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Housewife: What do I think of television? Um, um, well, um, it keeps the family at home, the kids don't go oot at night so much now, they come straight in from school most of them, they run in and straight, well the television's on when they come in, I watch it myself during the afternoon. Er, well it's company really and, er, well, then the kids come home, they eat their tea, I have no trouble with them eating their tea because they just ... well, they don't even look at what they eat, they just sit down and, erm, they eat it and they like the programmes and, and it keeps them quiet while I' m cooking the tea for their dad when he comes home an hour later and tea is ready when the news is on when he comes in, and, er and the news is on or perhaps the football match or something, er, they have to be quiet then,they're not very interested in that themselves, they like the cartoons and things but, em, yeah, well, I think television's great, er, we get on much better in the house now, um, well, we've got things to talk about, erm, you know, if I miss a programme, er, if I' m cooking or something in the kitchen, I miss a bit of what's going on, I mean I have the door open so I can hear, but if I miss a bit then they will tell me, and then perhaps later or perhaps the next day we' ll have a chat about it, you know. It gives us something to talk about really. Um, I don't think it hurts the kids, I don't think it's a problem, you know, like, er, it stops them, makes their eyes go funny or something, I don't think it,s a problem like rhat. I don't think it's a problem at all. They've... they've learned a lot from television, I think, they're always piping up with questions and learning a lot from the television. 3. Television Is Doing IrreparabIe Harm "Yes, but what did we use to do before there was television?" How often we hear statements like thisl Television hasn't been with us all that long, but we are already beginning to forget what the world was like without it. Before we admitted the one-eyed monster into our homes, we never found it difficult to occi.spy our spare time. We used to enjoy civilised pleasures. For instance, we used to have hobbies, we used to entertain our friends and be entertained by them, we used to go outside for our amusements to theatres, cinemas, restaurants and sporting events. We even used to read books and listen to music and broadcast talks occasionally. All that belongs to the past. Now all our free time is regulated by the `goggle box' . We rush hom.e or gulp down our meals to be in time for this or that programme. We have even given up sitting at table and hading a leisurely evening meal, exchanging the news of the day. A sandwich and a glass of beer will do-anything, providing it doesn't interfere with the programme. The monster demands and obtains absolute silence and attention. If any member of the family dares to open his mouth during a programme, he is quickly silenced. Whole generations are growing up addicted to the telly. Food is left uneaten, homework undone and sleep is lost. The telly is a universal pacifier. It is now standard practice for mother to keep the children quiet by putting them in the living-room and turning on the set. It doesn,t matter that the children will watch rubbishy commercials or spectacles of sadism and violence-so long as they are quiet. There is a limit to the amount of creative talent available in the world. Every day, television consumes vast quantities of creative work. That is why most of the programmes are so bad: it is impossible to keep pace with the demand and maintain high standards as well. When millions watch the same programmes, the whole world becomes a village, and society is reduced to the conditions which obtain in pre -literate communities. We become utterly dependent on the two most primitive media of communication: pictures and the spoken word. |
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Television encourages passive enjoyment. We become content with second-hand experiences. It is so easy to sit in our armchairs watching others working. Little by little, television cuts us off from the real world. We get so lazy, we choose to spend a fine day in semi-darkness, glued to our sets, rather than go out into the world itself . Television may be a splendid medium of communication, but it prevents us from communicating with each other. We only become aware how totally irrelevant television is to real living when we spend a holiday by the sea or in the mountains, far away from civilization. In quiet, natural surroundings, we quickly discover how little we miss the hypnotic tyranny of King Telly. 4. Television Is Good for People TV may be a vital factor in holding a family together where there are, for example, economic problems and husband and wife seem at breaking point. The dangerous influence is surely no more than what all of us are exposed to every day. . . in advertising, in the press. Primary and secondary education have improved out of all recognition since the arrival of TV in the home and this is not only because of programmes designed for schools. Through TV a child can extend his knowledge and it provides vital food for his imagination. 5. Television Is to Blame TV passes on to children the corrupting values of a corrupt society. It's only a matter of time before we can give statistical evidence'of how many criminals society has given birth to in front of the TV on Saturday night. You can blame TV for the fact that children take longer to learn to read these days and barely see the point any more of acquiring the skill. In my opinion watching TV should be strictly confined to "treats". |
