Analysis “Three Men in a Boat”.

The author of this text is Jerome K. Jerome. He is a popular English writer. The most famous works are Three Men in a Boat, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, Novel Notes and Three Men on the Bummel which belong to the end of 19^th century and the beginning of 20^th century. He is famous for his art of story-telling and his humour which is based on misunderstanding. He is good at revealing the weak sides of human nature.

This extract is about three men who decided to cook an Irish stew. They began cooking from peeling the potatoes. They threw another products which they wished to get rid of and mixed all carefully. At the end Montmorency bought fresh caught water-rat. After some discussions these three men decided to try something new and added the rat. Eventually, they were very happy by their cook masterpiece.

By this text the author wanted to tell us that it had better to try something new than to be indifferent and do everything as usual. People ought to develop in this case world progress would go ahead.

Jerome presents his story as 1^st-person narration with descriptive passages. This extract may be divided into the following parts. The first one is a description of Sonning. The second is decision of cooking an Irish stew. The third is Montmorency’s contribution to the dinner. The last one is about great success of Irish stew. This text is written with the cheerful, humorous, emotional and optimistic prevailing mod.

The author used in this text a lot of lexical and stylistic devices which helped to create the needful atmosphere. In the description of Sonning Jerome used metaphor: they (roses) were bursting forth in clouds of dainty splendour; simile: it is more like a stage village than one built of bricks and mortar; epithets: veritable picture, quaint rooms, winding passages, splendid opportunity, a slap-up supper, sweet Sonning. The author underlines his own attitude towards the village, he conveys his positive emotions to the reader.

Moreover, Jerome used polysyndetonwith help of connectives: with low quaint rooms and latticed windows and awkward stairs and winding passages; with the vegetables and the remains of the cold beef and general odds and ends; all bumps and warts and hollows and so on. He used these enumerations to increase the comic effect.

The author added also asyndeton. It is the sentence which is equal a paragraph in the text. The author described the climax when Montmorency brought a dead water-rat. The author kept the reader in suspense using the sentence where the connectives are deliberately omitted.

In addition, Jerome used hyperbole: the potato-scrapings in which Harris and I stood, half-smothered, could have come off four potatoes. He used a deliberate overstatement to reveal the humour of situation.

Moreover, he also used irony: It’s men such as you the hamper the world’s progress. One’s palate gets so tired of the old hackneyed things; similes: Montmorency evidently wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; a taste like nothing else on earth; gravy was a poem;

All these language means reveal the author’s manner, his style of writing. He renders his feeling and thoughts with epithets, similes, metaphors and so on.

In conclusion, it is worth adding that the author shows us the weak sides of people in such humorous manner.

TEXT 14

Book Attempts to Make Sense of Globalization Debate

By JOHN DELLA CONTRADA
Contributing Editor

Globalization is trumpeted by some and demonized by others as a pathway to either unprecedented global prosperity or increased poverty, among other benefits and ills. A new book by a UB law professor attempts to make sense of the debate and forge a new era of understanding by examining the powerful cultural and political implications of a force that is transforming the way we live and view the world.

In "City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent," David A. Westbrook, associate professor in the Law School, argues that "markets not nations" have become the dominant form of global governance. And while the emergence of globalization has created its own set of problems—including the fact that people and governments have yet to fully grasp what it means to live in a "globalized" world—Westbrook says globalization has achieved its primary goal: It has successfully stunted the emergence of aggressive, militarized nationalism, as was practiced by Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States prior to World War II.

In Westbrook's view, globalization is not a recent phenomenon, as is commonly described, but rather is more than 50 years old, set in motion by political decisions made in the aftermath of World War II. "Globalization was adopted for essentially political reasons because the nation-state—as exemplified most perfectly by Hitler's Germany—had become simply too dangerous," he explains. "Globalization limits the creation of this type of power by fragmenting institutions' and peoples' ways of looking at the world," he adds. "If we have a fragmented and overlapping set of affiliations, we can't—as we did prior to World War II—create a world in which large militaries, large economies and large politically mobilized populations all meet at the Rhine."

