A Story with a Moral

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1076.

G Listen to the story on the tape and answer the following questions.

1. Describe the man's appearance.

2. What did he buy?

3. What did he ask the manageress?

4. How did she react?

5. How did the man pay for the goods?

6. What was the real motive for the man's coming into the shop a second time?

7. Why did the police become interested?

8. What information was the woman able to give the police?

9. How did the policeman feel when he received the information?

10. Why did the woman remember the man so well?

11. What is the moral of the story?

Language awareness: loan words

AEnglish is a language that has always been happy to borrow words from other languages. Many of these "loan words" have now become an accepted part of the language. In the following sentences, can you identify the loan words and say what they mean?

1. I've got the afternoon off and I'm going to make use of the fine weather by having a blitz on the garden.

2. Representatives of the leaders of the two opposing armies met at a secret rendezvous to try to negotiate an armistice.

3. The press conference was a fiasco: none of the speakers was adequately briefed to respond to the questions.

4. The military junta was overthrown by guerilla forces working with help from a foreign power.

5. It's cold outside. Make sure you do up your anorak.

6. The health club provides a gymnasium, a sauna and a creche.

7. Flower-arranging has always been one of our most popular evening classes but this year it's been rivalled by origami.

8. If you are really hungry I can recommend some excellent restaurants for shish kebab, crepes, tandoori and dim sum.

9. Mary's become more relaxed since she took up yoga.

10. Christopher won't get on in this company. He's not prepared to kowtow to anyone, even the Managing Director.

В In the following sentences, can you use one of the words given to fill the gaps in the sentences?

Use each word only once.

1. The police discovered an arms...........buried beneath the floorboards in the abandoned building.

2. New York subways are patrolled by...........who aim to defend the traveling public against muggers.

3. One of the joys of being retired is being able to have a...............after lunch.

4. If you want to catch a glimpse of London's..................don't miss the presentation of the Booker prize for the year's best novel.

5. Stephen's terrific..............the stories he tells keep his audience spellbound for hours.

6. The new nanny established an immediate............... with the children she was going to look after, so her employers had no qualms about going off on holiday and leaving her in charge.

7. When I told my friends I was going to train as a social worker, they looked at me as if I had said I wanted to be a..............pilot.

8. The Conservative Party has always expected to get the support of young.............who are not unwilling to take risks in order to gain a reward.

9. Before the Second World War in Britain, it was not unusual for divorced women to be treated as............. not respectable enough to be entertained in polite society.

10. Another girl who left school in 1975, Sarah Taylor,..............Smith, is now living in New York where husband Piers has landed a job with the World Bank.

11. The poor Prince and Princess just couldn't escape from the Press. Even on their honeymoon they were relentlessly pursued by.................eager to photograph them wherever they went.

12. That was one of the most embarrassing evenings I've ever spent. If Michael and his wife have had a...................they might keep it to themselves and not inflict their bad feelings on their guests. Mozart was treated as a............... on his concert tours with his father and sister in his early years.

13. Many couples like to improve their homes by building a................complete with barbecue for summer entertaining.

14. The new principal's..............style of management caused feelings of resentment and hostility amongst the lecturers.

15. Like many students Angus was grabbed by..................and spent his vacations exploring the Amazon or............. in the Himalayas.

16. The...............is one class in society not conspicuous for its wish to change the status quo.

17. The applause reached a.................. then slowly faded away.

18. "Lean................"– our new range of low calorie pop-in-the-oven meals.

19. Aspiring authors are best advised to send a................. of their work and a sample chapter to an agent, rather than approaching a publisher direct.

20. The Junior Minister became involved in a financial..................that eventually led to his resignation.

21. John seems to be a talented pianist when he's playing at home. But the concert in front of parents at the school was not a success. Playing in public is just not his.............. .

22. I'm afraid that science fiction is not a................that has ever held any interest for me.

23. It's always fascinating at sales promotions listening to the PR men delivering their................. .

24. Students at the Officers' Training School go rock climbing, orienteering and on exercises involving.................difficult country at night.

Theme two: Moral Issues

A Have you ever seen terminally ill people?

Did they know they were going to die soon? Who told them that news?

Now read the article below and answer the questions which follow.

Should Doctors Tell The Whole Truth?

"First of all I'm accused of playing God and now I'm being crucified", complained Professor Hugh Dudley. The Professor, a consultant surgeon at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, had agreed to demonstrate, on BBC'2 Doctors' Dilemmas, the way he shares the news of death with a terminally ill patient and his family. What he actually demonstrated was the ethical chasm which exists between the old-style paternal consultant and almost everyone else – the young doctors and nurses who have probably had some training in terminal care, the patients who are now demanding the dignity of truth and don't wish to be treated like simpletons just because they are in hospital.

