Exercise on Text

8/3/2019 Exercise on Text

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Exercise 1 (source: http://www.uefap.com/reading/readfram.htm)

Look at the structure of the following text.

The Personal Qualities of a Teacher

1. Here I want to try to give you an answer to the question: What personal qualitiesare desirable in a teacher? Probably no two people would draw up exactly similar

lists, but I think the following would be generally accepted.2. First, the teachers personality should be pleasantly live and attractive. This does

not rule out people who are physically plain, or even ugly, because many suchhave great personal charm. But it does rule out such types as the over-excitable,

melancholy, frigid, sarcastic, cynical, frustrated, and over-bearing : I would saytoo, that it excludes all of dull or purely negative personality. I still stick to what I

said in my earlier book: that school children probably suffer more from boresthan from brutes.

3. Secondly, it is not merely desirable but essential for a teacher to have a genuinecapacity for sympathy - in the literal meaning of that word; a capacity to tune in tothe minds and feelings of other people, especially, since most teachers are schoolteachers, to the minds and feelings of children. Closely related with this is the

capacity to be tolerant - not, indeed, of what is wrong, but of the frailty andimmaturity of human nature which induce people, and again especially children,

to make mistakes.4. Thirdly, I hold it essential for a teacher to be both intellectually and morally

honest. This does not mean being a plaster saint. It means that he will be aware ofhis intellectual strengths, and limitations, and will have thought about and decided

upon the moral principles by which his life shall be guided. There is no

contradiction in my going on to say that a teacher should be a bit of an actor. Thatis part of the technique of teaching, which demands that every now and then ateacher should be able to put on an act - to enliven a lesson, correct a fault, or

award praise. Children, especially young children, live in a world that is ratherlarger than life.

5. A teacher must remain mentally alert. He will not get into the profession if of lowintelligence, but it is all too easy, even for people of above-average intelligence,

to stagnate intellectually - and that means to deteriorate intellectually. A teachermust be quick to adapt himself to any situation, however improbable and able to

improvise, if necessary at less than a moments notice. (Here I should stress that Iuse he and his throughout the book simply as a matter of convention and

convenience.)6. On the other hand, a teacher must be capable of infinite patience. This, I may say,is largely a matter of self-discipline and self-training; we are none of us born likethat. He must be pretty resilient; teaching makes great demands on nervousenergy. And he should be able to take in his stride the innumerable petty

irritations any adult dealing with children has to endure.7. Finally, I think a teacher should have the kind of mind which always wants to go

on learning. Teaching is a job at which one will never be perfect; there is always


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something more to learn about it. There are three principal objects of study: thesubject, or subjects, which the teacher is teaching; the methods by which they can

best be taught to the particular pupils in the classes he is teaching; and - by far themost important - the children, young people, or adults to whom they are to be

taught. The two cardinal principles of British education today are that education is

education of the whole person, and that it is best acquired through full and activeco-operation between two persons, the teacher and the learner.

(From Teaching as a Career, by H. C. Dent)------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Exercise 2

Look at the structure of the following text.

The Rules of Good Fieldwork

1. In my sketch of an anthropologist's training, I have only told you that he mustmake intensive studies of primitive peoples. I have not yet told you how he makesthem. How does one make a study of a primitive people? I will answer this

question very briefly and in very general terms, stating only what we regard as theessential rules of good fieldwork.

2. Experience has proved that certain conditions are essential if a good investigationis to be carried out. The anthropologist must spend sufficient time on the study, he

must throughout be in close contact with the people among whom he is working,he must communicate with them solely through their own language, and he must

study their entire culture and social life. I will examine each of these desideratafor, obvious though they may be, they are the distinguishing marks of British

anthropological research which make it, in my opinion, different from and of ahigher quality than research conducted elsewhere.

3. The earlier professional fieldworkers were always in a great hurry. Their quickvisits to native peoples sometimes lasted only a few days, and seldom more than a

few weeks. Survey research of this kind can be a useful preliminary to intensivestudies and elementary ethnological classifications can be derived from it, but it is

of little value for an understanding of social life. The position is very differenttoday when, as I have said, one to three years are devoted to the study of a single

people. This permits observations to be made at every season of the year, the

social life of the people to be recorded to the last detail, and conclusions to betested systematically.4. However, given even unlimited time for research, the anthropologist will not

produce a good account of the people he is studying unless he can put himself in aposition which enables him to establish ties of intimacy with them, and to observe

their daily activities from within, and not from without, their community life.5. He must live as far as possible in their villages and camps, where he is, again as

far as possible, physically and morally part of the community. He then not only


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sees and hears what goes on in the normal everyday life of the people as well asless common events, such as ceremonies and legal cases, but by taking part in

those activities in which he can appropriately engage, he learns through action aswell as by ear and eye what goes on around him. This is very unlike the situation

in which records of native life were corn-piled by earlier anthropological

fieldworkers, and also by missionaries and administrators, who, living out of thenative community and in mission stations or government posts, had mostly to relyon what a few informants told them. If they visited native villages at all, their

visits interrupted and changed the activities they had come to observe.6. What is perhaps even more important for the anthropologist's work is the fact that

he is all alone, cut off from the companionship of men of his own race andculture, and is dependent on the natives around him for company, friendship, and

human under-standing. An anthropologist has failed unless, when he says good-bye to the natives, there is on both sides the sorrow of parting. It is evident that he

can only establish this intimacy if he makes himself in some degree a member oftheir society and lives, thinks, and feels in their culture since only he, and not