According to Westbrook, when economies are radically dependent on events in other parts of the world, and when people have contacts across political and geographic lines—through travel, marriage, work, etc.—it becomes difficult to build the militarized nation-states that gave rise to World War II. "Prevention of future wars required suppression of nationalism," Westbrook writes in "City of Gold." "The vehicle for such suppression was economic integration. So we integrated Europe and globalized much of the world," he explains. "As a result, marketplace activity should be seen not as social relations that are opposed or ancillary to politics, but as political activities in their own right. Much of our politics today is done through markets."

The concepts of "nation building" proposed for Kosovo and Iraq are modern examples of how the process of globalization restricts the growth of militarized nation states, Westbrook points out. "By 'nation building' we don't mean creation of independent nations that are free to go to war," he says. "We mean creating nations where people have profound economic and cultural attachments that transcend geographic borders, which limits the ability to create a focused military machine that can inundate its neighbors."

The emergence of globalization, however, has outpaced our understanding of what it means to live in such a world, Westbrook says. "We're aware that we are going through a transformation, but we're not very good at articulating what we mean by globalization," Westbrook says. "We've had a difficult time thinking about what it means to live in a world in which we understand our political relationships to be market relationships.

TEXT 15.

WONDER WOMEN

(Profiles of leading female CEOs and business executives)

1. Judith Regan, Publisher . Growing up on Long Island, Regan earned a BA in English from Vassar College. In the late 1970s, she studied voice and worked as a secretary before becoming a reporter for the National Enquirer. In 1987 Regan proposed a book on American families and their role models to Simon & Schuster. The editors were impressed, and she joined Simon & Schuster, developing a string of best-selling celebrity "tell-all" books, including those by talk show host Rush Limbaugh and radio personality Howard Stern. Her aggressive, sales-oriented approach was highly successful, but critics charged she was undermining publishing by manufacturing personality-driven books. In 1994 Rupert Murdoch gave Regan her own imprint at HarperCollins, ReganBooks, and a TV show on Fox News.

2. Carleton "Carly" Fiorina, Former President & CEO, Hewlett-Packard Company. H-P, the world's second-largest computer maker, is ranked #13 on the Fortune 500 list. This former AT&T employee was already crowned the most powerful woman in American business by Fortune magazine before joining HP. Fiorina moved around a lot as a kid and spent time at high schools in Ghana, England, and the United States. She graduated with honors from Stanford where she studied medieval history and philosophy, and then went on to law school at UCLA. After two weeks she knew following her dad's footsteps into the law field would not make her happy and she dropped out. Breaking the news to her dad (a federal court judge) was one of the hardest things she's ever had to do, she said. In 1980, at age 25 she landed an entry-level job with AT&T and steadily rose through the ranks until finally landing atop Lucent.

3. Andrea Jung, President & CEO, Avon Products. Avon is the world's leading direct seller of beauty and related products which are sold in 135 countries with sales of $5.2 billion worldwide. It was ranked #312 on the Fortune 500 list. Jung's road to the top of Avon was paved with persistence. Passed over for the CEO position in 1997, Jung was promoted in 1999 and has since energized the company with her retail experience and acclaimed marketing wizardry. Jung attended Princeton, majoring in English literature, and graduated magna cum laude in 1979. Her remarkable retailing career began at Bloomingdale's when she joined the company's management trainee program. Jung began her career at Avon as a consultant before signing on full-time in 1994. Despite her leadership in the company's global marketing initiatives as a COO, the vacant CEO position went to Charles R. Perrin, a former Duracell International executive who had no cosmetics experience. Today Jung is sitting on top of this unique Fortune 500 company with more women in management positions than any other. In fact, half of Avon's board of directors are women.