In the playlet, the patient, his wife and daughter are played by actors. The professor and his hospital staff play themselves. Professor Dudley is caring, conscientious, confusing: "The future does look a little uncertain for you...but I don't want you to be pessimistic about this..." "But I could get better, doctor?" (hopefully). "You could go on feeling fine for some time yet, yes" (bracingly).

The studio panel comprises Ian Kennedy, the chairman, author of Unmasking Medicine, Dr Nell O'Connor, a hospice doctor, and Cambridge psychologist, Dr Nicholas Humphrey. They say that any relationship between doctor and patient should be based on truth and trust, that "white lies" are often more frightening than the truth (especially at times of illness when most of us are fearfully imaginative), that it is morally wrong to chat about a patient's symptoms in the wards or talk to his family before discussing his case with him. They accuse the professor of doing all the talking and no listening: "People do ask questions, but not in so many words," says Dr O'Connor. When a question does come up, the panel feels the professor fudges it; "Well, first of all, the operation went very well indeed...we did find some changes in the ulcer which were a bit worrying..." Dr Humphrey says this is real inquisition stuff. Lull them with the good news then shock them with the bad.

Although hospital attitudes have changed considerably in the last ten years – few doctors would now refuse to give a patient an honest prognosis of his case if he insisted upon it – the decision "do we tell and how do we tell it?" is still left to the consultant. In one ward of a big hospital, the consultant could tell you as much or as little as you want to know. In another ward it might be; "I'm afraid I can't say anything, dear, I expect he'll pop in and see you tomorrow", and "Cancer? Now whatever's given you that silly idea?"

This picture is described by one enlightened doctor as "the torture of the patient." "We are in a tricky situation whatever we do," says a junior doctor in a London teaching hospital. "We often don't know what the consultant has said and, if we step in and answer the patient's questions truthfully, we run the risk of getting a black mark on our references. The consultant has the power of hire and fire." Bill Heald is a consultant surgeon at Basingstoke District Hospital in Hampshire. He says; "When I was a student the consultant wouldn't hear the words "tumour" or "cancer". Everything was an "abscess" or an "inflammation". Most of us were brought up not to tell people they were going to die, not to speak frankly. This was our basic training and we are now in the middle of a communications revolution in medicine which is frightening for the doctor and, very probably, frightening for his patients. We're nervous of the new way. We're not quiet sure if it will work."

A working party has been discussing the care of the dying at Basingstoke for three years now. It was joined recently by two nursing sisters, funded by the National Society for Cancer Relief and trained to look after the terminally ill and to educate hospital staff to work with the dying. "A doctor's attitude to his own death is all important," says Michael Waldron, a surgical registrar. "Until we have accepted our own mortality we are unable to deal with other people's". When he was a student, Dr Waldron and his colleagues were so appalled by the way death was handled in their department that they sent the consultant an anonymous gift, a book on the care of the dying. "The patient's relatives went through so much mental agony in the hospital that I swore that when I qualified I would always make the phone call to the relative right after the operation, no matter how busy I was."

Recently about 20 of us gathered in the staff room at Basingstoke with white wine and crisps (no cigarettes) to watch and discuss Professor Dudley's film. The verdict was that his patients had learned the truth in a bad way. "Watching the film I realized how near I've been to making those crashing mistakes myself," said Sister Anne Desausmarez. "Saying things like "we want you to go on living as if you were going to live for ever..." which are unhopeful. The worst fault, everyone agreed, was to leave the family fencing with one another because each had been told a slightly different tale. "Always tell them together," said Mr Colin Jardin-Brown, a consultant gynaecologist obstetrician. Relatives are always instinctively protective, you know, and each one always thinks that the other won't be able to bear the truth."

Not everyone is happy to thrust the truth upon people who don't want to hear it "If we have a patient in and he unexpectedly turns out to have a malignant tumour, does he really want to know about it, there and then, with a great big pain in his stomach?" asked Mr Frank Tovey, a consultant general surgeon, some years older than his colleagues. His caution is reinforced by the various papers in the medical press which suggest that those of us who would wish to be told the bad news of our illness exactly equal those who wouldn't. Ninety-five per cent of those who wrote to the ВВС after Professor Dudley's appearance preferred his old-fashioned euphemisms to the more honest approach of the other three people in the studio.

