Critical thinking

a resource book on speech performance

for advanced students of English

O.L.Zaitseva
Department of West-European
Languages and Cultures
Real English series

Pyatigorsk State Linguistic University

2008

Introduction

A Real English series is designed for intermidiate, upper-intermidiate and more advanced students
of English. This book is meant for students who are interested in conceptual discussion, and who are
developing the skill of critical thinking, which is an important ability to take in new information, adequately
interpret it and apply it at another time and another place.

Possible variations of critical thinking are :

making predictions,

 interpreting new ideas,

recognizing cultural humour,

supporting information,
interpreting symbols,
classifying information,
considering both points of view,
expanding the literal meaning of words,
interpreting metaphors, etc.
This book provides teachers and students with authentic texts of problematic type; each containing
introduction into the problem, argumentative ideas, facts and consideration. Humorous manner of relating
makes it possible to view the problem from more or less serious aspects.
Open-up ideas and Close-up considerations sections follow the main communicative-cognitive
tendency in teaching English, providing necessary discussion practice in class.
Before holding group discussion,its advisable to carry out a thourough word study on the text to
facilitate language acquisition of every part of it and thus///////////not contributemuch into adequate
interpretation of the massage.
Glossary, containing pragmatic items, serves to fill in the gap between language competence and
speech performance.
Suggested themes for discussion are of great interest for young generation, and the texts are full of
good ideas. Its an ideal material for holding real discussions in English.

Unit One
TEXT FOR DISCUSSION
When we are very young, the house where we live is our whole world. Everything is provided for us food and shelter, warmth and love. We obey our parents without question, because if mummy and daddy say
it, it must be right. Every experience we have, everything that happens to us, is classified as good or bad
according to their reaction. We quickly learn to do those things which earn their praise, and to avoid those
things which upset them and earn their disapproval. Even if we do not know why a certain sort of behaviour
is said to be naughty, we accept that it is naughty and try to avoid doing it again, however enjoyable it
might otherwise be.
As we grow older, we are more and more exposed to outside influence - school, friends and other
adults - and we soon start to realise that there are other values which do not always coincide with those our
friends hold. For example, your parents have told you that certain words like bloody, are swear words and
have forbidden you to use them. Yet, in your friends house, everybody - children and grownups alike - say
things like bloody hell when they are annoyed, and do not seem to think that there is anything wrong with it.
You are bewildered, you wonder who is right, and you try to resolve the conflict of values between two lots of
people - your parents on the one hand, and your friends on the other - for whom you have equal respect.
Eventually what happens is that we start to lead double lives, reserving certain kinds of behaviour for the
home, and other kinds for the world outside the home.
The real conflicts only start, however, when we are adolescent, and begin to question everything and
everybody, including our parents and their values, as part of the process of establishing our own independent
values. Unfortunately, as long as we are living at home and are dependent on our parents, we cannot lead our
own lives or live according to our own views of right and wrong. The trouble is that if our parents give us
more freedom, we are bound to make some mistakes, and they may well begin to wonder if they have given us
too much freedom. On the other hand, most parents realise that if they allow too little freedom their teenage
children are likely to become sullen and resentful, or hostile and rebellious. At one extreme, a father may
become like a dictator, arguing that he will make all his childrens decisions for them, because they are not yet
mature enough to make their own.
At the other extreme, he might allow an anarchic sort of freedom, where the children are left to their
own devices without any help or guidance whatsoever. In the latter case, some of the mistakes his children
make could have very serious consequences, for example when choosing a career, or deciding to live away
from home. Somewhere between these two extremes it ought to be possible to find a sort of democratic
alternative, which allows them the freedom to grow up and to make their own decisions and even mistakes,
but which also offers them help and protection when the need arises.
.

Unit Two:
TEXT FOR DISCUSSION
Judging from the Flats to Let and Wanted columns of the local evening paper, there is an endless
search going on for partners to share flats which must surely compare with the search for suitable marriage
partners, Indeed, the fact that the advertisements so often specify the type and the personality of the potential
flat-mate suggests that compatibility - the simple ability to get on well together - is as important in flatsharing as it is in marriage.
Im particularly intrigued by the offers and requests for references. I suspect that they are quite
useless in providing anything more than trivial information, such as conforming that Mr.Smith is an honest
fellow and really does work in a bank. The things I would want to know about him are unlikely to be revealed
in even the most scrupulously-written testimonial. Does he make a noise when he eats? Does he pick his nose?
Does he leave the bathroom as he finds it (or, in my case, better than he finds it)? Does he snore? If finding
one suitable person to share your flat with is a risky business, heaven only knows what it must be like to
have to find four, and girls at that.
I am not suggesting that it is pointless to try to get an idea beforehand of the person whose face is
going to dominate your breakfast table for an unforeseeable length of time. But I suspect that - as in the case
of marriage - you will not really get to know them until you have taken them on, so to speak. What I would do
- or perhaps I ought to say will do, because my present flat is bankrupting me - is to assume the worst and
take steps in advance to avoid the frictions which result from trying to share your life with someone else. I do
not think it matters if we have different tastes in food or music, for example. I do not care if he doesnt like
my Gainsborough reproductions or my friends, and I am quite sure that I will be horrified by his passion for
birdwatching and healthy foods. No, what matters is that we should establish from the start a set of House
Rules, whose purpose is quite unmistakable; to reduce to minimum the need for us to have anything to do
with each other at all.
First, as far as possible, everything will be reduced to a routine; a notepad for shopping lists, a rota
for doing the cleaning, the cooking and the housework, a system of budgets to avoid any arguments about
money, and so on.. Next , like the rest of the animal kingdom, we will have clearly defined territories, in
which with as little noise as possible, we will be able to pursue our peculiar hobbies and indulge our
eccentricities. I would be willing, for example, to move my Gainsborough into my bedroom, if he in turn
would promise to keep his ridiculous pictures of displaying turtledoves out of sight. Thirdly, I will have a
serious talk with him about the weekends, when we are most likely to get on each others nerves. Perhaps he
can be persuaded to go and visit his aunt in Birmingham, or simply to lie in bed for forty-eight hours. I have a
sneaking suspicion, though, that all my planning is in vain. I will stick an ad in the paper like everyone else,
and be glad to accept this first quiet, respectable businessman who replies to it. I only hope that he is as
tolerant and as reasonable as I am.

