Practical Tasks

Task 1. VideoFolder Structure (Unit 1) contains 10 video clips that reflect structural parts of the news article carried by British quality and popular papers. Watch the clips and:

- identify all structural parts of the article you see in the clip (a headline / a caption, a lead, a by-line, a subhead) and write them down;

- translate into Russian the headlines and captions you see in the clips.

Task 2. Watch Video 1.1, Video 1.2 and Video 1.3 (Unit 1) and answer the questions listed below.

1. What is the difference between Video 1.1 and Video 1.2?

2. What is the difference between Video 1.2 and Video 1.3?

3. Name the papers featured in Video 1.3.

4. What papers are published exclusively on Sunday in the UK?

5. What event do British papers highlight in Video 1.2?

Task 3. Watch Video 1. 4 and answer the questions.

1. What papers are featured in the video?

2. What countries are the papers published in?

3. What is the name of the British paper not mentioned in this Unit? Is it a quality paper or a tabloid?

4. What do the British papers in the clip concentrate on?

Task 4. Below go the extracts and full texts of newspaper articles.

1. Read the articles, determine their genre.

2. Translate the articles’ headlines and their subheads into Russian.

3. Outline the articles’ idea in two sentences.

4. Translate the words in italics into Russian. What group of lexis are they?

Article A. Cuba stubs out cigarette rations for older people

Government to end monthly handouts of heavily subsidised cigarettes

to over-54s as part of attempts to revive economy

Sam Jones

Cuba’s more mature cigarette smokers will soon discover that economics is no respecter of borders, trade embargoes or even vices.

From next month the Cuban government will cease its monthly handouts of four packs of heavily subsidised cigarettes to around 2.5 million Cubans over the age of 54. The measure has not been prompted by concerns for the health of the island’s senior citizens. Cuban authorities describe it as another measure aimed at jump-starting the spluttering economy.

“The council of ministers has resolved to eliminate cigarettes from the rationed family basket as of September as part of the measures gradually being adopted to limit state subsidies,” read an official statement. Cigarettes, it went on, “are not a primary necessity.”

The president, Raúl Castro, has said the communist country’s ration system will eventually be eliminated as part of plans to modernise the economy. Monthly allotments of chickpeas, potatoes and a pound of sugar were removed from the system this year, and many subsidised items were cut in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged the island into a deep recession. But allotments of inexpensive cigarettes for Cubans born before 1956 had until now been kept in place.

The Guardian, August 26, 2010

Article B. Labour’s leader is not the problem.

The party’s missing soul is

Zoe Williams

The debonair, metropolitan response to Thursday’s crushing defeat for Labour is to wonder who they’ll pick as their new leader. Come on, depression is for losers; pep yourself up with an opinion or two about whether Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper will take the party in a more marketable direction.

“Labour should search its soul before it searches for a new leader,” wrote Neal Lawson, from Compass. “Any wannabe Labour leader should stand down so the party can understand why it lost before it can decide how it might win”. Although I agreed, I couldn’t understand why he was saying it: if this party were capable of listening to criticism from outside, making connections that weren’t hacked from its bumper book of why-we-lost-in-1992 cliches, it wouldn’t be in this situation.

The problem will not be solved by Cooper or Chuka Umunna because the problem is not that Ed Miliband was too far left. “We mustn’t descend into left-wing factionalism,” David Blunkett said on Thursday night, as if all their problems could be solved if only they could return to a time when they were considered “centrist”. These words – left, far-left, centrist, right – have no objective meaning. The ideas of the centre ground – that the private sector is better at everything, that growth is the highest value for a society to aspire to, that people on benefits must be starved into work because they’re lazy – would five years ago have been called the right, and five years before that been called the far right.

What counts now as far left, many bridges too far for the Labour party – that housing is a human right, that tertiary education is an investment in the future that we all should share, that wages must be liveable or they don’t count as wages – would, within the past decade, have been known as common sense. To chase the centre is to chase the ever-shifting territory of your opponent’s demarcation, and to recoil at the charge that you are “left” is like crumpling at the insult “motherfucker”; it has no concrete meaning, and its abstract meaning is simply that a person disagrees.

Labour lost because they were not offering anything that anybody wanted. The world they described was big, bad and scary, and the state they promised to “protect” would step in more often than if you left it to the other guys. What seemed so unthinkable until Thursday seems so obvious now: who would vote for a world like that? People accuse the Conservatives of running a fear and smear campaign, but at least they were only espousing fear of the other side. Labour wanted us to fear everything. I didn’t even vote for them myself; God knows how I expected to wake up with a Labour government.

The problem will not be solved by an intervention from Peter Mandelson; the Old Labour/ New Labour contest is over, a battle for solutions to a completely different set of questions.

The problem will not be solved by Burnham, because the problem is not that the leader wasn’t working-class enough; there is, across all the parties, a homogeneity of class, race and gender that is obvious and disastrous, but it is a symptom of the malaise and not the cause. It illustrates the lack of democratic connection between the grassroots and the high command. The manifesto is not voted on by members but handed down; the candidates are plucked from thinktanks. All of that will have to change if this party is ever going to mean anything again.

The search for the purely working-class candidate, as winning as Alan Johnson, as authentic as John Prescott, is pointless. That perfect person, the holder of no privilege, does not exist: that person is basically Jesus. The problem is not that they chose the wrong messiah. The problem is that they are looking for one in the first place.

