Unit 15

DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR

ARTICLES

1. DEFINITE ARTICLE

THE

Articles in English are invariable. That is, they do not change according to the gender or number of the noun they refer to, e.g. the boy, the woman, the children

'The' is used:

  1. to refer to something which has already been mentioned.

    Example:
    An elephant and a mouse fell in love.
    The mouse loved the elephant's long trunk, and the elephant loved the mouse's tiny nose.

  2. when both the speaker and listener know what is being talked about, even if it has not been mentioned before.

    Example:
    'Where's the bathroom?'
    'It's on the first floor.'

  3. in sentences or clauses where we define or identify a particular person or object:

    Examples:
    The man who wrote this book is famous.
    'Which car did you scratch?' The red one.
    My house is the one with a blue door.'

  4. to refer to objects we regard as unique:

    Examples:
    the sun, the moon, the world

  5. before superlatives and ordinal numbers:)

    Examples:
    the highest building, the first page, the last chapter.

  6. with adjectives, to refer to a whole group of people:

    Examples:
    the Japanese, the old

  7. with names of geographical areas and oceans:

    Examples:
    the Caribbean, the Sahara, the Atlantic

  8. with decades, or groups of years:

    Example:
    she grew up in the seventies

2. INDEFINITE ARTICLE

A / AN

Use 'a' with nouns starting with a consonant (letters that are not vowels), 'an' with nouns starting with a vowel (a,e,i,o,u)

Examples:

NOTE:
An
before an h mute - an hour, an honour.
A before u and eu when they sound like 'you': a european, a university, a unit

The indefinite article is used:

Notice also that we usually say a hundred, a thousand, a million.

NOTE: that we use 'one' to add emphasis or to contrast with other numbers:
I don't know one person who likes eating elephant meat.
We've got six computers but only one printer.

3. EXCEPTIONS TO USING THE DEFINITE ARTICLE

There is no article:

 

STUDY GUIDE

Reference: EGU: 68-80; PEG: 1-8, PEGE: 1-5,

  1. Put a/an or the in the gaps, or leave them blank (zero article).
    1. ... people who live in ... Spain are called ... Spanish.
    2. As ... captain of ... ship, I have ... complete authority.
    3. ... recipe for ... success is ... hard work.
    4. ... worst part of ... living in a caravan is ... lack of space.
    5. ... little knowledge is ... dangerous thing.
    6. There's no point in taking ... medicine for ... cold.
    7. It's ... long way by ... train to ... north of ... Scotland.
    8. ... people we met on ... holiday in ... north of England sent us ... postcard.
    9. David learned to play ... violin when he was at ... university.
    10. ... dancing is ... more interesting activity than ... reading.

  2. Put in a/an, the or '-' in the following sentences.
    1. We were looking for ... place to spend the night. ... place we found turned out to be in ... charming village. ... village was called ... Lodsworth.
    2. ... individual has every right to expect personal freedom. ... freedom of ... individual is something worth fighting for.
    3. Yes, my name is ... Simpson, but I'm not ... Simpson you're looking for.
    4. Who's at ... door?- It's ... postman.
    5. When you go out, would you please go to ... supermarket and get some butter.
    6. I've got ... appointment this afternoon. I've got to go to ... doctor's.
    7. We went to ... theatre last night and saw Flames. It's ... wonderful play.
    8. We prefer to spend our holidays in ... country, ... mountains or by ... sea.
    9. We have seen what ... Earth looks like from ... moon.
    10. This is the front room. ... ceiling and ... walls need decorating, but ... floor is in good order. We'll probably cover it with ... carpet.
    11. You're imagining ... things. All your fears are in ... mind.
    12. Look at this wonderful small computer. ... top lifts up to form ... screen; ... front lifts off to form ... keyboard and ... whole thing only weighs 5 kilos.
    13. ... history of ... world is ... history of ... war.
    14. Is there ... moon round ... planet Venus?
    15. What's ... John doing these days?- He's working as ... postman.
    16. ... exercise is good for ... body.
    17. Could you pass me ... salt, please?
    18. They're building ... new supermarket in ... centre of our town.
    19. Where's your mother at ... moment?- I think she's in ... kitchen.
    20. If you were a cook, you'd have to work in ... kitchen all day long.

 

READING COMPREHENSION

Read the following newspapar article and answer the questions.

Washington (Washington Star)-- The
unemployment rate was 7.8 percent in July,
almost unchanged from June, as the decline in
employment of the last four months apparently
"leveled off", the Labor Department reported
Friday.

The 7.8-percent rate, following the 7.7
percent in June and the 7.8 percent in May,
gives three months of fairly level un-
employment after the unemployment rate jumped
from 6.2 percent to 7.8 percent between March
and May.

Unemployment for adult males, at 6.7
percent, and adult women also at 6.7 percent,
were essentially unchanged. Unemployment for
blacks rose to 14.2 percent, up from 13.6
percent.

The economic signals in the figures were
mixed, and Janet Norwood, the commissioner of
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said it was
too early to suggest any new trend. Many
economists have been predicting that the
unemployment rate will rise to near 9 percent
by the end of the year.