Unit Three.
TEXT FOR DISCUSSION
One of the first things we try to find out about a person is what his job is. I suppose the reason is
that it helps us to define his status. We shall be able to judge where he stands socially, we can estimate how
mach he earns, and thus what kind of standard of living he can afford. In addition, we shall get a pretty good
idea of his educational background. I cannot deny that I am just as curious about peoples jobs as the
next man. But I am not so much interested in what a man does as how he came to choose that particular
line of work in the first place. So after how do you do? and what do you do? the question I ask (or
would you like to ask, because it is a sensitive area in which to ask such direct questions) is why did you
choose it.
The trouble is that we often choose a career for the wrong reasons. Take for instance those people
who follow in fathers footsteps, either entering the same trade or profession, or inheriting the family
business. John decides to be a doctor because his father was a doctor. In fact decides is too strong a word:
he probably never even thought about it. Funnily enough many people make exactly the opposite decision,
namely that whatever else they might do, they will certainly not do what father did.
A friend of mine, Simon, is a good example of a kind of mental struggle that goes on. He decided
while he was still at school that he would not go into his fathers business. Instead, he went to university,
took a degree in chemistry, and went into the research department of a firm that manufactured detergents.
After a couple of years he decided that he wanted to be a teacher, so he took a training course and
went to teach in a comprehensive school in the Midlands. After a spell in the classroom, he came to the
conclusion that, after all, business administration might be a better career, and he is now working for his
father in the factory which he will one day inherit. In this case Im not sure whether better for Simon
means more rewarding, more challenging, or simple more comfortable. Certainly he is much better off
financially, and he is required to use more skills than ever before, but at the same time he has the security of
knowing that he will one day take over a profitable and well-establishing business.
It seems to me that Simon was on the right track when he decided to do what he was good at, namely
chemistry, in which he always came top at school. No doubt he was also persuaded by his teacher
that this was the career for him. We may also persuaded to embark on a career for which we are unsuited as
a result of meeting people whom we admire. I know one young woman who was a doctor
at fourteen, a language teacher at sixteen, and is now at university studying law: in succession she met and
fell in love, as it were with an eminent surgeon, a brilliant linguist, and a successful lawyer. Judging from
her aptitude for languages on the one hand and her rather unsystematic way of ordering her life on the other,
I doubt if she has made the right decision. An interesting feature of her choice is the attitude of her parents.
They were quite pleased when she announced her intention to study medicine, disappointed when she
switched to languages, and finally overjoyed when she settled for a legal career. Clearly they have a very
definite idea of the relative merits of different jobs. And even though they appeared to leave the choice entirely
to their daughter, she always knew very well what they thought, and in the end probably decided to go in for
law out of respect for the wishes and their opinions . After all , some professions carry with them a special
sort of glamour, quite apart from the financial rewards they bring which can be very seductive. It is a pity
that we have to make such an important decision about our future at a stage in our lives when we are so
easily swayed by factors which have little or nothing to do with the central issue, namely, that we should do
those things for which we have a natural talent.

Unit Four
6

TEXT FOR DISCUSSION

Why are so many people so anxious to get away from the small town or village where they were
brought up, and to make for the big cities ? They usually describe their hometown as boring or dead, orthe most scathing criticism of all-as provincial. A town is provincial in the literal sense if it is a town in
the provinces of a country , as distinct from being the capital. In this sense, London, Paris, Madrid, and
Athens are not provincial, but Birmingham, Barcelona, Milan and Salonika are. The literal definition of
provincial is of a little use to us, then , because Barcelona or Milan are the sort of big cities that people
escape to as much as escape from.
Provincial could mean that the town has few attractions or amenities such as are provided in large
cities: concert halls, theatres, cinemas, restaurants, discotheques. But this, too, seems to be an inadequate
definition for two reasons. First of all, except for the very smallest villages and market towns, at least some
of these facilities exist; in any case it is usually possible to find them by travelling a relatively short distance
to the nearest town. Secondly, some of these facilities, such as concert halls, theatres and restaurants, seem to
cater much more for older than younger people. In any case many of a big citys attractions tend to be so
expensive that they are beyond the reach of young peoples pockets.`
If we examine the question from a distance, as we were viewing the whole country from a long way
off, we start to get a clue about what it is that lures us into the big cities. The main point to notice about big
cities is that they are big, there are a lot of people, and there are a lot of things going on. If you look down on
a country, literally from a great distance, from an aeroplane at night, you will be struck by the incredible
brightness of a city: there are so many lights that you cannot help feeling that all the bright things of life are
down there, waiting for you. But a feeling of disappointment will set in sho
-rtly after you land, because you will discover as you drive into the city centre from the airport that the lights
are just that: lights, miles and miles of street lights and neon signs. They are not in themselves sources of joy
and happiness: city lights are not friendly, they are merely lights. In fact the effect will probably be to make
you feel lonely and isolated. And yet the city lures us, because it is not provincial like the dead little town we
have left behind us. Provincial is in fact our way of describing not the town but the attitude of the people.
In our little town, we know ( or think we know) everybody. And what we know about them is that they dont
want to go anywhere, or to do anything outside the normal routine of their everyday lives. Unlike us, they
have no sense of adventure, no longing for new experiences or new horizons.
So we look down on them, pity or despise them, pack our bags, and make off for the big world which
we know is out there, where the bright lights are. Then a curious thing happens. We find a job, make a small
circle of friends and acquaintances, and move into some cramped accommodation or other in a section or
suburb of the city. Gradually we get to know our section of the city, its shops and its pubs and its people,
and after a while, we begin to feel at home. It is small enough, our part of the city, for us not to feel lost or
anonymous. We in effect create another little village for ourselves within the big city.
The ultimate irony comes when we rent a television set so that we can stay in at night and watch
exactly the same programmes that our despised country cousins watch. Soon we, too, become provincial ,
and others who live round us will be glad to get up and leave us behind.