4. Patricia Russo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Lucent Technologies. When AT&T spun off its Bell Labs systems and technologies division as Lucent Technologies, Patricia Russo was one of the people guiding the new company through its birth pangs. She joined AT&T in 1981 and her success in restructuring a wobbly Business Communications Systems division into the new company Avaya, Inc. in 1989 paved the way for her role in Lucent's own spin off in 1996. She took a brief detour (less than a year) as president and chief operating officer of Eastman Kodak but returned to take over Lucent as CEO in 2002 and then became chairman in 2003.When she took over Lucent in 2002, the company's share price was a dismal $1. She promised a return to profitability by the end of 2003, a promise kept through cost cutting, staff reduction, and cutting retiree benefits. The four quarters of 2004 also showed an increase but the stock price slacked off in 2005. Irate stockholders voted in 2006 to tie executive pay with performance. In 2005, Russo's compensation package was $1.2 million salary, $1.95 million bonus, and $8.7 million in stock options and restricted stock.

TEXT 16.

Paper recycling

Paper is different from other waste produce because it comes from a sustainable resource: trees. Unlike the minerals and oil used to make plastics and metals, trees are replaceable. Paper is also biodegradable, so it does not pose as much threat to the environment when it is discarded. While 45 out of every 100 tonnes of wood fibre used to make paper in Australia comes from waste paper, the rest comes directly from virgin fibre from forests and plantations. By world standards this is a good performance since the world-wide average is 33 per cent waste paper. Governments have encouraged waste paper collection and sorting schemes and at the same time, the paper industry has responded by developing new recycling technologies that have paved the way for even greater utilisation of used fibre. As a result, industry’s use of recycled fibres is expected to increase at twice the rate of virgin fibre over the coming years.

Already, waste paper constitutes 70% of paper used for packaging and advances in the technology required to remove ink from the paper have allowed a higher recycled content in newsprint and writing paper. To achieve the benefits of recycling, the community must also contribute. We need to accept a change in the quality of paper products; for example stationery may be less white and of a rougher texture. There also needs to be support from the community for waste paper collection programs. Not only do we need to make the paper available to collectors but it also needs to be separated into different types and sorted from contaminants such as staples, paperclips, string and other miscellaneous items.

There are technical limitations to the amount of paper which can be recycled and some paper products cannot be collected for re-use. These include paper in the form of books and permanent records, photographic paper and paper which is badly contaminated. The four most common sources of paper for recycling are factories and retail stores which gather large amounts of packaging material in which goods are delivered, also offices which have unwanted business documents and computer output, paper converters and printers and lastly households which discard newspapers and packaging material. The paper manufacturer pays a price for the paper and may also incur the collection cost.

Once collected, the paper has to be sorted by hand by people trained to recognise various types of paper. This is necessary because some types of paper can only be made from particular kinds of recycled fibre. The sorted paper then has to be repulped or mixed with water and broken down into its individual fibres. This mixture is called stock and may contain a wide variety of contaminating materials, particularly if it is made from mixed waste paper which has had little sorting. Various machinery is used to remove other materials from the stock. After passing through the repulping process, the fibres from printed waste paper are grey in colour because the printing ink has soaked into the individual fibres. This recycled material can only be used in products where the grey colour does not matter, such as cardboard boxes but if the grey colour is not acceptable, the fibres must be de-inked. This involves adding chemicals such as caustic soda or other alkalis, soaps and detergents, water-hardening agents such as calcium chloride, frothing agents and bleaching agents. Before the recycled fibres can be made into paper they must be refined or treated in such a way that they bond together.

Most paper products must contain some virgin fibre as well as recycled fibres and unlike glass, paper cannot be recycled indefinitely. Most paper is down-cycled which means that a product made from recycled paper is of an inferior quality to the original paper. Recycling paper is beneficial in that it saves some of the energy, labour and capital that goes into producing virgin pulp. However, recycling requires the use of fossil fuel, a non-renewable energy source, to collect the waste paper from the community and to process it to produce new paper. And the recycling process still creates emissions which require treatment before they can be disposed of safely. Nevertheless, paper recycling is an important economical and environmental practice but one which must be carried out in a rational and viable manner for it to be useful to both industry and the community.

TEXT 17.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 9622