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 qualities are 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 such have great personal charm. But it does rule out such types as the over-excitable, melancholy, frigid, sarcastic, cynical, frustrated, and over-bearing : I would say too, 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 bores than from brutes. 3. Secondly, it is not merely desirable but essential for a teacher to have a genuine capacity for sympathy - in the literal meaning of that word; a capacity to tune in to the minds and feelings of other people, especially, since most teachers are school teachers, 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 and immaturity 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 of his 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. That is part of the technique of teaching, which demands that every now and then a teacher 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 rather larger than life. 5. A teacher must remain mentally alert. He will not get into the profession if of low intelligence, but it is all too easy, even for people of above-average intelligence, to stagnate intellectually - and that means to deteriorate intellectually. A teacher must 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 I use 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 like that. He must be pretty resilient; teaching makes great demands on nervous energy. 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

something more to learn about it. There are three principal objects of study: the subject, 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 the most 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 active co-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 must make intensive studies of primitive peoples. I have not yet told you how he makes them. 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 the essential rules of good fieldwork. 2. Experience has proved that certain conditions are essential if a good investigation is 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 desiderata for, obvious though they may be, they are the distinguishing marks of British anthropological research which make it, in my opinion, different from and of a higher quality than research conducted elsewhere. 3. The earlier professional fieldworkers were always in a great hurry. Their quick visits 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 intensive studies 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 different today 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 be tested 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 a position 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

sees and hears what goes on in the normal everyday life of the people as well as less 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 as well 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 the native community and in mission stations or government posts, had mostly to rely on 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 and culture, and is dependent on the natives around him for company, friendship, and human under-standing. An anthropologist has failed unless, when he says goodbye 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 of their 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 I have described he must learn the native language, and any anthropologist worth his 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 strange languages easily, and many primitive languages are almost unbelievably difficult to learn, but the language must be mastered as thoroughly as the capacity of the student and its complexities permit, not only because the anthropologist can then communicate freely with the natives, but for further reasons. To understand a people'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 the language. Every kind of social relationship, every belief every technological process - in fact everything in the social life of the natives - is expressed in words as 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's study 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 a few key words, upon which the success of the whole investigation depends; and they can only be determined by the anthropologist himself learning to use the words 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 complete dependence 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 impossible to 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 every detail he has recorded, you will find in a good anthropologist's notebooks a detailed description of even the most commonplace activities, for example, how a cow 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

of their life and neglecting the rest, he does so always against the background of their entire social activities and in terms of their whole social structure. (From Social Anthropology, by E. E. Evans-Pritchard.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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 real thing, but that is the real thing', said a chemist many years ago. 'The only difference 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 try making synthetic diamonds towards the end of the eighteenth century. It was at this 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 that the carbon atoms have been packed together in a slightly different way. The chemists were fired with enthusiasm: Why not change a cheap and plentiful substance, carbon, into a rare and expensive one, diamond? 3. You have probably heard about the alchemists who for centuries tried to turn plain 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 the diamond 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 rumour began 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 was bored 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 the General 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 high temperature. Under these conditions the carbon turns into diamonds. For a long time the laboratory attempts failed, simply because no suitable machinery existed. What was needed was some sort of pressure chamber in which the carbon could be 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

work again. Imagine their disappointment when, even with this equipment, they produced 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 were unsatisfactory.' 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 a catalyst, 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 pressure chamber. 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 shiny crystals lay within. These crystals scratched glass, and even diamonds. Light waves 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 analysed chemically. They were finally studied under X-rays, and there was no longer room 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 the molecule 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 or blue-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) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------