Unit Five.
TEXT FOR DISCUSSION
Loneliness is a curious phenomenon. Most of us can remember feeling most lonely when we were not in fact
alone at all, but when we were surrounded by people. Everyone has experienced at some time that utter sense
7

of isolation that comes over you when you are at a party, in a room full of happy laughing people, or in an
audience at a theatre or a lecture. It suddenly seems to you as if everybody knows everybody else, everybody
is sure of himself, everybody knows what is going on; everybody, except you.
This feeling of loneliness which can overcome you when you are in a crowd is very difficult to get
rid of.
People living alone, divorced, widowed or single people, are advised to tackle their loneliness by
joining a club or a society, by going out and meeting people. Does this really help? And what do you do if you
are already surrounded by people?
There are no easy solutions. Your first day at work or at a new school or university is a typical
situation in which to feel lonely. You feel lonely because you feel left out of things. You feel that everybody
else is sure of himself and knows what to do, but you are adrift and helpless. The fact of the matter is that in
order to survive we all put on a show of self-confidence to hide our uncertainties and doubts. So it is wrong to
assume that you are alone. In a big city it is easy to get the feeling that everybody except you is leading a full,
rich, busy life. It is symbolised by the fact that everybody is going somewhere, and you tend to assure that
he is going somewhere nice, and interesting, where he can find life and fulfilment. You are also going
somewhere, and there is no reason whatever to believe that your distinati on is any less, or for that matter
any more, exciting than the next mans.
The trouble is that you may not be able to hide the fact that you are lonely, and the miserable look on
your face might well put people off. After all, if you are at a party you are not likely to try to strike up a
conversation with a person who has a gloomy expression on his face and his lips turned down at the corners.
So trying to look reasonably cheerful is a good starting point in combating loneliness, even if you are choking
inside. The next thing to avoid is finding yourself in a group where in fact you are a stranger, that is, in the
sort of group where all the other people already know each other. There is a natural tendency for people to
stick together, to form cliques, and you will do yourself no good by trying to establish yourself in a group
which has so far managed to do very well without you. Groups generally resent intrusion, not because they
dislike you personally, but because they have already had to make the group into a functioning unit. To
include you means having to go over a lot of ground again, so that you can learn their language, as it were,
and get involved in their conversation at their level. Of course, if you can offer something the group needs,
such as expert information, you can get in quickly.
In fact the surest way of getting to know others is to have an interest in common with them. There
is no guarantee that you will then like each other, but at least part of your life will be taken up with sharing
experiences with others. It is much better than always feeling alone. If all this seems to be a rather
pessimistic view of life, you have to accept the fact that we are all alone when it comes down to it. When
the most loving couple in the world kiss and say goodnight, as soon as the husband falls asleep, the wife
realises that she is alone, that her partner is as far away as if he were on another planet. But it s no cause for
despair: there is always tomorrow.

Unit Six.
TEXT FOR DISCUSSION
When I first went to University, I was determined to express my individuality. At school I had been
forced to wear a school uniform, a dreary affair of grey trousers and dark-blue blazer, which I detested.
Everybody looked like everybody else: the whole atmosphere was one of anonymous conformity. So when I
8

arrived at University at the ripe old age of 19, I promised myself I was not going to conform if I could help
it. The first thing I did was to go out and buy a pair of jeans and a sloppy sweater. The jeans were crisp and
clean, so I soaked them overnight in the bath to make them look convincingly old and worn, creased and
faded. At last, I thought, I am an individual, I am different, I am me. One day, I went into the Students
Union, a sort of club where you can go and relax between lectures or tutorials, and amongst the dozens of
students there, one man stood out. Immediately I noticed him and wondered how on earth he had managed to
make himself so conspicuously different from the rest of us. The answer was shatteringly simple: he was
wearing smart grey trousers and a neat dark-blue blazer! All the rest of us were wearing what was in effect
the standard student uniform of jeans and sweaters.
The funny thing about it is this: instead of admiring him for his individuality, his refusal to conform,
his courage, call it what you will, my companions and I laughed at him. We thought he was ridiculous to be
wearing such clothes; we despised him for conforming, when in fact he was doing, whether by accident or
design, just the opposite. That incident has left a lasting impression on me. I have come to the conclusion that
to be fashionable is to conform, and that so far from expressing our individuality, we are constantly seeking
ways to submerge it. When the miniskirt was in, what girl would dare to wear an ankle-length dress? Once
the miniskirt went out of fashion, which seemed to do overnight, any girl wearing one looked quite silly, as
conspicuous as a dress suit in a discotheque.
There is a widespread belief that all businessmen in the City of London wear bowler hats and
pinstripe trousers, and carry rolled umbrellas whatever the weather; it is a source of great amusement to
foreign visitors. But what we would find really laughable would be the sight of a City businessman on a hot
summers days going to work in shorts and a sports shirt.
I suspect that this whole business about our individuality is quite false. In spite of all our assertions
to the contrary, we prefer not to be noticed, or at least not to be noticeable. Women, for example, will go to
great lengths to find something different to wear for a party, and their greatest nightmare is to arrive and
find another woman wearing an identical dress. And yet the general style, the fashion, of what they are
wearing is bound to be the same. However bravely we talk, we limit the expression of our individuality to
small details, and on the whole do our best to merge into the crowd. Maybe that school uniform I wore for so
many years was not so bad after all. Perhaps if I had changed the colour of the buttons...

Unit Seven.