Why couldn’t they make any joint progressive case with the SNP? Why couldn’t they cooperate with the Greens the tiniest amount? Because it was never about the vision, it was only about the party. The problem is so much deeper than who the leader is; and so much more exhilarating.

The Guardian, May 11, 2015

Article C. Never mind Labour, where do the Liberal Democrats go from here?

Deborah Orr

Everyone with even a passing interest in politics now seems to have an opinion about what went wrong for Labour. No one bothers to speculate on why the Liberal Democrats crashed so spectacularly. It’s all too obvious. They behaved like arrogant fools, spreading themselves thinly around the top echelons of the government and going on telly to justify the most difficult parts of coalition policy whenever they could.

I'm a former Lib Dem member, who left not because of the coalition itself, but because of the manner of the coalition. For that, they thought we’d all be grateful and admiring. But the Lib Dems just looked opportunistic, power-hungry and naive. Every time I saw that ghastly quote the Lib Dems came up with for this election campaign, about giving the Tories a heart and Labour a brain, I winced and thought: you haven’t learned a thing. Can they learn though? Or are they a spent force?

As a former Liberal Democrat member, who left not because of the coalition itself, but because of the manner of the coalition, I’m horrified that what was the UK’s largest unambiguously social democrat party has become a marginal party. The SNP is Britain’s third party now, and its only to be expected that we’ll be hearing a lot more from them now, and a lot less from the Lib Dems. But, oh, the irony. As more and more people become aware of the need for proportional representation, the UK party that has been arguing for it for decades is all but gone. What’s more, because of their silly agreement to a quick AV referendum, champions of first-past-the-post feel, quite erroneously, feel able to insist that the public has no interest in any kind of electoral reform.

As for the Iraq war, the war the Lib Dems stood against, the war that has made the Middle East into a vast zone of horror, it was in the interests of both the Tories and Labour to not mention it. This was Britain’s Fawlty Towers election. It was quite something, knowing that if there’s one thing in the world that needs to be talked about, it’s world affairs, but that Britain is obsessed only with itself.

Can the Lib Dems still seize some credit for their time in government? Will their positive influence become more clear now that it is absent? Or will we all get as bored with hearing the Lib Dems pointing this out, as we did with hearing them bang on about the pupil premium? The Lib Dems will be thinking as hard as Labour about where they should go and what they should do now. I wish them every success in their endeavours.

The Guardian, May 11, 2015

Article D. Clean and Open American Elections

For at least 44 years, it has been illegal for foreign corporations, countries and individuals to make political contributions in the United States for any election, either directly or indirectly. It is even against the law to solicit such contributions. But in this Wild West year of political money, that longstanding ban is being set aside. The United States Chamber of Commerce – one of the biggest advertisers in midterm races around the country – is actively soliciting foreign money, and government enforcers seem to be doing nothing to stop it.

According to a report issued by the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, the chamber is getting “dues” payments of tens of thousands of dollars from foreign companies in countries such as Bahrain, India and Egypt, and then mingling the money with its fund to advocate for or against candidates in the midterm races.

The chamber firmly denies the charge, saying its internal accounting rules prevent any foreign money from being used for political purposes. Money, however, is fungible, and it is impossible for an outsider to know whether the group is following its rules.

The chamber has vowed to spend more than $75 million before the November election, and it has already run 8,000 ads, most of which support Republican candidates. The ads do not urge a vote for or against a specific candidate.

Because the United States Chamber is organized as a business league under the federal tax code, it does not have to disclose its donors, so the full extent of foreign influence on its political agenda is unknown. But Tuesday’s report sheds light on how it raises money abroad. Its affiliate in Abu Dhabi, for example, the American Chamber of Commerce, says it has more than 450 corporate and individual members in the United Arab Emirates who pay as much as $8,500 a year to join.

Because of a series of court decisions that culminated in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling earlier this year, these and similar nonprofits have become huge players in the year’s election, using unlimited money from donors who have no fear of disclosure.

The possible commingling of secret foreign money into these groups raises fresh questions about whether they are violating both the letter and spirit of the campaign finance laws. The Federal Election Commission, which has been rendered toothless by its Republican members, should be investigating possible outright violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act by foreign companies and the chamber.

The Internal Revenue Service, which is supposed to ensure that these nonprofit groups are not primarily political, has fallen down on the job. Last week, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, demanded that the I.R.S. look into whether the tax code was being misused for political purposes, and, on Tuesday, two watchdog groups made the same request of the agency.

The government needs to make sure that the tax code – and American control of American elections – is not being violated.

The New York Times, October 5, 2010

Task 5. Watch Video 1.2 (Unit 1). The clip features front page headlines of some British quality and popular papers. Fill in the grid below. Do the required tasks in the following order.

1. Step One. Watch the clip in full to get its idea.

2. Step Two. Play the clip again to fill in Column No 1 ofthe grid below by putting down the newspaper headlines you see in the clip.

3. Step Three. Transcribe the news presenter’s commentary into Column No 2 of the grid. The screen graphics of the clip may be of some use.

4. Step Four. Translate the headline into Russian and fill in Column No 3.

1. The newspaper headline	2. The news presenter’s commentary	3. The headline in Russian
Example: 1. Cameron Sparks Fury with Attack on Multiculturalism	His discourse has caused anger in some quarters	Выступление Д. Камерона по поводу абсурдности идеи мультикультурализма вызвало негодование ее сторонников
2.
3.
N…

Task 6. Watch Video 1.3 (Unit 1) and do the required tasks as required in Task 5.

Unit 2

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