth of population in the United States, assisted by massive immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that has given the English language its present standing in the world. People who speak English fall into one of three groups: those who have learned it as their native language in the US, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; those who have learned it as a second language in a society that is mainly bilingual: in more than 70 countries, such as Ghana, Nigeria, India, Singapore and Vanuatu; and those who are forced to use it for a practical purpose – administrative, professional or educational. One person in seven of the world’s entire population belongs to one of these three groups. Incredibly enough, 75% of the world’s mail and 60% of the world’s telephone calls are in English. Although estimates vary greatly, some 1.5bn are thought to be competent communicators in English. That’s a quarter of the world’s population. So, can English be a global language when three out of four people do not use it? Given the areas of world influence where it has become to have a pivotal role, the answer has to be yes. Evidence suggests that English is now the dominant tongue in international politics, banking, the press, news agencies, advertising, broadcasting, the recording industry, movies, travel, science and technology, knowledge management and communications. No other language has achieved such a widespread profile – or is likely to in the foreseeable future. Other languages have an important international presence, of course. Both Mandarin Chinese and Spanish have more mother-tongue speakers than English, according to a 1999 survey. Although there is uncertainty about statistics, Spanish is growing faster than any other language, especially in the Americas. The reason for the global status of English has nothing to do with its number of first-language speakers. Three times as many people speak it as a second or foreign language, and this ratio is increasing. Old English, like modern German, French, Russian and Greek, had many inflection to show singular and plural, tense, etc., but over the centuries words have been simplified. Verbs now have very few inflections. Without inflections, the same word can operate as many different parts of speech. Many nouns and verbs have the same form, for example swim, drink, walk, kiss, look, process, smile, record. We can talk about water to drink and to water the flowers; time to go and to time a race; a paper to read and to paper a bedroom. Adjectives can be used as verbs. We warm our hands in front of a fire; if our clothes are dirtied, they need to be cleaned and dried. Prepositions too are flexible. A sixty-year old man is nearing retirement; we can talk about a round of golf, cards, or drinks. This involves the free admission of words from other languages and the easy creation of compounds and derivatives. Most world languages have contributed some words to English at some time, and the process is now being reversed. Purists of the French, Russian, and Japanese languages are resisting the arrival of English in their vocabulary. Once a language is so widely spoken, it ceases to have a single centre of influence. Changes taking place in the way English is used in such places as South Africa, India, China and Singapore are outside anyone’s control. Not even a World English Academy could affect them. Standard English is the chief force, existing as an international reality in print, and available as a tool for national and international communication. Its position is being reinforced by new technologies. Satellite television is beaming standard English down into previously unreachable parts of the world, thereby fostering greater levels of mutual intelligibility. And the Internet currently has a predominantly (80%) English voice – though this figure is falling as other languages come online. But nothing is entirely predictable in the world of language. At the start of the millennium, it would have been hard to believe that few would know Latin 1,000 years later. It takes only a shift in the balance of economic or political power for another language, to move centre stage. Who speaks English … … as a first language (m) … as a second language (m)
Post-reading IV. Read some amazing facts about English today, fill in the gaps with suitable numbers. 1) One billion people speak English today. That’s … of the world’s population. 2) … million people speak English as their first language. For the other 600 million it’s either a second language or a foreign language. 3) The number of Chinese people learning English today is bigger than the population of the USA. 4) There are more than … words in the Oxford English Dictionary. 5) … % of all information in the world’s computers is in English. 6) Nearly … % of all the companies in Europe communicate with each other in English. 7) English is just one of over … languages in the world today. 8) … % of all international letters and telexes are in English. 9) … % of all English vocabulary comes from other languages. 10) When the American spaceship “Voyager” began its journey in … it carried a gold disc. On the disc there were messages in … languages. Before all of them there was a message from the Secretary General of the United Nations — in English. 11) It is said that William Shakespeare used about … words in his works. 12) An average English-speaking person uses several thousands of words; a poorly educated person can do with as little as… words in his everyday life.
V. Read and say why English has become an international language of scientific publishing. SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING English is now the international currency of science and technology. Yet it has not always been so. The renaissance of British science in the 17th century put English-language science publications such as the “Philosophical Transactions” instituted by the Royal Society 1665, at the forefront of the world scientific community. But the position was soon lost to German, which became the dominant international language of science until World War I. The growing role of the US then ensured that English became, once again, the global language of experiment and discovery. Journals in many countries have shifted, since World War II, from publishing in their national language to publishing in English. Gibbs (1995) describes how the Mexican medical journal “Archivos de Investigacion Medica” shifted to English: first publishing abstracts in English, then providing English translations of all articles, finally hiring an American editor, accepting articles only in English and changing its name to “Archives of Medical Research”. This language shift is common elsewhere. A study in the early 1980s showed nearly two-thirds of publications of French scientists were in English. All contributions in 1950 to the “Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie” were in German, but by 1984 95% were in English. The journal was renamed “Ethology” two years later. VI. Read the article and match suitable topic sentences with the paragraphs of the text. a) lawyers must be trained to understand legal agreements written in English b) lingua franca provides joint ventures with internationally recognised terms, obligations and rights c) a newly established company headquartered in any country of the world needs specialist with the skills in the local language d) joint ventures tend to use English as an international language e) importing and exporting processes of a joint venture requires English-speaking personnel f) a transnational corporation uses English for external trade   Конфликты в семейной жизни. Как это изменить? Редкий брак и взаимоотношения существуют без конфликтов и напряженности. Через это проходят все...  Что способствует осуществлению желаний? Стопроцентная, непоколебимая уверенность в своем...  Система охраняемых территорий в США Изучение особо охраняемых природных территорий(ООПТ) США представляет особый интерес по многим причинам...  Живите по правилу: МАЛО ЛИ ЧТО НА СВЕТЕ СУЩЕСТВУЕТ? Я неслучайно подчеркиваю, что место в голове ограничено, а информации вокруг много, и что ваше право... Не нашли то, что искали? Воспользуйтесь поиском гугл на сайте:
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