Catégorie : Langues
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BACK TO THE BUSH
1. Commentaire dirigé 1) What kind of men is described in this text? Show their twofold nature. 2) Pick up the details which make this text humorous and try to infer from them what the author is aiming at. 3) Which aspect of American history and which of to-day's social aspirations are brought together? Comment on the latter. 2. Version Translate the second paragraph from "In the intervals of telling lies ... " down to " ... sui...
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SOLITUDE IN NEW YORK
was a necessary part of the development of personaUties, but Joe rarely bad anything to say, and on occasions when he did dredge up (1) a few words, his listener as a rule remained unmoved and the effort went for nothing. He was simply no talker. His best conversations were with Sally, but even they were conducted on the run. He'd be sitting, say, on the edge of the bath-tub, watching ber paint herself in the mirror over the sink; the grea...
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AN ERA FOR NEW PIONEERS
1. Commentaire dirigé 1) This text was written in 1943. How far is it "modem" in its preoccupations? 2) America could be "a physical, economie, and social para dise". From what you know of America, has it become such a paradise? What is y our idea of such a paradise? 3) Can you imagine why the American minorities have become "selfish"? 4) Is it only an American attitude to criticize "the men who sit in libraries working out theories"...
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RESHAPING THE AMERICAN DREAM
mostly realized, while the dream of the sons bas not yet been successfully formulated. In its traditional form, it included both our purpose as a nation, embodied in such propositions as "liberty and justice for ali", as weil as the personal goals that echo in the familiar phrase, the land of promise. But dreams achieved become mondane (1). The achievements bring new problems. Not many Americans are so naïve as to think that money auto...
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THOSE MYSTIFYING AMERICANS
whether they set out to conquer polio or land a man on the moon, Americans are convinced that initiative, inteUigent planning and hard work will bring about the desired conditions sooner or later. ARTHUR GORDON, Those mystifying Americans. 1. Commentaire dirigé 1) Do you think the writer is fair or one-sided when he speaks of the Americans? 2) What were the problems surrounding "that earl y American" settler? What were the qualities requ...
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THE PHOTOGRAPH
been empty even by the standards of the market place. The money tiJey bad acquired wasn't worth much; they bad found that out 111 1929. As for the otber acquisitions-the homes, the furniture, the cars, the pianos, the clotbes, the land-they bad meant nothing. Tbese men who bad cried America, America! as the century died bad come bere looking for freedom and the other hlllti8D things, and ali they bad found for themselves was the...
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AMERICA'S AMBIGUOUS ATTITUDE TO FIREARMS
obtaining food and for defence against hostile lndians and marauding animais. Even today in rural sections of the Middle-West, South and Far West( ... ) almost every household is likely to have a rifle or shotgun hanging by the kitchen door ... This tradition of the right to defend one's home, by violence if necessary, still prevails across the land ... Today, the population of America is predominantly urban. lt is made up of endless permutat...
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JEANS ARE FOR EVERYBODY
"those pants of Levi's" (bence Levi's) were the strongest around, and they sold quickly. Convinced that he bad found a good thing, Levi opened a work clothes shop in San Francisco. When canvas ran out, he switched to a tough cotton fabric originally loomed in Nimes, France, called serge de Nîmes, or simply denim. (Genoese sailors bad long worn trousers of a similar fabric, known as gênes, and later jeans.) By the 1950's jeans bad become the...
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TELEVISION AND VIOLENCE
who habitually watched less than four hours T.V. a week and those who watched a minimum of 25 hours a week. In the Utah laboratory, each chitd was invited to view three film extracts. Two of these were relatively calm films, white the third was an eight-minute sequence from "The Champion", a Kirk Douglas film in which a brutal boxing-match is depicted. Results showed that white the children were watching the calm films, there was no obser...
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WOMEN'S LIVES WILL CHANGE IN EVERY WAY
Women in decision-making positions may also be important in creating a more peaceful society-at least until both sex roles are more humanized, and men feel less need to prove their masculinity with confrontation, toughness and even mass violence. Feminism brings something else to the poUtical scene that's very important: a sense that change must start at the bottom, organically. 1t may be attached to theory, of course, but radical or revo...
