Give the character sketches of Choupette, Henry, Charles.

THE SWIMMERS

1. Find word combinations in the text, translate them, recall the situations in which they were used and make up a dialogue using them:

to concentrate on the matter a process of ceaseless adaptation in regard to to rattle back to whip oneself up into a temper to be homesick to get divorce evidence to feel a little paunchy to talk straight from the shoulder to furnish weapons to let smb. drift to swim off one’s weight to be full of silly fads

2. Find English variant in the story:

1) В июньском солнце над площадью Бенуа медленно курилась взвешенная масса паров бензина. 2) Дрожь Генри Марстона усилилась, его стало трясти. 3) Генри почтительно слушал, но в это утро он никак не мог сконцентрироваться на деле. 4) Румяное лицо, обрамленное седыми волосами, на мгновение показалось таким добрым; затем оно как бы поблекло. 5) Юноша, вытащивший из воды девушку, быстро привел ее в чувство, - но гораздо больше времени пришлось провозиться с Генри, который наглотался воды – ведь никогда не учился плавать. 6) Маленькие волны стремительно напрыгнули и зашатали его, и мальчики завизжали от восторга. 7) Генри слегка постарел, его лицо стало чуточку жестче. Костюм в белую полоску не мог скрыть незначительной полноты.

3. Give transcription and pronounce all these words:

plutocrats, evolve, etherize, psychiatrist, defiant, caste, veld, frown, vagary, chauffeur, deprecatingly, debutante, apprentice, buoy, farrago, profusely, insurmountable, stowaways.

4. Translate the sentences into Russian:

1) She was a frail Latin blonde with fine large features and vividly sad French eyes that had first fascinated Henry in a Grenoble pension in1918. 2) So, at St. Jean de Luz they sat on the shore instead, and watched the English and Americans and a few hardly French pioneers of le sport voyage between raft and diving tower, motorboat and sand. 3) Looking for a last time into her eyes, full of cool secrets, he realized how much he was going to miss these mornings, without knowing whether it was the girl who interested him or what she represented of his ever-knew, ever-changing country. 4) After a while the sea got to be that very blue colour of four o’clock and the girl told him how, at nineteen, she had been divorced from a Spaniard who locked her in the hotel suite when he went out at night. 5) He had come home as to a generous mother and had been profusely given more than he asked – money, release from intolerable situation, and the fresh strength to fight for his own.

5. Translate the extract:

When difficulties became insurmountable, inevitable, Henry sought surcease in exercise. For three years, swimming had been a sort of refuge, and he turned to it as one man to music or another to drink. There was a point when he would resolutely stop thinking and go to the Virginia coast for a week to wash his mind in the water. Far out past the breakers he could survey the green-and-brown line of the Old Dominion with the pleasant impersonality of a porpoise. The burden of his wretched marriage fell away with the buoyant tumble of his body among the swells, and he would begin to move in a child's dream of space. Sometimes remembered playmates of his youth swam with him; sometimes, with his two sons beside him, he seemed to be setting off along the bright pathway to the moon. Americans, he liked to say, should be born with fins, and perhaps they were--perhaps money was a form of fin. In England property begot a strong place sense, but Americans, restless and with shallow roots, needed fins and wings. There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.

Give the character sketches of Choupette, Henry, Charles.

7. Answer the questions:

1. What was the reason of Henry’s illness? Who took care after him? 2) Where did Henry go with his family and why? 3) What happened once on the beach? 4) Why made Henry decide to learn to swim? 5) Who taught him to swim? 6) What did this girl think about the water when she was swimming? 7) What was Wiese? What kind of relations were between Choupette and Charles? 8) Why did Choupette want her children? 9) What were they talking about in the boat? What was the result of this talk? 10) Under what circumstances did Henry meet the girl he had tried to escape some years before? 11) What is the role of money in people’s described in this story? 12) Comment on the title of the story.

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