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Lesson 2 Are Pets Good for Mankind? Text Pets Are Good for You The basic meaning of "pet" is an animal we keep for emotional rather than economic reasons. A pet animal is kept as a companion, and we all need companions to keep us feeling happy. But pets offer us more than mere companionship; they invite us to love and be loved. Many owners feel their pets understand them, for animals are quick to sense anger and sorrow. Often a cat or dog can comfort us at times when human words don't help. We feel loved, too, by the way pets depend on us for a home, for food and drink. Dogs especially, look up to their owners, which makes them feel important and needed. A pet can be something different to each member of the family, another baby to the mother, a sister or brother to an only child, a grandchild to the elderly, but for all of us pets provide pleasure and companionship. It has even been suggested that tiny pets should be sent as companions to astronauts on space ships, to help reduce the stress and loneliness of space flights. In this Plastic Age, when most of us live in large cities, pets are particularly important for children. A pet in the family keeps people in touch with the more natural, animal world. Seeing an animal give birth brings understanding of the naturalness of childbirth, and seeing a pet die helps a child to cope with sorrow. Learning to care for a pet helps a child to grow up into a loving adult who feels responsible towards those dependent on him. Rightly we teach children to be good to their pets. They should learn, too, that pets are good for us human beings. II . Read Read the following passages. Underline the important viewpoints while reading. 1. An Unmatchable Cat I was sick that winter. It was inconvenient because my big room was due to be whitewashed. I was put in the little room at the end of the house. The house, nearly but not quite on the top of the hill, always seemed as if it might slide off into the corn fields below. This tiny room had a door, always open, and windows, always open, in spite of the windy cold of a July whose skies were an unending light clear blue. The sky, full of sunshine; the fields, sunlit. But cold, very cold. The cat, a bluish grey Persian, arrived purring on my bed, and settled down to share my sickness, my food, my pillow, my sleep. When I woke in the mornings my face turned to half-frozen sheets; the outside of the fur blanket on the bed was cold; the smell of fresh whitewash from next door was cold and clean; the wind lifting and laying the dust outside the door was cold-but in the curve of my arm, a light purring warmth, the cat, my friend. At the back of the house a wooden tub was set into the earth, outside the bathroom, to catch the bathwater. No pipes carrying water to taps on that farm; water was fetched by ox-drawn cart when it was needed, from the well about two miles away. Through the months of the dry season the only water for the garden was the dirty bathwater. The cat fell into this tub when it was full of hot water. She screamed, was pulled out into a cold wind, washed in permanganate, for the tub was filthy, and held leaves and dust as well as soapy water, was dried and put into my bed to warm. But she grew burning hot with fever. She had pneumonia. We gave her what medicine we had in the house, but that was before antibiotics, and so she died. For a week she lay in my arm purring, purring,in a rough, trembling little voice that became weaker, then was silent; licked my hand, opened huge green eyes when I called her name and begged her to live; closed them, died, and was thrown into the deep old well-over a hundred feet deep it was-which had gone dry, because the underground water streams had changed their course one year. That was it. Never again. And for years I matched cats in friends' houses, cats in shops, cats on farms, cats in the street, cats on walls, cats in memory, with that gentle, blue-grey purring creature which for me was the cat, the Cat, never to be replaced.And besides, for some years my life did not include extras, unnecessaries, ornaments. Cats had no place in an existence spent always moving from place to place, room to room. A cat needs a place as much as it needs a person to make its own. And so it was not until twenty-five years later my life had room for a cat. 2. Mother Pays More Attention to Pet Dog Than to Her Young Boy Dear Ann I.anders: I hope you will publish