TEXT FOR DISCUSSION

Everybody wastes time. Instead of doing his homework, the schoolboy watches television. Instead of
writing her essay, the student goes out with her friends . Instead of reading his book, the commuter gazes out
of the window. The writer neglects his work, and wanders round the house making cups of coffee and
daydreaming. They all have good intentions, but they keep putting off the moment when they must start work.
As a consequence they begin to feel guilty, and then waste even more time wishing they had not allowed
themselves to be distracted. When someone else is organising our time for us, as for instance during lessons or
working hours, we do not necessarily work more efficiently but at least we are subject to the discipline of a
routine. It is when we are responsible for organising our own time that the need for self-discipline arises. Selfemployed people, particularly those engaged in such creative activities as writing, can only survive, let alone
prosper, if they can organise their time efficiently.
9

I know two writers who seem to me to have got to grips with the problem, but in quite different ways.
Bob is extremely methodical. He arrives at his office at 9 and is creative until 12.30. At 2 he returns to his
desk and is creative until 5, then he goes home and switches off until the following morning.
Alan would deny that you can regulate your creativity in this way, by the clock as it were. He works in
inspired bursts, often missing meals and sleep in order to get down on paper the ideas which are in his head.
Such periods of intensive activity are usually followed by days of lethargy, when he potters around his flat
listening to Mozart and flicking through magazines.
Their places of work reflect their styles. Bobs books are neatly arranged on the shelves by his desk,
he can always find at once the book he wants, and there is not a single book in his office which is not directly
relevant to his work. Alan, on the other hand, has books and magazines all over the place, some on shelves,
some in piles on the floor and the table, even some on and under his bed. Moreover they are about every
subject under the sun, most of them apparently unconnected with his work; needless to say, there is no hint of
system or order. All the same he has a marvellous knack of making use of the most unlikely information,
which he gleans from this motley collection, to illuminate and enliven his books. Bob, as you might imagine,
has an immaculate filing system, keeps a diary, and always carries a small notebook in which to jot down
things he has to do. If Alan ever made a list of things to do, he would immediately lose the paper on which he
had written it. He now has a novel and rather desperate system for remembering something. He writes it down
on the largest piece of paper he can find. Then, instead of folding the paper neatly, he crumples it up and
stuffs it into his jacket pocket, where it makes such an obtrusive bulge that he cannot possible forget that it is
there-until he changes his jacket, that is.
Both Bob and Alan have managed to organise their lives in such a way that they are able to produce
work of very high quality. Obviously each works in the way that suits his character, and it would be foolish to
take either as a model. All the same, there is a lot we can learn from them. For example, Bob has the excellent
idea of setting targets for each week. As long as he is on target, he has no qualms about taking an afternoon
off in the middle of the week. In other words, he will occasionally waste time deliberately, rather in the way
that you might treat yourself one day to a lunch you could not normally afford. It seems to be a much better
idea to relax and enjoy your time-wasting, rather than to feel guilty about it both at the time and afterwards.
Although Alan may appear to be careless about time compared to Bob, he is in fact very conscious of
what he calls the interstices time, that is, all those minutes in a day when you are between the end of one
activity and the beginning of the next. A good example of this is the time we spend waiting for appointments
and buses, or travelling to and from work. I know one man who spends two hours every day commuting to
work by train. Most of us would fritter this time away in snoozing, chatting or doing crossword puzzles, but
he has managed to use the time to study for an Open University degree. Alan would approve of this. He takes
it a stage further in dealing with the potentially wasted hours when friends pop in for a chat. He will skilfully
turn the conversation around to something related to the work he is engaged on, and as often as not will make
use of parts of the conversation in the next chapter he writes. In this way his friends so far from distracting
him and wasting his time actually make a contribution to his work, albeit unwittingly. So, although it may be
true that we all waste time, we can learn from people like the two writers the techniques for wasting as little
as possible, and for not minding very much when we do.

Unit Eight.
TEXT FOR DISCUSSION
There is ancient Chinese proverb which says Beware of a man whose stomach does not move when
he laughs. We reveal a great deal of what we are thinking and feeling by the movements which we make
quite unconsciously. When children are bored they start to fidget; tapping with the foot or drumming the
fingers are sure signs of impatience; a man shows his nervousness by constantly adjusting his tie or patting
his hair, particularly if he is waiting for an interview, or is about to meet his girlfriend. Sometimes you can
work out what people are talking about, or at least determine what kind of mood they are in, even if you
cannot hear a word they are saying, by the gestures they use. Occasionally it is even possible to identify a
persons nationality: nobody shrugs quite like a Frenchman, or gesticulates quite like an Italian, or bows
quite like a Japanese. Some say you can tell an Englishman by the fact that he hardly gestures at all!
All these are obvious, stereotyped gestures, widely recognised and understood. The only thing to
watch out for is that a gesture which is perfectly polite and reasonable in one country might turn out to be
very offensive in another. For example, an Englishman gives a thumbs up sign to show approval but in
10

some countries the same gesture is obscene and offensive. But we make many much more subtle movements,
when we are talking, which betray our attitude, or define our relationship to others. Take for example the
ways people sit: leaning back, relaxed; sitting forward, earnest and interested ; legs crossed and arms folded,
hostile or insecure. There are many touching movements which, if you can read them, will tell you what
someone is thinking, quite independently of what he is saying: stroking the chin, pulling the ear, scratching the
head, tapping the nose , and so on. Then there are hand movements which give you away: hand-wringing ,
fist-clenching, steepling with the fingers.
It is also very interesting to consider how much meaning we convey, sometimes quite deliberately,
with our eyes. I remember once being on a bus and looking at a stranger. He suddenly looked back at me i.e.
our eyes met. My instinctive reaction was to avert my gaze. It occurred to me that if I had continued to
maintain eye contact, I would have been guilty of staring, which would have been rude and aggressive. You
can observe the same phenomenon in zoos, where apes will refuse to look you in the eye after a short interval.
Of course, if a man stares at a woman in a bus and refuses to avert his gaze, his intentions are quite clear: he
wishes to let her know that he is admiring her. The normal pattern of eye contact when two people are
engaged in conversation is that the speaker only looks at the listener from time to time, in order to assure
himself that the latter is listening and grasping what is being said. The listener on the other hand will look
more or less continuously at the speaker (except perhaps in such unnatural situations as in a car) as a sign
that he is paying attention.
If a person looks you in the eye continuously while he is speaking to you, you are likely to be
disconcerted. It is as if he were trying to dominate you. A bad liar usually gives himself away by looking too
long at his victim, in the mistaken belief that to look a man straight in the eye is a sign of honest dealing. It
may be that the opposite is true, however. In fact, continuous eye contact is usually confined to lovers, who
will gaze into each others eyes for an eternity, conveying meanings that words cannot express, and baffling
onlookers into the bargain. There is even meaning to be found in how close people stand to each other and at
what angle. We may stand side by side, or face to face, which is more intimate, or at some intermediate angle
in between. An interesting experiment is to stand back to back with someone and try to have a conversation; it
is quite unnerving not to be able to see or to establish contact with the other person, even though we have
learnt to have conversations with people we cannot see, as on the telephone.
Careful studies have been made of all these non-verbal forms of communication, and there is no
doubt that what we say with words is only a part of the message we convey. It is important however to realise
that gestures, like words, tend to come in clusters, and furthermore are often capable of more that one
interpretation. You must look at the whole combination of words, facial expression, gesture and stance. If you
learn to read signs, you can tell whether what a person says is what he really means, or whether, like the man
whose stomach does not move when he laughs, he is trying to deceive you.