Dr Tim Nash, the anaesthetist who runs the "pain clinic" at Basingstoke, mixing drugs which can ease the pain of dying, said that in his experience you could tell someone he was dying until you were blue in the face, but he would not accept the fact of his death until he was ready for it. Bib Wheeleess, a visiting American consultant, strongly criticized the way the patient was handled in the film. "Before an operation the patient has to sign a document saying that he has been told the diagnosis and likely prognosis of his illness, the benefits and possible complications of surgery and the alternative to it.»Our experts warn against paternalism. They believe in telling all the truth, preferably pre-operatively."

One surgeon remembers operating on a writer. "I took out the cancer in his lung but he had a secondary in his liver. I sewed him up and didn't tell him about the secondary, but I did tell his best friend. Three months later, when he was very ill and his friend had told him what was wrong, the writer came to me and told me I had done him a disservice. ‘There were three things I wanted to do before I died', he said, ‘finish a book, climb a mountain and visit my grandchildren in Australia. And now, I haven't the time to do any of them'."

B Answer the following questions:

1. What does Professor H. Dudley complain of and why?

2. What does he demonstrate in the playlet?

3. How does he share the news of death with a terminally ill patient and his family?

4. Why is Professor H. Dudley criticized?

5. What is more important: to talk or to listen?

6. How did the hospital attitudes change in the last years?

7. Why do the doctors often encounter tricky situations?

8. What is the new way of talking with the terminally ill?

9. What does Dr Waldron say about his hospital experience?

10. What kind of disservice can sometimes doctors do to their patients?

C Discuss with the group:

How would you share the news of death or any serious illness with a patient and his family?

If you were dying of an incurable disease, what would you prefer: to be told the whole truth, or to be unaware of the inevitable?

What can help people to cope with dying?

Would you tell anyone if you were diagnosed HIV positive?

What do you think of euthanasia (the painless killing of people who are very ill or very old in order to stop them suffering)?

What is morally worse: killing someone or letting someone die? Analyze the situations given below.

Smith will gain a large inheritance if his six-year-old cousin dies. He sneaks in when the child is bathing, drowns him, and arranges it to look like an accident.

Jones, similarly placed with respect to his cousin, plans to do the same but on reaching the bathroom observes the child slip, hit his head and fall into the water. Jones simply stands by while the child drowns.

Imagine that you are seriously ill. There is not much time left – you are going to die very soon. How would you spend your last days? Would you keep on working, going out together with your friends, or would you prefer shutting yourself away at home?

D Put each of the following words or phrases in its correct place in the passage below.

EHave you everread or heard of any books considered to be disreputable and harmful?

Do you think such books should be accessible to everybody or to a limited number of people? Why?

Read the article below and do the task which follows.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO SUICIDE

Go intoany large Tokyo bookshop and you will find a well-stocked self-help section. Much of the material here is familiar to book browsers all over the world – advice for the depressed or bereaved, for those in troubled relationships or stuck in dead-end careers.

But in among them, along with the Japanese translation of Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, are titles that would never make it into Waterstone's or WH Smith. There is The Perfect Manual of Fraud and another entitled How to Borrow Money and Runaway. Other life-enhancing guides in the "subculture section" include Secret Techniques of Maniac Stalkers and the Manual for Making Unreasonable Claims. And there, sealed in a cellophane wrapper and emblazoned with a warning, is the most notorious and successful of the Japanese self-help guides: Wataru Tsurumi's Complete Manual of Suicide.

Since its publication in 1993 with a print run of only 8,000 copies, it has been reviled and scrutinized in the media, deplored by psychiatrists and counselors, and has sold more than 1.2 million copies. A number of local governments across Japan have officially classified the book as fukenzen – literally "unwholesome." Now, nearly eight years after the book's initial publication, the Tokyo metropolitan government is planning to make it illegal for bookshops to sell the manual to anyone under 18.

What is it about this infamous book that so divides people? Put simply, it is a methodical, chillingly explicit, step-by-step guide to certain death. No detail is left out as Tsurumi coldly and precisely takes the reader through 10 methods of suicide, ranging from hanging and drowning to electrocution and gas poisoning. Each method is given a skull-and-crossbone rating for criteria such as pain, effort, appearance of body after death, and reliability. Jumping from a high building gets only one skull for effort (just take the elevator and step off the roof) but five for the unsightly appearance of the body after death. Self-immolation is similarly disfiguring but extremely painful. Hanging comes out on top, being both "artistic" and reliable, while wrist-cutting is dismissed as being "for thrill seekers who don't really want to die."

The manual is packed full of case studies and statistical analysis and includes a chapter of "special cases" and notable suicides. It documents the precise lethal doses of over-the-counter drugs and other substances, from travel-sickness pills to nail-polish remover.It describes the exact spot on the platform from which suicides should leap under a train – recommending use of a station passed by express trains – and gives a detailed account of exactly what will happen to the body.

