План работы IV курса (первый язык) по аспекту
общего языка в марте-апреле 2008-2009 учебного года
1. Базовый учебник: «Английский для будущих дипломатов» Зелтынь Е.М., Легкодух Г.П
The Future is Now / Challenges of the 21st Century
Basic Course Book
Unit 18 Fears of Tomorrow
Unit 19 A New Century Beckons
Unit 24 Our built-in Moral Senses the Basic we Should go back to
Unit 45 The end of heroism
Home Reading Class: “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury
Additional File
Read the text. Say what in the author’s opinion is particularly dystopian about the global prospects for the coming years. Do you personally share any of the author’s predictions?
November 2012: a dystopian dream
By Gideon Rachman
February 16 2009 19:27
On both sides of the Atlantic, senior officials are issuing dire warnings about global political turmoil. In the US, Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, says instability produced by the economic crisis is now the biggest short-term threat to US national security. In Britain, Ed Balls, a cabinet minister, argues that the financial crisis is “more serious” than that of the 1930s, adding cheerfully: “And we all remember how the politics of that era were shaped by the economy.”
All this is alarming – but also rather vague. So how might world politics look in four years’ time? Something like this, perhaps . . .
It is November,7 2012. At three in the morning, an exhausted-looking President Barack Obama appears before weeping supporters in the ballroom of the Chicago Hilton and concedes defeat. The euphoria of his victory-night speech in Grant Park four years earlier is a distant memory. The Obama administration has been overwhelmed by America’s economic problems. Sarah Palin is the new president of the US.
Elected on a ticket of populism at home and nationalism overseas, President-elect Palin starts to take congratulatory phone calls from foreign leaders. First on the line is Avigdor Lieberman, the prime minister of Israel; then comes President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Five different leaders claiming to speak in the name of the European Union try to place calls – but they are all put on hold. As for the Chinese leadership, the new president is not speaking to them. How could she, after she has campaigned against the “communist currency manipulators of Beijing”?
The Chinese have resisted the temptation to call Mrs Palin a “capitalist running dog”. But Maoist language is creeping back into Chinese official discourse, as the country struggles to adjust to the collapse and closure of its export markets. Alarmed by the large number of unemployed in the cities, the Communist party has abandoned plans to privatise rural land and invested heavily in public works in the countryside and new collective farms. This policy is swiftly dubbed “the Great Leap backwards”.
The world event that had most damaged Mr Obama was Iran’s successful test of a nuclear weapon in 2011. The Republicans had hammered home their message that Mr Obama was “a second Jimmy Carter”, who had been duped by hopes of striking a grand bargain with Iran.
The Iranian nuclear test had also driven Israeli politics even further to the right and set the stage for the rise of Mr Lieberman. His campaign slogan in the 2011 election – “bomb them while they are on the toilet” – was borrowed from Mr Putin and chanted gleefully by Mr Lieberman’s Russian-speaking supporters.
Mr Obama had successfully delivered on his campaign promise to get America out of Iraq. But by 2012, the voters were taking that for granted. Nato’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan had, however, damaged him. The US and its allies had left behind a country run by a patchwork of more or less co-operative warlords. The new anti-terror strategy was officially called “watch and strike”, and unofficially dubbed “whack a mole”. It involved monitoring potential terrorist camps from a distance and bombing them.
Mr Putin had said that he had no intention of gloating about Afghanistan, before adding: “But the age of American arrogance is over.”
By 2010, Mr Putin was safely installed back in the Kremlin. The gravity of Russia’s economic crisis had led the official media to clamour for a return to strong leadership. President Dmitry Medvedev had taken the hint in early 2010 and stepped aside.
In 2011, the unstable democratic governments in Ukraine and Georgia had fallen, after weeks of popular unrest. The Russians were suspected of orchestrating events but nobody could prove anything. The Americans and Europeans had protested – but only feebly.
After the fall of the Merkel government in 2009, Germany was governed by a succession of unstable coalitions and forgettable chancellors. The hope that had accompanied the election of David Cameron as Britain’s prime minister, under the slogan “let the sunshine in”, had swiftly disappeared. The hapless Mr Cameron was now the most unpopular prime minister in British history.
This left President Nicolas Sarkozy of France as the dominant figure in the EU. His divorce from Carla Bruni and marriage to Madonna had only briefly distracted him.
Mr Sarkozy had weathered the denunciations that followed his decision in 2010 formally to withdraw France from the EU’s regimes on competition and state aid. All main French banks and industrial conglomerates were instructed to make 90 per cent of their investments at home. Mr Sarkozy’s move was widely denounced across the EU – but then equally widely imitated.
At home, the French president was under pressure to go even further in a nationalist direction from his main political opponents – “the postman and the housewife”, otherwise known as Olivier Besancenot, a Trotskyite, and Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front. Ms Le Pen cited the rise of Sarah Palin as an inspiration.
As the morning of November 7 wore on, President Palin herself took to the stage in Anchorage, Alaska. Her supporters cheered and waved ice hockey sticks. “I’ve got a message for the mullahs and the commies,” she roared: “America is back.”