Unit nine
TEXT FOR DISCUSSION
We live in a scientific age, which presumably means that everything we do is based on rational
decisions and careful investigation of the facts. Nobody is given a job because his eyes are blue, even though
we sometimes refer to the bosss favourite as his blue-eyed boy. Nobody buys a house because the moon
shines through the bedroom windows on certain nights in the month. We would not dream of marrying
someone simply because of the shape of their fingernails. No, we all agree that we act, or try to act, sensibly
and as a result of using our brains.
If this is the case, I should like to know what makes so many people read the horoscopes which are to
be found in practically every newspaper and magazine in the country. They will tell you, of course, that they
do not believe a word of it, that it is all nonsense, just a bit of fun. And yet horoscopes are big business. There
is a good living to be made from writing professional horoscopes for people who are prepared to provide
their full name, and the date, time and exact place of birth, together with a handsome fee, I recently got
someone to do my horoscope (I did not pay for it, so to that extent I feel superior!) and I do not mind
reproducing part of it for you to see. I say part of it because it is very long and you might get bored after a
while, although the lady who did it for me asserts that I only want you to see the bits that are most flattering.
Now, of course, I do not believe in what she wrote, and I think she describes my character accurately
for the simple reason that she knows me very well anyway. But I have been unnerved a few times in my life
11

by being identified at once as a Gemini type by people who did not know anything about me except what
they had been able to learn from a short acquaintance. Similarly, I once had my palm read by a young lady
who did not know me at all. Please understand that I did not really believe in palmistry at the time, and that
my reason for letting her read my palm was that she was a very pretty young lady, and it seemed an excellent
excuse for holding her hand, or rather letting her hold mine, and getting to know her better. Our relationship I
regret to say, did not develop owing to the sudden arrival of her regular boy-friend, but she had by then had
enough time to do a character sketch of me that was devastatingly accurate.
I was so impressed by her performance that I got another lady (who was not quite so young or pretty
so at least I had no ulterior motive this time) to show me how to interpret the lines of the hand and other
features such as hand shape, relative length of the fingers and so on. I tried out my new found knowledge in a
number of light-hearted situations, but it soon became something more than a mere party trick. I have
sometimes been so accurate in my interpretations of the good and bad features of character that I have
unintentionally offended people I liked.
I think it is important to distinguish between reading hands to interpret character, and reading hands
to predict an individuals future; the former seems much more likely to have some basis of truth than the
latter. All the same, we have all met people who have been told things about their future by gypsies,
clairvoyants and the like, and who swear that these things have come true. Many quite ordinary people who
make no special claims to have the gift of foresight have had premonitions of such misfortunes as illness,
death in the family and accidents; so many in fact that there must be more to this business of foretelling the
future than meets the eye.
The paradox is that in this scientific age, when we claim to believe only what we can prove, we go on
reading horoscopes or visiting fortune-teller at the fair, which are almost certainly worthless, and at the same
time we refuse to take seriously the few scientific investigations that have been made into what we might call
the paranormal or the supernatural. Obviously we want to have our cake and eat it. Personally I remain
completely sceptical about astrology, but I am convinced that our minds and our bodies are much more
complex than we realise. Therefore, it is foolish to reject some kinds of human experience just because at the
moment we cannot find any rational scientific explanation for them.

Unit Ten

TEXT FOR DISCUSSION

I hate being ill, I do not simply mean that I dislike the illness itself (although that is true), but I hate
what being ill does to my character. As soon as I have a headache or a cold or the first signs of the flu
coming on, I proceed to behave as if I were in the grip of some fatal illness, and to wear an expression of
martyrdom which is supposed to indicate that I will bravely face the few days of life that are left to me. The
fact is that I have developed into a fine art the ability to feel sorry for myself, and, which is more important,
to wring sympathy out of the women who surround me. I love being nursed and fussed over, and I make a
three-day cold last a good week by a combination of carefully produced and well-timed groans and grimaces.
Of course, being a man I have to show that I suffer my pain bravely, but I make it quite clear that I am
nonetheless suffering I suffer beautifully, I am really good at it, and I can melt the hardest female heart the
minute I show symptoms of, for instance, migraine even though I am probably suffering from nothing more
serious than a hangover.
The first thing you must do is to deny that you are suffering, because they will be reluctant to give
you any sympathy if they think that that is what you are after. But at the same time that you deny you are ill,
you must furrow your brow and clutch the part of you that is in agony to show that the pain is overwhelming
you in spite of your efforts to put on a brave front. Once you are into your pyjamas and your bed, the battle is
as good as won. Do it, at first, ask for anything: you do not want to be a bother to anyone, you are prepared
to lie there alone and suffering in silence until the end comes. Under no circumstances should you ask for
food: nobody can have a really worthwhile illness and an appetite. In no time at all, they are all over you, full
of concern and caresses, stroking your brow and destroying themselves in an attempt to restore you to health.
Most men are naturally good at this sort of thing, and will exploit a minor illness to good effect. But
men are not hypochondriacs sufferers from imaginary illness as most women assert. The fact is that most
12