your answer to this letter because there is a family out there that needs help-fast! My friend (I'll call her Krista) married a nice guy in 1978. He's a sales rep on the read most of the time. Krista and Cal had a son five years ago. A nice family unit. About a month after Junior was born, Cal gave Krista a purebred beagle. She went crazy about the dog and treated him better than the baby. When Junior was old enough to crawl, he began to pull the dog's tail and hit him when he thought nobody was looking. Two months ago, Junior began urinating in unexpected and inappropriate places. First, into his mother's shoe, then in her purse, next her jewel box. After he was punished for ruining the jewel box, he found some scissors and cut his mother's string of pearls. At first Krista attributed the urinating to Junior's laziness. I told her if it were laziness, he would just wet his pants and not seek special places. Last Christmas Day, it snowed heavily. I called Krista to chat. She sounded breathless. I asked her what she had been doing. "I've been playing outside in the snow with the dog," was her reply. I asked where Junior was. 3. Dogs Have a Sense of Humour The question of whether dogs have a sense of humour is often fiercely argued. My own opinion is that some have and some haven't. Dachshunds have, but not'St Bernards or Great Danes. Apparently a dog has to be small to be fond of joke. You never find a Great Dane trying to be a comedian. But it is fatal to let any dog know that he is funny, for he immediately loses his head and starts overdoing it. As an` example of this I would point to Rudolph, a dachshund I once owned, whose slogan was "Anything for a I.augh". Dachshunds are always the worst offenders in this respect because of their peculiar shape. It is only natural that when a dog finds that his mere appearance makes the viewing public laugh, he should imagine that Nature intended him to be a comedian. I had a cottage at t.he time outside an English village,not far from a farm.where they kept ducks, and one day the farmer called on me to say his ducks were disappearing and suspicion had fallen on my Rudolph. Why? I asked, and he said because mine was the only dog in the neighbourhood except his own Towser, and Towser had been so carefully trained that he would not touch a duck if you brought it to him with orange sauce over it. I was very annoyed. I said he only had to gaze intp Rudolph's truthful brown eyes to see how baseless were his suspicions. Had he not, I asked, heard of foxes? How much more likely that a fox was the Bad Guy in the story. He was beginning to look doubtful and seemed about to make an apology, when Rudolph, who had been listening with the greatest interest and at a certain point had left the room, came trotting in with a duck in his mouth. Yes, dachshunds overplay their sense of humour, and I suppose other dogs have their faults, but they seem unimportant compared with their virtues. 4. Man and Animal In ancient Egypt, people believed that the cat was a god. When a cat died its owners showed their sadness by the strange habit of shaving their eyebrows off( More recently, in the last century in fact, the famous English writer Charles Dickens had a cat who was very fond of him. The cat didn't like to see Dickens working too hard. At night, when the cat wanted to say "Stop writingl" to his master, he often put out Dickens' candle with his paw! When animals become pets, the result, after a number of generations, is a smaller animal with a smaller brain. Rabbits, for example, which live as pets in a garden, are much less intelligent than their wild cousins. Of course, man doesn't always keep animals for pleasure. Many animals have to work for their masters. ] |
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There was once a farm in Namibia, Africa, which had 80 goats. Instead of a goatherd, there was a female baboon. She took her goats to the hills every day and brought them back at night. She always knew exactly which goats were hers-which is more than many humans could do! 5. Do Animals Communicate? When we think of communication, we normally think of using words-talking face-to-face, writing messages and so on. But in fact we communicate far more in other ways. Our eyes and facial expressions usually tell the truth even when our words do not. Then there are gestures, often unconscious: raising the eyebrows, rubbing the nose, shrugging the shoulders, tapping the fingers, noddin and shaking the head. There is also the even more subtle "bodylanguage" language"of posture: are you sitting-or standing-with arms or legs crossed? Is that person standing with hands in pockets, held in front of the body or hidden behind ? Even the way we dress and the colours we wear communicate things to others. So, do animals communicate? Not in words, although a parrot might be trained to repeat words and phrases which it doesn,t understand. But, as we have learnt, there is more to communication than words. Take dogs for example. They bare their teeth to warn, wag their tails to welcome and stand firm, with hair erect, to challenge. These signals are surely the cani ne equivalent of the human body-language of facial expression, gesture and posture. Colour can be an important means of communication for animals. Many birds and fish change colour, for example, to attract partners during the mating season. And mating itself is commonly preceded by a special dance in which both partners participate. 