The passage mentions the British Book Award that the Harry Potter series have
won. If interested, read more about literary awards in America and Britain.
National Book Awards are annual awards given to books of the highest quality written by Americans and published by American publishers. The process begins when publishers submit selected books to compete in several categories, chiefly fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Winners are chosen by five-member panels selected for each genre; they receive a $10,000 cash award and a crystal sculpture. Awards are also intermittently given for children's literature, autobiography, first novel, and other categories.
Booker Prize,in full Man Booker Prize , formerly Booker McConnell Prizeis aprestigious British award given annually to a full-length novel; those eligible (èìåþùèé ïðàâî) include English-language writers from the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth countries, the Republic of Ireland, and South Africa. The award is administered by the Book Trust. In 1992 the Booker Russian Novel Prize was set up to reward contemporary Russian authors, to stimulate wider knowledge of modern Russian fiction, and to encourage translation and publication of Russian fiction outside Russia.
Whitbread Book Award- any of a series of literary awards given to writers resident in the United Kingdom and Ireland for books published there in the previous year. Established in 1971 and sponsored by the British corporation Whitbread PLC, the awards are given annually and are administered by the British Booksellers Association.
Awards are given in five categories (novel, first novel, poetry, biography, and children's); in addition, from these winners one is chosen the Whitbread Book of the Year. A prize purse of £50,000 is shared among the winners.
GETTING PROFESSIONAL
Act out a teacher-class session giving a short talk about the author and her books.
²Listening comprehension
As is known, to become an established writer one needs talent, hard work and some
Good luck. The story you are going to listen to is about someone who might be called
‘a failed writer’ Look at the words you will hear in the story and make sure you
understand them. The story is called His Last Chance
A theatre manager, to settle the matter once and for all, to introduce one’s work to
the boards (here, to put on the work as a play in a theatre), a snowstorm, to tear
smth up
Can you make any predictions about the plot of the story? Discuss it with your
Partner.
123 Now listen to the story just once and say why it is called His Last Chance.
Listen to the story again and retell it in the name of
· the theatre manager
· the failed writer
· an actor or actress who might have heard the story
124 Reading comprehension test
WHEEL OF FORTUNE
Emma Duncan discusses the potential effects on the entertainment industry of the digital revolution
A
Since moving pictures were invented a century ago, a new way of distributing entertainment to consumers has emerged about once every generation. Each such innovation has changed the industry irreversibly; each has been accompanied by a period of fear mixed with exhilaration. The arrival of digital technology, which translates music, pictures and text into zeros and ones of computer languages, marks one of those periods.
B
This may sound familiar, because the digital revolution, and the explosion of choice that would go with it, has been heralded for some time. In 1992, John Malone, chief executive of TCI, an American cable giant, welcomed the ‘500-channel universe’. Digital television was about to deliver everything except pizzas to people’s living rooms. When the entertainment companies tried out the technology, it worked fine – but not at a price that people were prepared to pay.
C
Those 500 channels eventually arrived but via the Internet and the PC rather than through television. The digital revolution was starting to affect the entertainment business in unexpected way. Eventually it will change every aspect of it, from the way cartoons are made to the way films are screened to the way people buy music. That much is clear. What nobody is sure of is how it will affect the economics of the business.
D
New technologies always contain within them both threats and opportunities. They have the potential both to make the companies in the business a great deal richer, and to sweep them away. Old companies always fear new technology. Hollywood was hostile to television, television
terrified by the VCR. Go back far enough, points out Hal Varian, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, and you find publishers complaining that ‘circulating libraries’ would cannibalise their sales. Yet whenever a new technology has come in, it has made more money for existing entertainment companies. The proliferation of the means of distribution results, gratifyingly, in the proliferation of dollars, pounds, pesetas and the rest to pay for it.
E
All the same, there is something in the old companies’ fears. New technologies may not threaten their lives, but they usually change their role. Once television became widespread, film and radio stopped being the staple form of entertainment. Cable television has undermined the power of the broadcasters. And as power has shifted the movie studios, the radio companies and the television broadcasters have been swallowed up. These days, the grand old names of entertainment have more resonance than power. Paramount is part of Viacom, a cable company; MGM, once the roaring lion of Hollywood, has been reduced to a whisper because it is not part of one of the giants. And RCA, once the most important broadcasting company in the world, is now a recording label belonging to Bertelsmann, a large German entertainment company.
F
Part of the reason why incumbents got pushed aside was that they did not see what was coming. But they also faced a tighter regulatory environment than the present one. In America, laws preventing television broadcasters from owning programme companies were repealed earlier this decade, allowing the creation of vertically integrated businesses. Greater freedom, combined with a sense of history, prompted the smarter companies in the entertainment business to re-invent themselves. They saw what happened to those of their predecessors who were stuck with one form of distribution. So, these days, the powers in the entertainment business are no longer movie studios, or television broadcasters, or publishers; all those businesses have become part of bigger businesses still, companies that can both create content and distribute it in a range of different ways.
G
Out of all this, seven huge entertainment companies have emerged – Time Warner, Walt Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom, News Corp, Seagram and Sony. They cover pretty well every bit of entertainment business except pornography. Three are American one is Australian, one Canadian, one German and one Japanese. ‘What you are seeing,’ says Christopher Dixon, managing director of media research at PaineWebber, a stockbroker, ‘ is the creation of a global oligopoly. It happed to the oil and automotive businesses earlier this century; now it is happening to the entertainment business.’ It remains to be seen whether the latest technology will weaken those great companies, or make them stronger than ever.
A. Which paragraph mentions the following questions (1-8)? Write the
