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Exercise 4. Give a short content of what you have listened to.
Exercise 5.Text for quick content skim.Read the text and say what do you think of the statistics of it.
In your opinion, what makes fast food so popular not just in America but throughout the world? What did the author mean when he said that “a nation’s diet may be more revealing than its art or literature?” What does fast food reveal about Americans? Why do anti-globalists often choose fast food chains such as McDonald’ s as their targets?
Fast Food. Over the last three decades, fast food has infiltrated every hook and cranny of American society. An industry that began with a handful of modest hot dog and hamburger stands in southern California has spread to every corner of the nation, selling a broad range of foods wherever paying customers may be found. Fast food is now served at restaurants and drive-through, at stadiums, airports, zoos, high schools, elementary schools, and universities, on cruise ships, trains and airplanes, at K-Marts, Wal-marts, gas stations, and even at hospital cafeterias. In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2001, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined. A nation’s diet may be more revealing than its art or literature. On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant. During a relatively brief period of time, the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. Fast food and its consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day, try to avoid it, or have never taken a single bite.
(by Eric Schlosser ‘Fast Food Nation’ in “American Patchwork” by I. V. Zubanova and A. I. Nikolskaya)
Exercise 6. Skim the text quickly and discuss the questions:
1. Can you name the things that Russians and Kazakhs love doing? 2. What customs and common practices may be called “Russian rituals” and “Kazakh rituals”? 3. Discuss the meaning of the word “rituals”.
Rituals are highly structured, prescribed and repetitive forms of action involve their performers in a context which gives special meaning to what they do, say, or wear. Whether performed out of faith or mere habit, rituals are things that structure life, celebrating its important movement and making the passage of time. Rituals accompany Americans throughout their lives. No childhood is complete without Christmas gifts, Halloween trick-or-treating, baseball games that father take their sons to, or family visits to Disneyworld. Easter egg-hunts, Fourth of July fireworks and barbeques, graduation ceremonies and Thanksgiving turkey dinners keep families together and are major events celebrated every year.
Exercise 7. Read the text first passage and translate the second one [1, p.259]
Eating Out.Americans love eating out. This is true just for business people, whose stressed high speed lives are punctuated with “power breakfast”, business lunches, and expensive dinners with important clients paid for with corporate credit cards. They also frequently go out to eat on their own. A dinner in a restaurant is most Americans’ idea of keeping in touch with friends or entertaining relatives, including parents and grown-up children. People are sometimes prepared to drive for hours to get a particular fashionable place: it gives them an extra opportunity to discuss the experience later with other friends, or colleagues at the office. In fact, Americans love talking about restaurants: the food, the service, the prices. Big cities, full of emigrants from all over the world, offer an enormous choice of ethnic cuisines to suit all tastes and wallets. There’s always some exotic or fancy place you can go to, and then recommend to others.
For many US families eating out is a part of their weekly routine, typically on Friday or Saturday night, or on Sunday right after the church service. All the restaurants offer facilities for disabled people and young children; it’s not uncommon to see parents bring in babies in bassinettes and toddlers who are placed in high chairs to eat the meal with the rest of the family. Food courts are meant as a place where exhausted shoppers can relax before they drive home loaded with their purchases, but you can often see young suburban wives and mothers with babies in strollers using them as a place to enjoy a quiet chat with a friend while the older children are at school. Teenagers and young families that don’t have a lot of money to spend can go to fast-food places like McDonalds, Burger King, or Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). These restaurants belong to huge chains, and can be found all over America, and the world. Everywhere chain restaurants offer identical food and service. It is predictability – and the low prices – that customers like about such places, although their critics describe the food there as “junk”.
(in “American Patchwork” by I. V. Zubanova and A. I. Nikolskaya The little things that count.)