they, can make the necessary transference.7. It is obvious that if the anthropologist is to carry out his work in the conditions Ihave described he must learn the native language, and any anthropologist worthhis salt will make the learning of it his first task and will altogether, even at the

beginning of his study, dispense with interpreters. Some do not pick up strangelanguages easily, and many primitive languages are almost unbelievably difficult

to learn, but the language must be mastered as thoroughly as the capacity of thestudent and its complexities permit, not only because the anthropologist can then

communicate freely with the natives, but for further reasons. To understand apeople's thought one has to think in their symbols. Also, in learning the language

one learns the culture and the social system which are conceptualized in thelanguage. Every kind of social relationship, every belief every technological

process - in fact everything in the social life of the natives - is expressed in wordsas well as in action, and when one has fully understood the meaning of all the

words of their language in all their situations of reference one has finished one'sstudy of the society. I may add that, as every experienced field-worker knows, the

most difficult task in anthropological fieldwork is to determine the meanings of afew key words, upon which the success of the whole investigation depends; and

they can only be determined by the anthropologist himself learning to use thewords correctly in his converse with the natives. A further reason for learning the

native language is that it places the anthropologist in a position of completedependence on the natives. He comes to them as pupil, not as master.

8. Finally, the anthropologist must study the whole of the social life. It is impossibleto understand clearly and comprehensively any part of a people's social life except

in the full context of their social life as a whole. Though he may not publish everydetail he has recorded, you will find in a good anthropologist's notebooks a

detailed description of even the most commonplace activities, for example, how acow is milked or how meat is cooked. Also, though he may decide to write a book

on a people's law, or their religion, or on their economics, describing one aspect


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of their life and neglecting the rest, he does so always against the background oftheir entire social activities and in terms of their whole social structure.

(From Social Anthropology, by E. E. Evans-Pritchard.)

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Exercise 3

Read the following text and observe the table below.

Making Artificial Diamonds

1. 'It should be possible to make a precious stone that not only looks like the realthing, but that is the real thing', said a chemist many years ago. 'The onlydifference should be that one crystal would be made by man, the other by nature.'

2. At first this did not seem like a particularly hard task. Scientists began to trymaking synthetic diamonds towards the end of the eighteenth century. It was atthis time that a key scientific fact was discovered: diamonds are a form of carbon,which is a very common element. Graphite, the black mineral that is used for the

'lead' in your pencil, is made of it, too. The only difference, we know today, is thatthe carbon atoms have been packed together in a slightly different way. The

chemists were fired with enthusiasm: Why not change a cheap and plentifulsubstance, carbon, into a rare and expensive one, diamond?

3. You have probably heard about the alchemists who for centuries tried to turnplain lead or iron into gold. They failed, because gold is completely different from

lead or iron. Transforming carbon into diamonds, however, is not illogical at all.This change takes place in nature, so it should be possible to make it happen in

the laboratory.4. It should be possible, but for one hundred and fifty years every effort failed.During this period, none the less., several people believed that they had solved thediamond riddle. One of these was a French scientist who produced crystals that

seemed to be the real thing. After the man's death, however, a curious rumourbegan to go the rounds. The story told that one of the scientist's assistants had

simply put tiny pieces of genuine diamonds into the carbon mixture. He wasbored with the work, and he wanted to make the old chemist happy.

5. The first real success came more than sixty years later in the laboratories of theGeneral Electric Company. Scientists there had been working for a number of

years on a process designed to duplicate nature's work. Far below the earth's

surface, carbon is subjected to incredibly heavy pressure and extremely hightemperature. Under these conditions the carbon turns into diamonds. For a longtime the laboratory attempts failed, simply because no suitable machinery existed.

What was needed was some sort of pressure chamber in which the carbon couldbe subjected to between 800,000 and 1,800,000 pounds of pressure to the square

inch, at a temperature of between 2200 and 4400F.6. Building a pressure chamber that would not break under these conditions was a

fantastically difficult feat, but eventually it was done. The scientists eagerly set to


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work again. Imagine their disappointment when, even with this equipment, theyproduced all sorts of crystals, but no diamonds. They wondered if the fault lay in

the carbon they were using, and so they tried a number of different forms.7. 'Every time we opened the pressure chamber we found crystals. Some of them

even had the smell of diamonds', recalls one of the men who worked on the

project. 'But they were terribly small, and the tests we ran on them wereunsatisfactory.'8. The scientists went on working. The idea was then brought forward that perhaps

the carbon needed to be dissolved in a melted metal. The metal might act as acatalyst, which means that it helps a chemical reaction to take place more easily.

9. This time the carbon was mixed with iron before being placed in the pressurechamber. The pressure was brought up to 1,300,000 pounds to the square inch and

the temperature to 2900F. At last the chamber was opened. A number of shinycrystals lay within. These crystals scratched glass, and even diamonds. Lightwaves passed through them in the same way as they do through diamonds. Carbon

dioxide was given off when the crystals were burned. Their density was just 3.5

grams per cubic centimetre, as is true of diamonds. The crystals were analysedchemically. They were finally studied under X-rays, and there was no longerroom for doubt. These jewels of the laboratory were not like diamonds ; they were

diamonds. They even had the same atomic structure. The atoms making up themolecule of the synthetic crystal were arranged in exactly the same pattern as they

are in the natural.10.'The jewels we have made are diamonds', says a physicist, 'but they are not very

beautiful. Natural diamonds range in colour from white to black, with the white orblue-white favoured as gems. Most of ours are on the dark side, and are quite

small.'

(From The Artificial World Around Us by Lucy Kavaler)----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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