Match the notions with their definitions.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 506.

B) Answer the following questions and do the assignments.

- Does the given text present objective information or personal feelings of the author concerning Stanford University?

- Write out at least five concrete facts describing the life of the universitya)

3. Read the essays given below and identify them as 1) descriptive, 2) narrative, or 3) argumentative. Sum up each of the essays in two or three sentences. Use the following as an opening phrase “The essay ‘(title)' describes/argues/gives an account of …”

A. The New Tutor

With the summer came Peter to tutor me, a tall, handsome young man, fresh from Oxford with dedicated ideas on education which I found rather trying to begin with. But gradually the atmosphere of the island worked its way insidiously under his skin, and he relaxed and became quite human. At first the lessons were painful to an extreme: interminable wrestling with fractions and percentages, geological strata and warm currents, nouns, verbs and adverbs. But, as the sunshine worked its magic on Peter, the fractions and percentages no longer seemed to him an overwhelmingly important part of life and they were gradually pushed more and more into the background; he discovered that the intricacies of geological strata and the effects of warm currents could be explained much more easily while swimming along the coast, while the simplest way of teaching me English was to allow me to write something each day which he could correct. Diffidently, I suggested I wrote a book, and Peter, somewhat startled, but not being able to think of any reason why I should not write a book agreed. While I was at work on my masterpiece, breathing heavily, tongue protruding, Peter and Margo would take a stroll in the sunken garden to look at the flowers. To my surprise, they had both suddenly become very botanically-minded. Occasionally, in the early days, Peter suffered from sudden spasms of consciousness, my epic would be relegated to a drawer, and we would pore over mathematical problems. But as the summer days grew longer, and Margo's interest in gardening became more sustained, these irritating periods became less frequent.

(from “My family and Other Animal's by Gerald Durrell)

B. Latin – Hard Labour?

Te study of Latin builds character. If you have Latin thought your school years, and you have enough of it, you will never in later life become decadent – no matter how weak-willed you are naturally.

That is where, when it comes to character-building, Latin is so superior to Mathematics.

Mathematics teachers you to be slick, the use of ingenuity, to look for quick ways – like using logarithms or tables, instead of multiplying out. But there is no nonsense like that about Latin. There is only hard, honest toil. The result, when you have studied Latin, is that I later life you approach an issue in an honest, stupid straightforward fashion, which is the right way in the long run, for approaching any issue. You don't look for loopholes.

Penology and education being, for obvious reasons, closely interrelated sciences, it is a well to consider, for a moment, the advisability of introducing the study of Latin as a prison task for our convicts along with the more orthodox activities of packing oakum, sewing mail bags and breaking stones. “The stone pile was nothing”, I can imagine a reformed recidivist saying, “and I could always do solitary. But that four-year Latin class left me a broken man. I am only 52 – and look at me. O temprora, o mores”.

No, Latin is not a dead language. There is a great future for it.

(from “A Cask of Jerepido” by H.C. Bosman)

C. Technologies of the Future

There are several key technologies which will, without doubt, affect the nature of work in the twenty-first century, one of which is virtual reality. Appealing to several of your senses at once, this marvel of science presents images that respond instantaneously to your movements. It allows people to behave as if they were somewhere completely different; this could be a place which existed hundreds of years ago, or a completely fictional one. At present, you need to wear bizarre-looking goggles to receive the images. However, as computers become smarter these will be replaced by more lightweight ones, which will be able to superimpose synthesised images onto the real world.

Complex tasks are already being performed using multimedia applications, some of them in hazardous environments such as space, or inside the nuclear reactors. Pilots now train in virtual reality cockpits; these merge three-dimensional graphics with the view out of the window and contain sound systems that provide prompts to tell them about their surroundings. In the not-do-distant future, surgeons will be conducting delicate operations on patients, the latter possibly being thousands of miles away, while architects will stroll through buildings and environments still in the first stage of design.

As software evolves, complex systems may be simplified into models which are no longer beyond human comprehension. New ranks of specialists will clearly be needed to enable both expert and amateur alike to access and utilise such applications. Clearly, the job opportunities thus created for those trained in this sphere will be immense.