6. She's All for the Birdsl Twice a week, 58-year-old Mrs. Winifred Cass shops in the market for her main supplies, "topping up" daily by calling at local shops on her way home from work. But she,s not buying family groceries! She returns home laden with heavy bags of mixed hen corn, pigeon corn, peanuts and large p ackets of bird food to feed her larger "family", the wild birds of I,eeds. And she's been doing this for 16 years. Daily, she feeds the birds which frequent her garden, the area around the shop where she works part-time, and several pa tches of waste-ground near her home. Then, twice every week, she ioads the carrying basket with bags of grain on to her tricycle and sets out to pedal the 20-min!ate ride up to rthe city centre. "In the morning, birds on my own roof at home hang almost upsidedown trying to see me through the windows." She laughed. "In severe conditions last winter, I had as many as four robins in my garden at the same time, though they're well known to be territorial birds. "It's amazing how many different kinds of birds I see in the city itself . In Park Square, as well as the usual starlings, pigeons and sparrows, there are blue tits, great tits, thrushes, doves, and sometimes even seagulls." It all started when Winifred was working at a cafe. She used to throw out stale bread and buns, and developed such an interest in the wild birds which accepted her offerings that she started taking food along to those in City Square as well. On one occasion, an old lady sitting in the square remarked that the birds could do with a more nutritious diet. So Winifred began buying corn for them. "In the end, I was carrying so much weight and tramping so far that my feet and arms really ached, ?she said. "I tried using wheeled shoppers, but with the weight of all that corn they were breaking within weeksl So I splashed out and bought this tricycle." Winifred has come across other wild-life on her travels, too. "I stop to feed families of hedgehogs which I found at the side of the railway near the park," she said. Despite her love of birds, she'd never want to keep one because she can't bear seeing them caged. Disaster struck recently when a car reversed into her parked trike, damaging its wheels. But two local business men, hearing of her activities, decided kindly to help by replacing the wheels for her. So now the "Bird Woman of Leeds" is back in action again, doing the job she loves best-caring for the host of feathered friends who have come to rely on her. 7. Too Many Pets in France In France a campaign has been launched to warn against the danger of a threatening over-population . . . of petsl The country is the second most densely populated country in the world as far as domestic animals are concerned. At the moment it is inhabited by more than 8% million dogs and almost as many cats. Every second family in Paris owns one or more pets, which cause problems of hygiene that cannot be solved. In the year 2000 France will have more than 15 million dogs if no drastic measures are taken to stop this increase. The French organization for the protection of animals has appealed to the owners to have their dogs and cats of both sexes sterilized, because the animals themselves are in danger of becoming the first victims. Every summer, when the holiday-exodus begins, thousands of dogs and cats are abandoned, because their owners, unable to take them along, do not want to or cannot find homes where their pets will be looked after during their absence. Only one of three of these stray animals can be adopted, the other two must be killed. A great number of pet-owners, however, object to sterilization on grounds of "inadmissable cruelty". 8. Pets Eat Better Than Peoplel "My mouth watered as I imagined the lovely soup I could make from some bones in the butcher's window. There was a lot of meat on them, too. So I went in and bought some. `Certainly, one pound of bones for your dog, madam,' said the butcher brightly. My next stop was at the fish shop, where I asked for some cheap fish. 'For your cat?, asked the assistant. As you may have guessed, neither bones nor fish were for pets-they were for me, a pensioner. But it made me think that many animals eat better meals than peoplel" 9. A Birthday Present for a Dog! "We have a friend who works in a Dog Parlour where they sell coats for dogs. A customer, choosing a coat, tried to describe her dog and the saleswoman suggested she bring the dog in so that they could fit him. Horrified, the customer replied that she couldn't do that as it was for the dog's birthday present and she didn't want him to see it! " |
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i like it it's easy for me now oh hehe! |
