I. Giving an Edge to Children of Alumni

Jonathan Zell

Legacy preferences are a red herring because elite universities use them only when it serves their institutional interests. They will be used, for example, to help the children of wealthy alumni, who are then expected to increase their annual contributions to their alma mater. But will they be used to help the children of poor or noncontributing alumni?

The only guiding principle behind the admissions policies of the elite universities is that these policies must allow them to accept – and to reject –whomever they desire. Therefore, until these universities are required to admit students solely on the basis of merit or to use affirmative action policies only to help truly disadvantaged applicants, outlawing legacy preferences by itself will change nothing.

Those with the cash and the connections will always have the advantage1.

The New York Times, October 4, 2010

II. Childhood misery

My parents separated when I was three and thereafter I began to wet my bed nightly (In floods, Weekend, August, 21). At eight, I was sent to a Quaker boarding school. My mother did not tell the school. My misery, despair and embarrassment as night after night I tried to pretend something had been spilt may be imagined. One day my father came to see me. As we sat together, he said “I hear you have been having some trouble. I found praying helped me.” As a child I used to kneel by my bed each night to say my prayers and now added “Please Jesus help me to stop wetting my bed.” The prayer was answered: the bed-wetting stopped. I am now 83 and have been left with two thoughts. First, extraordinary gratitude to some power I cannot now accept or comprehend as simply as when I was a child. Second, an image of the misery endured by countless generations of children tormented by this problem.

Name and address supplied,

The Guardian, August 26, 2010

Task 12. Read the two letters again, and observe the difference between them. What arguments does the author of first letter put forward to drive his message across?

Which letter appeals to you? Why?

Task 13.WatchVideo 6.2and fill in the grid as in Task 5, Unit 1.

TEST 1. PRINT MEDIA

Variants 1-16.

Task 1. Choose the correct answer / variant (variants) from the statements.

Task 2. Analyse the syntactical structure of the headlines, translate them into Russian. Which of the headlines is featured by a quality paper?

Task 3.Restore the headlines using the context below. Translate them into Russian.

Task 4. Read an extract of an article, determine its genre. Prove your point in writing.

Task 5. Make lexical and stylistic analysis of the sentences in writing. Translate them into Russian.

Task 6. Watch Press Review Video1 (at home) and fill in the grid below

Part II. BROADCAST MEDIA

Unit 7

BROADCAST NEWS MEDIA: GENERAL NOTION

Broadcast news media embraces radio and television stories (articles) of different forms, found innews bulletins(news programmesor newscasts)in varying proportions. News in electronic broadcasting is packaged information about new events happening somewhere else.

News programme is a regularly scheduled programme that reports current events (home and foreign news) in a series of individual stories that are presented by one or more anchors. The programme is aired on the top of the hour and lasts from 15-30 minutes (a standard news programme) to one or two hours (an extended news programme).

Television news bulletin opens and ends up with news headlines that are very much similar to newspaper headlines in lexis and grammar. The headlines are broadcast every 15 minutes in a news bulletin to keep the viewer informed on the news of the hour.

TV n e w s b u l l e t i n lists:

- stories and voice-overs;

- news flashes (or breaking news reports to provide news updates on events of great importance);

- packages in television journalism, wraps in radio broadcasting;

- live or recorded interviews( or sound bites);

- expert opinions (of a journalist or an expert);

- press reviews.

The news bulletin is traditionally structured in the form of an “inverted pyramid”, with the latest news placed at the beginning of the newscast.

News of the day are called hard news. Cultural and entertainment news are called soft news (human interest stories that may likened to newspaper feature stories). They are aired in the second half of the news programme.

Sometimes the news bulletin is interrupted by flash news or is replaced by an unscheduled coverage of an important event as it shapes up. In this case the news bulletin embraces live reporting from the scene of a particular event.

There are currently four English free-to-air rolling news television channels (broadcasting news 24 hours a day) available in the Republic of Belarus via satellite: BBC World News, EuroNews, Sky News and CNN. The broadcasting component of such channels includes three elements:

a) current affairs and events of general inerest;

b) business;

c) sport.

News channels keep the viewer informed by presenting factual information and its immediate analysis by experts.

A lot of news channels during their news programming use a news ticker (a "crawler" or "slide") – a primarily horizontal, text-based display that typically resides in the lower third of the screen space and is dedicated to presenting headlines or minor pieces of news. Most tickers are traditionally displayed in the form of scrolling text running from right to left across the screen, allowing for headlines of varying degrees of detail.

Radio news is similar to television news but is transmitted through the medium of the radio. It is based on the audio aspect rather than the visual aspect. News updates occur more often on radio than on television – usually about once or twice an hour.

Control Questions

1. What is news in electronic broadcasting?

2. What is a news programme?

3. What does a news bulletin list? What is its structure?

4. What is the difference between soft and hard news?

5. What is the broadcasting component of a news channel?

Practical Tasks

Task 1.Listen to Audio Track 7.1 and Audio Track 7.2 (Folder Unit 7) to get the general idea of the material.

What is the media focus in Audio Track 7.1 and in Audio Track 7.2? If there is any difference, why is it so?

Task 2. Listen to Audio Track 7.1and transcribe the first sentence of each headline.

Write down the countries and organisations in the media spotlight.

Task 3.Listen to Audio Track 7.1again.

1. Determine the three key words of Headline No 1.

2. What organisations are mentioned in Headlines No 2 and No 3. Recall the events they refer to.

3. What is the general idea of Headline No 4 and No 5?. Try to identify the key word in each headline.

Task 4.Study the word boxes below.

