4. Where does the humour in the cartoon lie?
5. What do you think the cartoonist’s purpose was in creating this cartoon?
A listening text
Knowing how to listen – whether it be to an educator, the news or an employer – is a vitally important life skill. One can learn the skill of listening by practising, which is what you will do in the activity below.
Activity 1.3 - Listening to understand (individual and pair)
Pre-listening:
Read the questions below to give you some idea of what the text will be about.
During listening:
Sometimes when there are a lot of names, it is difficult to keep track of who did or said what. In the table below are a number of names in the first column. Rewrite the table in your workbook. As you listen to the passage try to fill in the second column.
| Name | Description |
| a. Detlef Quafasel | |
| b. Lamont-Doherty | |
| c. Michael D. Limonick | |
| d. National Oceanography Centre | |
| e. Nature | |
| f. Stuart Cunningham | |
| g. Wallace Broecker |
[A research ship used by the British National Oceanography Centre [http://www.nerc.ac.uk] ]
Post-listening:
Questions:
1. The article you have just listened to is about a scientific study that was conducted. This might make you think that everything in the article is factual because it is scientific. This is not the case. A good reader distinguishes between fact and opinion so that they can question and make decisions for themselves. Look at the sentences below and see if you can identify ways of distinguishing the facts from the opinions:
The sun rises in the East. (fact)
Red is an attractive colour. (opinion)
Bob and Gary play golf every Saturday. (fact)
Golf is an enjoyable game. (opinion)
2. Below is a list of statements from the text. With a partner, decide which ones are fact and which are opinion. Explain to each other why you say so.
a. Even in the dead of winter, long stretches of freezing temperatures are pretty rare for London.
b. The relatively balmy climate of much of Western Europe suggests that many countries in the region should lie well south of where they actually are…
c. a component of the ocean’s current system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed by 30% since 1992.
d. ‘The result’, writes University of Hamburg climatologist Detlef Quadfasel in a commentary on the study that also appears in Nature, ‘is alarming.’
e. His theory: fresh water, perhaps from melting glaciers, might have diluted the ocean’s salinity, making it harder for cooling water to sink and return southward to pick up more heat.
f. … today global warming is causing more melting water to stream into the North Atlantic from glaciers and older sea ice, which is lower in salt.
g. It’s something, in other words, to keep an eye on.
Your teacher will go through the answers with you.
3.Here is another listening exercise for you to practise with. Listen carefully while your teacher reads the extract about the extinction of life forms on earth. Read through the questions below first and then write out answers to them on your own:
a. What is the purpose of the text? What is its tone? Do you remember one word that supports your answer?
b. What do scientists call what is happening now?
c. When was the last mass extinction and what became extinct then?
d. What is the problem at the moment?
e. What is causing it?
Features of texts
You know the word ‘genre’, don’t you? The genres of literary texts that you will study this year are novel, drama and poetry. You will also read short stories in this book. How do you know which is which? You can determine this by the layout of the text. Literary texts do not usually have contents pages, but other texts do. In the activity below you will look at some of these texts.
Activity 1.4 - What are the key features of books? (pair)
Pre-reading:
Look at examples of textbooks for your other subjects. With your partner, list the main features that you find.
Now discuss how literary texts differ from each other.
Questions:
1. If you have a Geography book in front of you and want to look up something about global warming, how would you go about finding it?
Your teacher will call for answers from the class, and give general feedback.
Novel
You will read one of three prescribed novels this year: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, or Animal Farm by George Orwell. You will read extracts from all three in this book. The idea is to give you practice at reading a novel. You can transfer the knowledge you gain to the reading of whichever of the three novels your school and teacher have chosen.
First we will look at the beginning of Animal Farm and then we will give you a few extracts to study. Orwell wrote this novel in 1945 after Stalin had come to power in Russia. It is an allegory:
Information box
An allegory is a text, written or spoken, that that uses symbolic figures and actions to tell truths about human behaviour or experience. An allegory can be found in forms such as fables and parables. Characters in an allegory often personify abstract types and the action of the story represents something not explicitly stated. Symbolic allegories, where characters have an identity apart from the story itself, are used to represent political and historical situations and figures and are vehicles for satire.
Activity 1.5 - Reading the beginning of a novel (individual and pair)
Pre-reading:
When we start a book, we want to know who the characters are, details regarding historical context and setting, and what the book will be about. The first chapter of Animal Farm gives us much information about these aspects.
During reading:
Read the chapter here to yourselves, even if you have already read it before now. Look for the aspects that we have mentioned.
Animal Farm
by George Orwell
1
Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring.
As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings. Word