Ex. 1 Сhoose words / word combinations that collocate with each of the following verbs:
concede, resist, strike, set, deliver. Translate these collocations into Russian
independence
a baby
the watch forward
defeat
the table
land to the enemy
a good / bad example
the pace
a goal
the temptation
a speech
a chord
one's hopes on smb. / smth
the flag
the stage
a blow
at the rights of every citizen
terror into his enemies
a match
the eye
on promise
fire
a bargain
from slavery
Ex.2 Read the article and then look at the statements below. Agree or disagree with the opinions in the text. Underline the part of the text that gave you your answer.
Changing Attitudes and Trends
The past 40 years have seen astounding developments: globalisation, the end of the Cold War, the Internet. The next 40 years may bring even more profound changes. In order to predict the future we must first examine the past. Historians see history as being driven by a combination of cumulative long-term trends and short to mid-term cycles, each of which contains the seeds of a subsequent but familiar situation. There have been many projections about the future which, with the benefit of hindsight, seem rather ridiculous. Who can forget the predictions about the Y2K bug when commentators believed that societies would collapse and satellites would fall from the sky? Unfortunately, as a result, many people today are more sceptical about current predictions concerning global warming.
One of the few areas in which long-term trends can be clearly seen is demographic statistics. These indicate that the population of the world will increase to about eight billion in 2026 and continue to rise to nine billion by 2050, after which it will flatten out. Some societies have birth rates that are already locking their populations into absolute decline. Not only will the populations of each of these societies dwindle, but an increasing proportion will be moving into old age, when they are less productive and use more health resources. However, the weakness of all such predictions is that humans meddle with their own history. Predictions about the future affect how humans act or plan today and ultimately how events unfold. The challenge is to pick the trends that are likely to be prolonged, but to also factor in human influence.
· A cycle is usually repeated at some time in the future.
· We can look back and understand past predictions.
· Past predictions have caused people to firmly believe in current predictions
· Population figures can be predicted quite accurately.
· Some countries are predicted to experience a total decline in population
· The percentage of elderly people will dwindle in some countries
· Elderly people work less
· To make accurate predictions we need to take into account the effect people have on their environment.
Look at the words in bold in the eight statements and find the words or phrases in the text that are similar in meaning, or the opposite. The first one has been done for you
in the future - subsequent
Read the text and comment on the author’s statement “To understand that things happen you have to understand that things vanish”.
Bruce Sterling - Prophet and loss
By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News 13/03/2009
The difficulty with interviewing Bruce Sterling is knowing where to start. His interests range from literature and design culture, to futurism, political activism, micro and macro economics, technology and 11th Century writers.
Perhaps the simplest starting point would be: The future? Explain. But Sterling does not speak in handy, journalist-friendly soundbites and rejects the notion of being a prophet. Instead he speaks as he writes, launching verbal hand grenades packed densely with ideas, answers and counter questions.
"I am a cult author; I don't write for the vast hamburger-eating, seething masses. I try to plant mind bombs - do the most damage," he tells me. He is the author of 10 novels, many short stories and is one of the most interesting, magpie bloggers of the modern-day techno-infused culture.
Forward facing
Along with writers such as William Gibson and Pat Cadigan, he drove the take-up of the cyberpunk literary genre which both fomented and predicted contemporary society's heady mix of technology and culture. But he is worried that his novel-writing days may soon be at an end.
"I am not sure I am going to be allowed to do it. American publishing is in distress. The book stores are going, the big centralised publishers are very heavily indebted and they are small sections of the centralised American media apparatus that have lost social credibility."
He adds: "People don't pay attention to novels. The socially important parts of American communication are not taking part in novels. You can write them but they are not changing public discourse. "You can also say that everybody in society has moved up a notch and everybody just wants the executive summary."
Despite cyberpunk's prescience Sterling does not want to cast himself as a prophet. In his 1988 novel Islands in the Net he wrote of off-shore global terrorist groups, of de-localised, networked corporations, and of computers becoming fashion items. "If you read a piece of science fiction that is very accurate about future developments it makes you unhappy. When you read these books you wonder why nothing was done about these problems if you were able to predict them. "It gives you a sense of helplessness." But he adds: "There's a clear social need for someone willing to predict the future. People really need prophets in the same way they need faith healers and witch doctors." But he warns that looking to these prophets "doesn't galvanise people; it doesn't change their behaviour".
Sterling is not looking to produce manifestos of the future to try and corral people into making change, despite his strong activist feelings around issues such as the global economy and climate change. He says: "I like ideas as abstract constructs. I don't fancy myself as political organiser. "I am too literary and poetic to be an organiser or rabble rouser. I am an attention philanthropist, always pointing to stuff other people are doing."
Science fiction, he says, has as much relevance in today's world of seemingly relentless scientific endeavour across many different fields as it did in the past when the perception of the pace of change was arguably slower.
One of the recurring themes of Sterling's blog is obsolete media. It is a thread in his novels too: In one scene of Islands in the Net the female protagonist trips on a half-buried video recorder, a relic of the past. "I am not an industrialist. But it's up to me to talk about the loss. The future is obsolescence in reverse. And obsolescence is a big part of maturity.
"To understand that things happen you have to understand that things vanish. A lot of it deserves to be gone forever, but not all of it. I am especially worried that things disappear in thoughtless fashion."
Brainstorm to answer the following questions: What are the advantages and the disadvantages of living in a big city? What amenities should a city offer its residents and commuters? Are you happy to be living in a big city? Give your personal reasons