The final salary scheme – the amount of one’s pension on his retirement is equal to his last salary in work.

Labour peer – a member of the Labour party elevated to peerage for his service to the nation. He is entitled to sit in the House of Lords as life peer.

First Minister – a post set up in the process of devolution. Equals to the UK Prime Minister but relates to the UK four constituent parts.

(British) Commonwealth Games – sporting event held every four years by the British Commonwealth countries. In 2010 India and in 2014 Scotland hosted the Games.

Task 5.Listen to Audio Track 7.2and transcribe it. What events are in the spotlight?

Task 6.Study the realia in the box below. Watch Video 7.1 (Unit 7) and transcribe it.

Shadow Cabinet the Tories Shadow Chancellor

News bulletin featured in Video 7.1 went on air on the same day as bulletins in Audio Track 7.1 and Audio Track 7.2. Is there any difference in television and radio news coverage? If so, what is it?

Task 7. What is the difference in news headlinesof Video 7.1 and Audio Track 7.2?

Task 8.Make sure you know the word combinations and names in the box.

to run amok (amuck) to make gains for good

Big Apple Nick Clegg

Task 9.Watch Videos 7.2 and7.3 and transcribe them. What events does each video predominantly focus on?

Task 10.Watch Videos 7.1 – 7.3 again and fill in the grid below with appropriate headlines. Only twoof the three news channels (BBC World News, EuroNews, Sky News)feature the headline in question at a time.

Task 11.Headlines of what channel are most difficult to understand, in your view? Why is it the case?

Task 12. Watch Video 7.4and transcribe it.

Task 13. Answer the questions below.

1. In what way are Video 7.4 and Video 7.3 similar?

2. What is the top headline of each video clip?

Task 14. Having worked with Video 7.4 and Video 7.3, prove that any news bulletin is presented in a form of an inverted pyramid.

Compare the structure of the sentences and their grammar in both videos. What conclusions do you come to?

Task 15. Listen to Audio Track 7.3 and transcribe it. Be ready to compare its content with Video 7.2.

Task 16. Fill in the grid below with headlines of Video 7.2 and Audio Track 7.3 highlighting the same events.

Task 17. Analyse the difference in the wording of television and radio news scripts (Video 7.2, Audio Track 7.3). What conclusion do you come to?

Poverty affects grades less among non-white children with social divide noticeable from primary school

Jessica Shepherd

A child’s social class is more likely to determine how well they perform in school if they are white than if they come from an ethnic minority, researchers have discovered. The gap between the proportion of working-class pupils and middle-class pupils who achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE is largest among white pupils, academics found.

They analysed official data showing thousands of teenagers’ grades between 2003 and 2007. Some 31% of white pupils on free school meals – a key indicator of poverty – achieve five A* to Cs, compared with 63% of white pupils not eligible for free school meals, they found. This gap between social classes – of 32 percentage points – is far higher for white pupils than for other ethnic groups.

For Bangladeshi pupils, the gap is seven percentage points, while for Chinese pupils it is just five percentage points, the researchers discovered.

The study – Ethnicity and class: GCSE performance – argues that one of the reasons why class determines how white pupils perform at school is that white working-class parents may have lower expectations of their children than working-class parents from other ethnic groups.

Researchers from the University of Warwick analysed the scores of pupils living in the south London borough of Lambeth. White children from well-off homes were the top-performing ethnic group at the age of 11, while white pupils eligible for free school meals had among the worst test results.

“More recent immigrant groups, such as the Portuguese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities often see education as the way out of the poverty they have come from. By contrast, if you’ve been in a white working-class family for three generations, with high unemployment, you don’t necessarily believe that education is going to change that,” says the study.

The Guardian, September 3, 2010

Task 19.WatchVideo 7. 5 and answer the questions.

1. What is the general idea of the clip? Transcribe a sentence of the report to highlight the social problem in the media focus.

2. What ethnicities are mentioned in the report? How successful are they academically?

3. How is the UK government trying to tackle the issue?

4. What conclusion does the journalist come to?

5. How does the article in Task 18 and Video 7. 5 correlate? Write out similar pieces of information (in sentences) out of the two media reports.

Task 19.WatchVideo 7. 6 and say what is the general idea of the clip.

Task 20.WatchVideo 7.6 again. Answer the questions.

1. What broadcaster is in the media focus? What news channel does it own?

2. What other broadcasters are also mentioned in the clip?

3. How many customers does the broadcaster have today compared with the late 1980s?

4. What does the day of 05.02.1989 mean for Britain’s news media?

5. What was the joke of the day back in the late 1980s regarding news television?

Task 21.WatchVideo 7.6 and fill in the gaps in the pieces below.

1. Sky’s …1…, …2…and …3… are also attracting customers to …4… …5… as well as …6… and …7… …8… . What they have is a …9… …10… and …11…, what they don’t have is control of Sky’s crown jewels – the rights to live …12… …13… football matches. And the worry for is that in future the …14… , OffCOM wants Sky to share.

But this analyst believes that the biggest threat to Sky’s fututre success is the …15….

2. – A couple of years ago video and Internet was fuzzy …1… …2… clips, not very compelling. Now we have the …3… …4…, 4OD and several others which is beginning …5… reasonable experience. We’are going forward. We’re gonna have …5-7… , …8… …9… , we’ll be able …10… in HD. At that point any company can become …11-13… .

Unit 8

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 715