men are fully aware that they are performing a valuable social service by making out that they are more ill
than they really are. You see, women love illness. They do not on the whole like to be ill themselves, although
they will occasionally take to their beds on some flimsy pretext, just to make sure that they are not being
taken completely for granted. No, a wife actually likes her husband to be ill from time to time so that she can
show off her talents as a n amateur Florence Nightingale. It is the spirit of noble self-sacrifice that really
fulfils her.
In this she is encouraged by all the television commercials she sees which show a calm, caring
mother-wife figure mopping fevered brows, administering patent medicines, preparing soothing potions, and
generally behaving like a ministering angel. And when she shakes the thermometer before prodding it into
your unprotesting mouth well, you would think it was a magic wand and she a fairy godmother! This is the
role they see themselves in, and we poor men, so far from being the exploiting male chauvinist pigs of
contemporary mythology are in fact the exploited victims of their fantasies.
Still, as I said before, it is nice to be ill once you get the hang of it. If, in addition, you want to make
your loved one happy, keep her awake night after night with your moans and groans and your requests for hot
drinks and cold compresses. And, for her, there is a bonus: when you are better and back at work, think of all
the pleasure she is going to get out of telling the neighbours about the hell she has been through.

Unit Eleven
TEXT FOR DISCUSSION
There is one part of womens magazines that every man reads. It is the section popularly known as the agony column,
where women, and increasingly men, write for advice on what are sometimes referred to as affairs of the heart. The person who
answers these letters usually has a very reassuring sort of name, which suggests a gentle middle-aged lady of great wisdom and
experience, but who at the same time is as homely and approachable as your favourite aunt. At one time it used to be widely
believed that the letters were in fact all made up by someone on the editorial staff, and that Aunt Mary who provided the
answers was a fat man with a beard who drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney, and was unfaithful to his wife into the bargain.
Although this may be true in some cases, the great majority of advice columns are completely genuine, and the advisory staff are
highly-qualified people with a considerable breadth of understanding of human problems.
At one time the letters which were published and answered in full dealt with problems of a very general emotional
nature. The recurrent themes were loneliness, unhappiness in marriage, difficulties in bringing up children, and the problems of
adolescence, of which these two are typical.
LETTER A.
Dear Katy Brown,
My problem is that Im terribly shy, I cant help blushing and stammering when I have to speak to new people. I went to a girls
school, so I didnt really have anything to do with boys till I started work. I work in an office, and there is one boy here whos very
nice and friendly with everybody. The trouble is that whenever he speaks to me, I just blush and stay silent : I just darent open my
mouth. Id love to get to know him but I just get tense every time he comes up to me. If things go on like this, Ill never get
married, because Ill never even get to know anyone. What should I do?
LETTER B. Dear Katy Brown,
Im a 19-year-old boy. Ive got a good steady job, a lot of friends, but one big problem my father. He always insists on knowing
where Im going, who Im going with and what Im going to do every time I got out. I have to be home by eleven oclock during
the week, and eleven thirty at the latest on Saturdays and Sundays. To make matters worse he usually waits up for, and makes a
terrible fuss if Im even a few minutes late. The worst thing of all is that he doesnt treat my sister (she is 21) this way, she is
allowed to do whatever she likes, more or less. It just isnt fair. How can I convince my father that at 19 Im just as grown-up as
my 21-year-old sister?
Occasionally the letters themselves were not published but only the answers, giving rise to such mysterious comments as
Do not worry, Miss B of Bed ford, yours is a common problem which will disappear when you are older, or, Have nothing more
to do with this man if he continues to do what you say he does. Much of the fun in reading them lay in trying to work out what on
earth the problem was that led to such peculiar answers.
Nowadays everything is much more explicit, and questions of the most intimate kind are fully dealt with. As the agony
columns have become more professional and more frank, a lot of the fun has gone out of them. This is undoubtedly a good thing,
because there is something very sad about our tendency to laugh at the misfortunes of our fellow men. For example the advice
columns get a lot of letters from people who are genuinely distressed about what they believe to be terrible physical deformities:

13

stammering, acne, bad breath, protruding ears and so on. Others are terrified of meeting people because they suffer from a
crippling shyness, or are convinced that they are hopelessly unattractive. There is a joke about a psychiatrist who told a patient:
Dont worry about your inferiority complex, Mr Jones, because you are in fact inferior. But it is not really funny to be so selfconscious about your appearance or so lacking in self-confidence that you stay in your room instead of going out and meeting
people. If they do nothing else, the agony columns let you know that you are not the only one who worries about pimples, or
whatever it is that is cramping your social life.
The advisers seem to be on much more dangerous ground when they start to give advice on the most delicate and
intimate aspects of human relationships. This is not to doubt either their good intentions or their understanding of human nature.
But it is a risky business to advise, say, a married couple on how to save their marriage, when you know about them only what
they reveal to you in a short letter. Not only that, but the chances are that you only get one side of the story, because only one of
the couple will write to tell you about the shortcomings of the other. It is difficult to know how you can usefully answer such
letters as these, for example:
LETTER C My husband has just announced that he is going to end our seven-year marriage. He says he is absolutely
convinced that I have been having a lot of affairs with other men. It simply isnt true, but he just will not listen to anything I say,
and the more I express my innocence, the worse he becomes. I have even suggested that he should ask someone else about it, but
he refuses. I am so desperate that I think the only solution is for me to take a lie detector test. Can you tell me how I can get such
a test?
LETTER DI am twenty years old and I have been going steady with a boy for more than a year. He is always telling me
that he loves me, but whenever we go out, he stares at other girls and says how lovely and sexy they are. Things came to a head
the other night: we went out with another couple and he told me he thought the girl was really pretty, and that before he met me
he was always trying to date her, but she refused. He spent the whole evening talking to her, so you can imagine how miserable I
felt by the time we left. I just dont know what to do, Im afraid that if I get angry with him, hell leave me, but on the other hand I
cant stand much more of it.
To their credit, the best advisers always make the point that without knowing more, they must limit themselves to
general advice, and in some cases will even offer to enter into private correspondence in order to get more information and
consequently to give more useful advice. Without doubt they are in their way performing a valuable social service. If they were
not, the agony columns would soon dry for lack of interest, and more importantly for lack of confidence.

