№ 8
I. 1. Read
the article and say in 2—3 sentences what it is about.
GREAT GRANDAD
It
was a funny, surprising thing that brought Grandad back to me. It was algebra.
I couldn’t cope with algebra in my first year at secondary school, and it made
me mad. “I don’t see the point of it,” I screamed. “I don’t know what it’s
for!”
Grandad,
as it turned out, liked algebra and he sat opposite me and didn’t say anything
for a while, considering my problem in that careful expressionless way of his.
Eventually
he said, “Why do you do PE1 at school?”
“What?”
“PE.
Why do they make you do it?”
“Because
they hate us?” I suggested.
“And
the other reason?”
“To
keep us fit, I suppose.”
“Physically
fit, yes.”
He
reached across the table and put the first two fingers of each hand on the
sides of my head.
“There
is also mental fitness, isn’t there? I can explain to you why algebra is
useful. But that is not what algebra is really for.”
He
moved his fingers gently on my head.
“It’s
to keep what is in here healthy. PE is for the head. And the great thing is you
can do it sitting down. Now, let us use these little puzzles here to take our
brains for a jog.”2
And
it worked. Not that I fell in love with algebra. But I did come to see that it
was possible to enjoy it. Grandad taught me that maths signs and symbols were
not just marks on paper. They were not flat. There were threedimensional, and
you could approach them from different directions. You could take them apart
and put them together in a variety of shapes, like Lego. I stopped being afraid
of them.
I
didn’t know it at the time, of course, but those homework sessions helped me to
discover my Grandad. Algebra turned out to be the key that opened the invisible
door he lived behind and let me in.
Now
I learnt that Grandad’s world was full of miracles and mazes, mirrors and
misleading signs. He was fascinated by riddles and codes and labyrinths, by the
origin of place names, by grammar, by slang, by jokes – although he never
laughed at them – by anything that might mean something else. I discovered My
Grandad.
1 PE [ˌpiːiː] физкультура
2 take
our brains for a jog [ˈteɪk əʊə ˈbreɪnz fər əˈdʒɒɡ] шевелить мозгами
2. The author says she had problems with algebra. Find this
extract and read it aloud.
3. How did Granddad help the author understand the subject?
4. What else did the author understand about her Grandad?
II. Listen to the member of the Greenpeace
organisation telling a story about whales and answer the questions below.
1. Why were the whales on the beach?
2. How did the people help them?
3. How did this event affect the story-teller’s life?
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