Practical Tasks

Task 1. Read the pieces below. What genre are they? Analyse the pieces’ linguistic features.

A. Big protests over plans for chemical plant Jonathan Katman, Beijing Thousands of protesters gathered in he southern Chinese city of Kunming for the second time this month over the environment impact of a planned chemical plant, underscoring the increasing willingness of China’s emerging middle class to challenge government decisions by taking to the streets.Around 2,000 protesters gathered in front of the Yunnan provincial government headquarters in a demonstration that drew a large police presence and began with one arrest, but remained largely non-violent.Kunming’s first environmental protest this month was held, without arrests, on May 4, after China National Petroleum Corporation announced plans to build the chemical plant in Anning, a county seat 18 miles south-west of eh city centre. Every year, the refinery would produce 500,000 tonnes of the chemical paraxylene, a suspected carcinogen used in production of polyester, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper. Kunming’s municipal government has denied the claim, but residents dear the city‘s air and water will be polluted.Demonstrations against local developments have proliferated in recent years, as China’s affluent, educated and tech-savvy rising middle class grows exasperated with the government’s “growth-first” development model and shadowy decision-making process. The Guardian, May 17, 2013 B. Cameron’s energy reforms “will cost customers ₤100” Hundreds of thousands of families face paying more for gas and electricity under David Cameron’s flagship promise to reform tariffs, the Government admitted today.Many of the households whoa re set to lose out are those who have already shopped around and switched suppliers to get the best deal. The Prime Minister pledged last autumn to legislate to force energy giants to give customers the lowest tariff. He Government is now backing a major shake-up unveiled by regulator Ofgem which includes slashing the number of “core” tariffs each energy company can offer to four.Experts say the biggest losers were likely to be estimated 25 per cent of customers who shop around to benefit from early savings of between ₤80 and ₤90. They cold see their bills rise by over ₤100. London Evening Standard, May 14, 2013 Task 2. Read Articles A – C and answer the questions below. 1. What genre are the articles? 2. What is the syntactical structure of their headlines? 3. Translate the headlines into Russian in writing. Article A. Too many clichés, at the end of the day

At the end of the day, British newspapers are full of clichés

Stephen Brook

Shurely some mistake? A new study has found that British newspapers and websites, far from being the best written on the planet, are actually riddled with clichés.

The report, by the news and information company Factiva, found that “at the end of the day” was the most over-used cliché in newspapers and websites – clocking up an eye-watering 3,347 mentions between January and June.

Financial terms “in the red” and “in the black” were second and third in the survey, followed by “level playing field”, “time and again” and “wealth of experience”.

A quick glance shows that financial clichés dominate, as do clichéd references to time (six in the top 20). A wake up call (geddit?) to our business writers, perhaps?

The survey prompted an instant debate here at MediaGuardian towers. I think you can make a case for “in the black”, but I, erm, draw the line at phrases such as “rushed to the scene” – 310 uses in six months, since you ask.

Media clichés are somewhat under-represented, with no mention of “thinking outside the box”, “drilling down deep”, “the long tail” or even “the tipping point”.

Clichés have a shelf life and can outlive their usefulness: can you remember when “twin peaks”, “thousand points of light”, the “information super-highway” and “new world order” were repeated parrot-fashion by just about everybody? Equally, they can sit gathering dust in obscurity until they are picked up by a politician, public figure or TV show, and then become amazingly popular.

But however much we disdain them, there is a reason they catch on and it's not just journalistic laziness. They usually express things rather aptly and thus become the sort of phrase it’s hard to avoid using. Consistent use of language can sometimes help readers. Still, at the end of the day, as journalists we should try to avoid avoid being repetitive and this survey ought to give us plenty of pause for thought.

The Guardian, August 25, 2006

Article B. Blair’s job was done by 1997: to numb Labour, and to enshrine Thatcherism

In Downing Street, Blair never fulfilled his early promise and let Brown in.

Now he can only emit a long wail of impotence

Simon Jenkins

Who said books are dead? Did he blog or tweet, video or iPad? No, Tony Blair wanted to get a message across, so he wrote a book. He smeared the black staff on trees, stitched it and made people go out and buy it. Good for him.

Blair’s mildly engaging stream of auto-eroticism shows him memoirising much as he ruled. He uses the first person singular a million times. He stages everything. He fixes on a theme and controls the narrative. The intention is to smother an Iraq apologia in endless quotables on Gordon Brown and his emotional idiocy and general hopelessness. It is cruel, but has worked a dream.

Blair was a politician of great talent, and a miserable prime minister. The service he did his country was considerable, but it was done by the time he took office in 1997. It was to anaesthetise the Labour party while he turned it into a vehicle to make him electable and his newly espoused Thatcherism irreversible, much as Attlee had made welfarism irreversible in 1945…

When the Social Democratic party was formed in 1981, an ambitious young Blair abused them as “middle-aged, middle-class erstwhile Labour”, with only “lingering social consciences [to] prevent them voting Tory.” When, a year later, Anthony Blair fought Beaconsfield, he was for CND, against Trident and for withdrawal from Europe…

By the end of the 80s, ambition had worked a wondrous change. Blair abandoned nuclear disarmament and subscribed to the EU. He did a U-turn on privatisation…

When he became leader, Blair’s self-styled “project” dared not speak its Thatcherite name, but it understood that success could lie only in capturing the middle ground, in the “electoral necessity of bourgeois ascendancy”…

The party was torn to shreds as Blair scored victory after victory against “old Labour.” He turned a 19th century movement into a 21st century presidential machine, puffed up with candyfloss vacuities such as “traditional values in a changed world.” Blair’s appetite for cliché was, and is, gargantuan…

Blair blames much of this failure on Brown, but the failure was Blair’s. He left Brown in charge, with his co-architect of madness, Ed Balls – who without apology now thinks himself equipped to run the country. Blair never had the guts to sack either of them. As a result, one of the brightest sparks to cross the political firmament since the war can emit only a long wail of impotence.

The Guardian, September 2, 2010

Article C. House prices: Heading south

By the turn of this year, the housing market was enjoying a very fragile recovery,

but in the last few months it has begun to suffer a relapse

Let us start with two propositions. First, house prices are going down. And second, that is a very good thing.

The first proposition is riskier to make but rather more straightforward – because if you want to see what a double-dip recession 1 actually looks like, just take a look at a graph of house prices over the last few years. From around the time Northern Rock2 collapsed in 2007, prices went a long way south. At the tail end of 2008, after governments had contained the financial crisis and put the economy on life support, prices began to come off the floor. By the turn of this year, the housing market was enjoying a very fragile recovery, but in the last few months it has begun to suffer a relapse. That trend was confirmed by yesterday’s survey from Nationwide 3. Crash followed by recovery followed by relapse: the housing market provides practically a textbook definition of a double dip.

Nor is there likely to be a letup in the downturn. The coming spending cuts will cost both economic growth and hundreds of thousands of jobs – not the assertion of a newspaper, but the admission of this Conservative-led government in its budget red book. It would be a brave and possibly foolhardy person who took out a stonking great home loan if they were anxious about their job.

Contrary to what you might read in some newspapers, falling house prices would be a blessing. The house bubble [1] of the noughties [2] has handed billions of pounds to the older generation from young people who have had to take on giant mortgages to buy their homes. That was unsafe both for the purchasers and for the wider economy. But runaway prices also served to reinforce the wealth gap as rich parents were able to bung their kids big deposits, while middle- and working-class children got no such leg-up. An end to that unfair, unsafe regime can only be a good thing.

The Guardian, September 3, 2010

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