Unit twelve
TEXT FOR DISCUSSION

I know a boy called Michael who has a remarkable talent. He knows an incredible amount about
football teams and football leagues. He can recite the names of the players, tell you the results of every match
played last weekend and who scored the goals, and can give you a potted history of any football club you
care to name. What I find most extraordinary of all is that he is as knowledgeable about Spanish and German
football as he is about English. He spends an enormous amount of time perusing football magazines and the
sports pages of newspapers, making intricate lists, and working out statistics which are much more
comprehensive than those which appear in the papers. He is, to put it in a nutshell, an expert on football,
although curiously enough he does not play the game himself, and only goes very occasionally to a match. As
it happens, he also has a fanatical interest in the history of the First World War. Thanks to a retentive, almost
photographic, memory, he now has an encyclopaedic knowledge of that as well.
Everybody admires him for his experience, but I have to admit that, while I am not envious of him for
knowing more about football than I do, he does make me feel inadequate. I so much want to be an expert on
something, it does not really matter what, as long as I can find about which I know more than anyone else.
They say that in studying a subject you go through four stages: at first, you know nothing and you know you
know nothing; then, in Stage 2, you know a little and you think you know a lot; in the third stage, you know a
lot but you think you know very little; finally, when you reach Stage 4, you know a lot and you know that you
know a lot. I never seem to get beyond Stage 1.
Bookstalls at railway stations and airports are designed expressly to seduce you into believing that
you can become an expert effortlessly in the time it takes to make your journey. There is always one
particularly attractive kind of book on sale; these are pocket-sized paperbacks, always beautifully illustrated
in colour, and so cheap that you cannot help buying them. The very simplicity and brilliance of the colours
seem to convince you that you can acquire expertise on any subject that takes your fancy-astronomy, zoology,
antique-collecting, foreign languages-with no more effort than is required to read the morning paper. There
must be a huge sale in these instant-knowledge booklets, and I assume that, if my experience is anything to go
by, they are producing a colossal sense of failure in millions of people. I still go on buying them of course,
because I could never allow myself to do anything on a journey so trivial as to sleep or to read a thriller. My
14

excuse is that, even if I do not become an expert on, say, meteorology by the time I get to Glasgow, I can
always take it up later on. Then I assuage my guilt feelings at having failed so miserably to absorb the
wisdom that the book promised by deluding myself that it will be useful for the children to have the book, just
in case. I am presumably setting up for the next generation the conditions for an identical sense of failure to
my own.
Anyway, how does Michael do it? At 16, he is at Stage 4 in two unrelated fields, apparently without
effort. The answer is; hard work and single-minded devotion of his free time to the study of his chosen
subject. It is more difficult to say why he does it. I suppose that his interest in football was sparked off
originally by some casual event, such as meeting a famous footballer or being taken to a match by a
favourite uncle. After that his interest grew, and on the principle that nothing succeeds like success, the more
he found out , the more he wanted to find out.
Actually, now that I come to think of it , I have been far too modest. There is one subject about which
I know a lot, and that is natural history. On a country walk, I can put a name to most things I come across:
birds, flowers, trees, fungi and so on. Wait a minute, though. On second thoughts, perhaps, I have just
reached Stage 2.

Unit Thirteen

TEXT FOR DISCUSSION

Most of us lead unhealthy lives: we spend far too much time sitting down. If in addition we are
careless about our diets, our bodies soon become flabby and our systems sluggish. Then the guilt feelings
start: I must go on a diet, I must try to lose weight, I must get some more fresh air and exercise I must stop
smoking, I must keep fit. There are some aspects of our unhealthy lives that we cannot avoid. I am thinking
of such features of modern urban life as pollution, noise, rushed meals and stress. But keeping fit is a way to
minimise the effects of these evils. The usual suggestion to a person who is looking for a way to keep fit is to
take up some sport or other. While it is true that every weekend you will find people playing football and
hockey in the local park, they are outnumbered a hundred to one by the people who are simply watching
them . It is an illusion to think that you will get fit by going to watch the football match every Saturday,
unless you count the effort required to fight your way through the crowds to get to the best seats.
For those who do not particularly enjoy competitive sports- and it is especially difficult to do so if
you are no good at them- there are such solitary activities as cycling, walking and swimming. What often
happens though is that you do them in a leisurely way, so slowly, that it is doubtful if you are doing yourself
much good, apart from the fact that you have at least managed to get up out of your armchair. Of course you
can be very thorough about exercise , even fanatical. Many sports shops now sell frightening pieces of
apparatus, chest- expanders and other mysterious gadgets of shiny spring steel, which according to the
advertisement, will bring you up to an Olympic standard of fitness, provided that you follow a rigorous and
regular programme of exercises. Such programmes generally involve long period of time bending these
curious bits of metal into improbable shapes. It all strikes me as utterly boring and also time-consuming.
Somebody suggested recently that all such effort was pointless anyway because if you spend half an hour
every day jogging round the local park, you will add to your life exactly the number of hours that you wasted
doing the jogging in the first place. The argument is false even if the facts are correct, but there is no doubt
that exercise in itself can be boring.
Even after you have found a routine for keeping in shape, through sport or gymnastics or isometrics,
you are still only half way to good health, because, according to the experts, you must also master the art of
complete mental and physical relaxation. Now, this does not mean snoozing in the armchair or going dancing
15

(which incidentally is a good form of exercise in itself). It has to do with deep breathing, emptying your mind
of all thoughts, meditation, and so on. Yoga, as practised in the West, is the most widely known and popular
of the systems for achieving the necessary state of relaxation , and, contrary to popular belief, you do not
have a lot of strange words or become Buddhist in order to benefit from Yoga. It seems ironical, though, that
as our lives have improved in a material sense we have found it increasingly necessary to go back to forms of
activity-physical effort on the one hand and relaxation on the other which were the natural way of life of our
forefathers.