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ALDOUS HUXLEY (Brave New World Revisited). (1964, CHATTO and WINDUS, p. 75, LONDON)
these violent words with even more violent gestures. He would yell, he would scream, his veins would swell, his face would turn purple. Strong emotion (as every actor and dramatist Jmows) is in the highest degree contagious. Infected by the malignant frenzy of the orator, the audience would groan and sob and scream in an orgy of uninhibited passion. And these orgies were so enjoyable that most of those who bad experienced them eagerly came...
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THE LAST OF THE OPTIMISTS
the last of the optimists these days in America, and in a funny way, they balance the outrageous pessimism of ali other writers of our time. 1. Commentaire dirigé JAMES RESTON, International Herald Tribune, Monday, December 15, 1975. 1) In what way can an advertisement be a bit of a fraud? 2) What does a street look like when the dustmen are on strike? 3) How does the author show that he did not write this article in praise of advertising?...
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THE HARDEST CHOICE
often only telling the parents tbat their babies were stillbom. But public discussion of this unpleasant alternative is a relati vely new phenomenon. Doctors and hospital officiais across the U.S. are now openly acknowledging tbat there are cases in which ali concemed agree that the best-and perbaps even the most humane-treatment for a severely deformed infant is none at ali .•. ... As a result, the painful decision to treat or not to treat...
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AN INDIAN IN WASHINGTON
our apartment door. The corridor was long: doors, doors. The iUuminated ceiling was decorated with stars of different sizes; the .colours were grey and blue and gold. Below that imitation sky 1 felt like a prisoner. V. S. NAIPAUL. In a free state. 1971, p. 26-27, in Penguin Books Edition. 1973. 1. Commentaire dirigé 1) What are the elements that cause the lndian narrator's surprise in Washington? Does he feel happy in his new sur roundings?...
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THE RIGHT TO DIE
When people talk about euthanasia (1), they always insist on the right to live and say that cases like this young boy's are very unusual. But sooner or later we bave got to realise tbat we are produclng so-called unusual cases by the hundreds. Of course no-one bas the right to take another's life. But our hospitals are already full of old people who are carefully being kept balf alive, although we know that they wiU never be nor...
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James BALDWIN, Go Tell it on the Mountain
Tben he remembered his father and his mother, abd ali the arms stretched out to hold him back, to save him from this city where, they said, his soul would find perdition. And certainly perdition sucked at the feet of the people who walked there; and cried in the lights, in the gjgantic towers; the marks of Satan coulcfbe found in the faces of the people who waited at the doors of movie bouses; his words were printed on the great...
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CRIME AND THE GREAT SOCIETY
World War II bave sbarply limited the market for unskilled labor... Frustrated youths, unable to find work, become bored and cynical, convinced that life is a racket, that social responsi bility is a joke. TIME ESSAY, Time, March 24, 1967. 1. Commentaire dirigé 1) What is the effect of the fear of crime on the different cate gories of individuals? How do they react? 2) Comment upon the following statement: "There is a growing tende...
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MINNESOTA EXPERIMENTAL CITY: THE NEWEST NEW TOWN
In their place will be "megastructures" complete with their own housing units, streets and transit systems. While ali this might sound like a futurist vision, the truth is that the planners have looked hack as often as forward. Their stress is on old fashioned values- "good food, good friends, and a good rela tionship with the earth ", Pinney sa ys. That means a return to windmills for sorne electrical power, to cottage industries for sorne em...
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WHY BE LITERATE ?
ing (1) people with unnecessary skills? H only people would open their eyes and stop living in the past, life could be so much easier and more pleasurable. It is up to us to give the future generations a good start in life. So let's begin by scrapping (2) the postal system (who can alford to send letters these days, anyway ?) and introducing cheap telephones so that every home bas one; and let's use more symbols (as is already done with moder...
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The greatest ride in my life
harvests; their old men bad given them leave tobit the road for a sommer. There were two young city boys from Columbus, Ohio, high school football players, chewing gum, singing in the breeze, and they said they were hitchhiking around the United States for the sommer. "We're going to LA (1)!" they yelled. "What are you going to do there ?" "Hell, we don't know. Who cares ?" ..• 1 was glad when the two Minnesota farmboys who owned the t...