Make up the following sentences complete.

1. I am all for the children ...; but who knows what is the proper upbringing.

2. She was all for the article ..., but the editor said it couldn’t be done.

3. Your mother is all for you ...; she doesn’t like the idea of your going away.

4. We are all for our students ... .

5. The professor was all for the examination ..., but the dean said it was too late and it should be postponed.

6. I was all for us ..., but every one said it was too cold and wet.

7. They were all for the incident ... but somehow it was hushed up.

8. Listening to beautiful music is as ... .

9. He would have been founf quilty but for some new evidence that happened to have ...

10. He proudly showed me a painting which happened to have ... .

 

Контрольная работа № 3

для студентов V курса заочного отделения.

(практика устной и письменной речи)

Составители: Поспелова Н.В.

 

Федеральное агентство по образованию

Елабужский государственный педагогический университет

Факультет иностранных языков

Контрольная работа № 6

для студентов V курса заочного отделения.

(практика устной и письменной речи)

                                           Елабуга, 2006.

 

 

             Control work N 6.

Foreign Language learning. New Technologies in Education.

I.Read the text.

Confessions of a Gallomaniac (1)

By Frank Moore Colby

     Down to (2) the outbreak of the war I had no more desire to converse with a Frenchman in his own language than with a modern Greek. I thought I understood French well enough for my own purposes, because I had read it of and on (3) for twenty years, but when the war aroused sympathies and sharpened that I had not felt before, I realized the width of the chasm that cut me off from what I wished to feel. Nor could it be bridged by any of the academic, natural, or commercial methods that I knew of. They were either too slow or they led in directions that I did not wish to go. I tried a phonofraph, and after many bouts (4) with it I acquired part of a sermon by Bossuet (5) and real fluency in discussing a quinsy sore throat with a Paris physician, in case I ever went and had one.(6) I then took fourteen conversation lessons from a Mme. Carnet (7), and being rather well on in years at the start (8), I should, If I had kept on diligently, have been able at the age of eighty-five to inquire faultlessly my way to the post-office. I could already ask for butter and sing a song written by Henry IV -when my teacher went to France to take care of her half-brother’s children. I will say this for Mme. Carnet. (9) I came to understand perfectly the French for all her personal and family affairs. No human being has ever confided in me so abundantly as she did. No human being has so sternly repressed any answering confidences of my own. Her method of instruction, if it was one, was that of jealous, relentless, unbridled soliloquy.(10)

     I fell in with (11) M.Bernou, the commissioner who was over here buying guns, and whose English and my French were so much alike that we agreed to interchange them. We met daily for two weeks and walked for an hour in the park, each tearing at the other’s language.(12) Our conversations, as I look back upon them, must have run about like this:

     “It calls to walk”, said he, smiling brilliantly.

     “It is good morning”, said I, “better than I had extended”.

     “It was at you yesterday the morning, but I did not find.”

     “I was obliged to leap early”, said I, “and I was busy standing up straight all around the forenoon”.

     “The book I prayed you send, he came, and I thank, but positively you are not deranged?”

     “Don’t talk”, I said. “Never talk again. It was really nothing anywhere. I had been very happy, I reassure.”

     “Pardon, I glide. I glode. There was the hide of a banana. Did I crash you?”

     “I notice no insults”, I replied. “You merely gnawed my arm”.

     Gestures and smiles of perfect understanding.

     I do not know whether Bernou, who like myself was middled-aged, felt as I did on these ocasions, but by the suppression of every thought that I could not express in my childish vocabulary, I came to feel exactly like a child. They said I ought to think in French but thinking in French when there is so little French to think with, divests the mind of its acquisitions of forty years.(13) Experience slips away for there are not words enough to lay hold of it. From the point of view of Bernou’s and my vocabulary, Central Park (14)

 

was as the Garden of Eden (15) after six months - new and unnamed things everywhere. A dog, a tree, a statue taxed all our powers of (16) description, and on a complex matter like a policeman our minds could not meet at all. We could only totter together a few steps in any mental direction. Yet there was a real pleasure in this earnest interchange of insipidities and they were highly valued on each side.

     Now at the end of a long year of these persistent puerilities (17) I am able to report two definite results: in the first place a sense of my incapacity and ignorance infinity vaster than when I began, and in the second a profound distrust of all Americans in the city of New York, who profess (18) an acquaintance with French culture, including teachers, critics, theatre, audiences and patronesses of visiting Frenchmen.

     I do not blame other Americans for dabbling in (19) French, since I myself am the worst of dabbles. But I see no reason why any of us should pretend that it is anything more than dabbling. The usual way of reading French does not lead even to an acquaintance with French literature. Everybody knows that words in a living language in oder to be understood have to be lived with. They are not felt as a part of living literature when you see them pressed out and labbeled in a glossary, but only when you hear them fly about. A word is not a definite thing susceptible of dictionary explanation. It is a cluster of associations, reminiscent of the sort of men that used it, suggestive of social class, occupation, mood, dignity or the lack of it, primness, violences, pedantries, or platitudes. It hardly seems necessary to say that words in a living literature ought to ring in the ear with the sounds that really belong to them, or that poetry without an echo cannot be felt.

     It may be that there is no way out of it. Perhaps it is inevitable that the colleges which had so long taught the dead language as if they were buried should now teach the living ones as if they were dead.

 

Notes

1. Gallomaniac -one who is crazy about everything French (англомания).

2. down to -from an earlier period to some specified time or date. E.g. From the feudal times down to the French revolution the French peasant’s life was that of misery.

3. off and on - from time to time, every now and then, not continuously, irregularly,e.g. His job involves going abroad off and on.

4. bout - period of active, strenuous activity; fight, an atack, as a bout with an enemy, a boxing bout also a fit of illness, as a bout of insomnia, a coughing bout, a drinking bout.

5. Bossuet, Jacques Benign (1602-1704) - a French preacher and writer.

6. in case I ever went there and had one - the clause has a strong ironical ring, emphasizing the utter uselessness of the kind of knowledge he had obtained.

7. a Mme. Carnet [ka: ‘net] - a certain Mme.Carnet.

8. rather well on in years at the start - far from being young when I began

9. I will say this for Mme.Carnet - there is one thing I can say in favour of Mme. Carnet.

10. soliloquy (fig) - monologue; the string of epithets are used to emphasize that the author had a chance of uttering a single word.

11. to fall in with - to meet by chance.

12. each tearing at the other’s language (fig) - distoring each other’s language by using wrong and poor grammar, by mispronouncing words, etc. The dialogue that follows serves as an illustration to this.

13. divests the mind of its acquisitions of forty years- makes a man forget everything he has learnt in the course of forty years.

14. Central Park - a park in Manhattan, New York.

15. Garden of Eden (bibl) - the garden in which Adam and Eve lived.

16. to tax one’s powers - to put a strain on one’s ability to ..., as to tax one’s patience.

17. persistent puerilities - the author’s persistent attempts to behave in a silly childish way.

18. to profess - to claim falsery, to allege, to pretend, e.g. He professed a profound knowledge of Oriental history.

19. to dabble in - to study something just off and on, not seriously or continuously, as to dabble in music, politics, art.

 

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