Unit Fourteen.

TEXT FOR DISCUSSION

England seems to be the home of good causes. In any town on a Saturday morning, wherever you go
you will be approached by someone wearing a smile and carrying a tin with a slot in the top. They will invite
you to put money into the tin and in return they will give you a little flag to stick in your lapel. If you do what
they ask and few people have the courage to refuse you will have made a contribution to a good cause.
Many of the causes are connected with the welfare of the less fortunate in our society, and with health in
general. No one begrudges the 10 p. piece he puts into the tin for the cause of the Red Cross, or Cancer
Research, or to further the good work of such societies as the NSPCC or the RSPCA. But there are now so
many good causes that the time has come to find out how many of them are really necessary, and indeed how
genuine.
A recent investigation revealed two disturbing points. First, that often only a small percentage of the
money which went into the tin was actually used for the purpose for which it was intended. In some cases, as
much as 60 % was eaten up in so called administrative expenses and as little as 10% was spent on the
cause itself. Secondly, many small charities were not registered at all: not only were they illegal, but there was
no guarantee that they were even honest. Naturally the large, well- established, respectable charities, such as
those mentioned above, are very concerned about this state of affairs, because of the danger that the whole
business of charities might be brought into disrepute by the activities of a few unscrupulous operators.
Leaving aside for a moment the question of the legality of some of the smaller charities, it might be
useful to consider why there are so many societies for the promotion of this and the protection of that. If you
buy a guide to even the smallest town, you will find an extraordinary list of groups, clubs and societies. It
seems that there is no interest that is not catered for. There are large numbers of dedicated and tireless
citizens who give up most if not all of their spare time to the promotion of good causes. Many of the causes
are of purely local interest, concerned with such things as the preservation of buildings of historical interest,
or the promotion of local nature reserves.
It increasingly happens that an association is formed on direct response to a local issue, such as the
proposal by the local authorities to build a bypass, or to pull down houses in the town centre in order to
create a shopping precinct. Once the issue has been resolved, the association will be disbanded, but there is
no doubt, that many of the same individuals will reassemble to fight the next issue that comes along. What
often strikes an Englishman when he goes abroad is the large number of small political parties which exist in
many countries, whereas he is used to the idea that about three or four large parties are quite enough. Perhaps
instead of forming political parties, the English have got into the habit of forming associations to fight for
good causes.
16

It is a form of local politics which has at least one major advantage. If you are fighting over a local
issue, such as opposing a plan to turn a public open space into an eighteen- hole golf course, you are
concerning yourself with an issue which immediately affects your life, and where, by your own efforts, you
might de able to get something changed. This seems to be a more effective use of ones energies than joining
a political party in the hope of foreign changes in society as a whole, particularly nowadays when so many of
the influences on our society seem to be due to forces beyond the control of individual governments. The
counter- argument is that we become so obsessed with our own little issues that we fail to notice what is
happening to our country as one government after another brings in laws which affect our lives in ways which
are not always beneficial. Fortunately it is not an either-or issue. We can both fight for good causes in our
own neighbourhoods and also involve ourselves in national politics. The pity would be if people just stopped
caring.

Unit Fifteen.

TEXT FOR DISCUSSION

One of the most difficult questions to answer is how much a job is worth. We naturally expect that a
doctor s salary will be higher than a bus conductors wage. But the question becomes much more difficult to
answer when we compare, say, a miner with an engineer or an unskilled man working on an oilrig in the
North Sea with a teacher in a comprehensive school. What the doctor, the engineer and the teacher have in
common is that they have devoted several years of their lives to studying in order to obtain the necessary
qualification for their profession. We feel instinctively that these skills and these years when they were
studying instead of earning money should be rewarded. At the same time we recognise that the work of the
miner and the oilrig labourer is both hard and dangerous and that they must be highly paid.
Another factor we must take into consideration is how socially useful a mans work is, regardless of
the talents he may bring to it. Most people agree that looking after the sick or teaching children is more
important than, say, selling second-hand cars or improving the taste of toothpaste by adding a red stripe to it.
Yet it is almost certain that the used-car salesman earns more than the nurse, and the research chemist earns
more than the schoolteacher. Indeed, the whole question of just reward can be turned on its head. You can
argue that a man who does a job which brings him personal satisfaction is already receiving part of his
recompense in the form of a so-called psychic wage, and that it is the man with the boring, repetitive job
who needs more money to make up for the soul-destroying drudgery of his work. It is significant that those
jobs which are traditionally regarded as vocations nursing, teaching and the Church, for example
continue to be poorly paid, while others, such as those in the world of sport or entertainment, carry financial
rewards out of all proportions to their social worth.
Although the amount of money that people earn is in reality largely determined by market forces, this
should not prevent us from seeking some way to decide on what is the right pay for the job. A starting point
for such an investigation would be try to decide the ratio which ought to exist between the highest and the
lowest paid. The picture is made more complicated by two factors: firstly by the social wage, i.e. the
welfare benefits which every citizen receives; and, secondly, by the taxation system, which is often used as an
instrument of social justice by taxing high incomes at a very high rate indeed. Allowing for these two things,
most countries now regard a ratio of 7:1 as socially acceptable. If it is less, the highly qualified people
carrying heavy responsibilities become disillusioned, and might even end up by emigrating (the so-called
brain drain is evidence that this can happen). If it is more, the gap between rich and poor will be so great
that it will lead to social tensions and ultimately to violence.

17

Contents

Introduction
Unit One
Unit Two
Unit Three
Unit Four
Unit Five
Unit Six
Unit Seven
Unit Eight
Unit Nine
Unit Ten
Unit Eleven
Unit Twelve
Unit Thirteen
Unit Fourteen
Unit Fifteen

Living at Home
Sharing a Flat
Choosing a Career
Small Towns And Big Cities
Loneliness
Conforming
Making Use of Your Time
How People Communicate
Fortune Telling
How to Be Ill
Psychological Problems
Experts
Keeping Fit
Good Causes
How Much Are You Worth

18