For urban suicides, a famous housing estate, the Takashimadaira Housing Project in Tokyo is recommended, and the book helpfully includes an address and map. Its tone is icily unemotional and clinical, its detachment more nihilist than humanist. Tsurumi, 35, a freelance writer whose other works include The Personality Remodeling Manual, has always denied that his book actively encourages suicide. "I'm not saying anything so ridiculous as 'Everyone go out and kill yourselves!' he has said. “If you want to live, you should live as you please, and if you want to die, you should die as you please."

Giving people the means to kill themselves, he argues, is precisely what stops them from doing it – knowing how easy it is to die is in itself an incentive to live. The author has said repeatedly that reading his book would not make someone who didn't already want to kill himself do so. Social and economic factors, not books, he insists, are what lie behind Japan's soaring suicide rates.

But the book has been dogged by controversy from the beginning. Just a few months after its publication, the bodies of two men were found in a recommended suicide spot alongside copies of the book. When the book was linked to the suicides of two young people in Tokyo in 1999, controversy flared again and has been rumbling away ever since.

"The problem with this book is that it's all very well to speak about suicide in a rhetorical, almost ironic way, but not everyone will understand that," says Wataru Fuematsu of the help-line organization Life Line.

On the proposal to ban sales of the book to under-18s, Fuematsu is unimpressed. "Age is not an issue in the psychology of people who wish to die," he says. Compared to the shame attached to suicide in Christian society, in Japan it has traditionally been an honorable act. In the code of the samurai, ritual suicide – seppuku – was a tragic but noble means of exiting from life – a means of atonement and of taking responsibility.

But statistics show that modern Japanese are taking their own lives as never before. In 1997 there were 24,391 suicides. Two years later, the number had risen to 33,048, a rate per capita surpassed only by Hungary and Finland.

The increase coincides with Japan's worst postwar recession. Since the collapse of the "bubble economy" 10 years ago, it has become common to read of the suicides of the heads of bankrupted companies. Web sites dedicated to suicide have proliferated. In an infamous case in 1999, a 27-year-old teacher who called himself Dr. Kiriko ran his own Internet "consulting room" where he offered to supply cyanide to people who wanted to end their lives. After mailing cyanide to eight people, one of whom was found dead. Kiriko committed suicide himself. After his death, it was discovered he had enough cyanide to kill 3,000 people.

Not surprisingly, given how lucrative Tsurumi's book has been, Ota Publishing vigorously defends its bestseller."Of course, people could follow this manual, but this is not a book that recommends suicide," says Tsurumi's editor Misa Ochiai. "In fact, most say that reading this book has stopped them from committing suicide."

By Fiona Wilson

F Find a word or phrase in the text which, in context, is similar in meaning to:

G Answer the following questions:

1. Why do you think the book Complete Manual of Suicide is sealed in a cellophane wrapper?

2. Which text might the warning inscription on the wrapper contain?

3. Why is the book reviled in the media?

4. What makes the book so popular with the public?

5. What is a “skull-and-crossbone rating”?

6. Which methods of killing oneself are described in the book? Which of them have the highest rating? Why?

7. Does the book really encourage suicide?

8. What is controversial about the book?

9. How does Fiona Wilson explain the increase in the number of suicides in Japan?

H Read the information provided in Additional Resources (p. 173) and discuss the following questions with the group:

Is killing oneself a voluntary act or the product of mental illness?

How is suicide viewed in different societies and cultures?

What makes people resort to voluntary death?

Provide your comment on the following statements:

1. “Not long ago the right-thinking person believed that masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and other "unnatural acts" were medical problems whose solution was delegated to doctors. It took us a surprisingly long time to take these behaviors back from physicians, accept them comfortably, and speak about them calmly. Perhaps the time is ripe to rethink our attitude toward suicide and its relation to the medical profession, accept suicide comfortably, and speak about it calmly.”

2. "The life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster."

I Do you agree with Tsurumi's statement: “If you want to live, you should live as you please, and if you want to die, you should die as you please"? Discuss the topic with the group.

A Wicked Story

J Listen to the following story and indicate whether the following statements are true or false.

1. The speaker describes an incident which happened while he was working on a cruise ship.

2. The deceased passenger had expressed a wish to be buried at sea.

3. The captain of the ship authorized the funeral.

4. The coffin itself could not be seen when it was on the ramp.

5. The bosun's mate pulled the wrong lever.

6. The bosun was in a state of panic.

7. The bosun produced three things from inside the ship in order that the funeral ceremony could go ahead.

8. The captain was present when the coffin went into the sea.

9. Five people were present at the funeral ceremony.

10. There was no indication that anything had gone wrong.

Grammar: the verb