Total employment was up 460,000, after four
months of sharp declines. But since February
total employment is still down by about
950,000. At the same time, the labor force--
the total of all the employed and unemployed
--rose 650,000 in July, which is why the rate
of unemployment rose slightly.

But payroll employment, which excludes farm
workers and is measured in a separate survey,
fell 240,000 in July. The Labor Department
said this drop was attributable to major
strikes in the mining and construction
industries, which have idled about 150,000
workers. However, in the payroll survey,
these workers are counted as not working
but as still employed in the total employment
survey.

In addition, the federal government is
laying off about 90,000 workers who had been
hired to do the 1980 census, the department
said, and this added to the payroll
employment drop.

  1. In line 5, what does "level off" mean?
    1. become stable
    2. decrease
    3. rise
    4. change

  2. The unemployment rate rose by ______% between March and May.
    1. 1.6
    2. 1.8
    3. 9
    4. 107.8

  3. What two industries had strikes?
    1. the Labor Department and the Bureau of Labor Statistics
    2. the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the federal government
    3. farm workers and payroll employees
    4. mining and construction

  4. What was the July increase in the labor force?
    1. slight
    2. 150,000
    3. 190,000
    4. 650,000

  5. By what amount did the payroll employment decrease in July?
    1. 90,000
    2. 150,000
    3. 240,000
    4. 390,000

- key to Unit 15 -

 

Literature

EMILY BRONTË: Wuthering Heights

Bronte, name of three English novelists, also sisters, whose works, transcending Victorian conventions, have become beloved classics. The sisters Charlotte Brontė (1816-1855), Emily (Jane) Brontė (1818-1848), and Anne Brontė (1820-1849), and their brother (Patrick) Branwell Brontė (1817-1848), were born in Thornton, Yorkshire: Charlotte on April 21, 1816, Emily on July 30, 1818, and Anne on March 17, 1820. Their father, Patrick Brontė, who had been born in Ireland, was appointed rector of Haworth, a village on the Yorkshire moors; it was with Haworth that the family was thenceforth connected. In 1821, when their mother died, Charlotte and Emily were sent to join their older sisters Maria and Elizabeth at the Clergy Daughters' School in Cowan Bridge; this was the original on which was modeled the infamous Lowood School of Charlotte Brontė's novel Jane Eyre. Maria and Elizabeth returned to Haworth ill and died in 1825. Charlotte and Emily were later taken away from the school due to the grim conditions and the sisters' illness.

The Brontė children's imaginations transmuted a set of wooden soldiers into characters in a series of stories they wrote about the imaginary kingdom of Angria-the property of Charlotte and Branwell-and the kingdom of Gondal-which belonged to Emily and Anne. A hundred tiny handwritten volumes (started in 1829) of the chronicles of Angria survive, but nothing of the Gondal saga (started in 1831), except some of Emily's poems. The relationship of these stories to the later novels is a matter of much interest to scholars.

Charlotte went away to school again, in Roe Head, in 1831, returning home a year later to continue her education and teach her sisters. She returned to Roe Head in 1835 as a teacher, taking Emily with her. Emily returned home three months later and was replaced by Anne, who stayed for two years. In 1842, conceiving the idea of opening a small private school of their own, and to improve their French, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels, to a private boarding school. The death of their aunt, who had kept house for the family, compelled their return, however. Emily stayed at Haworth as housekeeper. Anne worked as a governess in a family near York, where she was joined as tutor by Branwell, who had failed first as a portrait painter and then as a railway clerk. Charlotte went back to Brussels, her experiences there forming the basis of the rendering, in Villette (1853), of Lucy Snowe's loneliness, longing and isolation. In 1845 the family was together again. Branwell, who had been dismissed from his tutorship, presumably because he had fallen in love with his employer's wife, was resorting increasingly to opium and drink.

Charlotte's discovery of Emily's poems led to the decision to have the sisters' verses published; these appeared, at their own expense, as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), each sister using her own initials in these pseudonyms. Two copies were sold.

Each sister then embarked on a novel. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was published first, in 1847; Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights appeared a little later that year. Speculation about the authors' identities was rife until they visited London and met their publishers.

On their return to Haworth they found Branwell near death. Emily caught cold at his funeral, and died December 19, 1848. Anne too died, on May 28, 1849. Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, had been published the year before; the account of a drunkard's degeneration, it was as deeply rooted in personal observation as Agnes Grey, the study of a governess's life.

Alone now with her father at Haworth, Charlotte resumed work on the novel Shirley (1849). This was the least successful of her novels, although its depiction of the struggle between masters and workers in the Yorkshire weaving industry a generation earlier precluded Charlotte's relying solely on intense subjectivity. This strain of realism was the source of her power, as can be seen earlier in Jane Eyre and later in Villette and The Professor (1857). In 1854, Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Pregnant in 1855, she became ill and died March 31 of that year of tuberculosis.

Since their deaths, new generations of readers have been fascinated by the circumstances of the Brontės' lives, their untimely deaths, and their astonishing achievements. Jane Eyre's popularity has never waned; it is a passionate expression of female issues and concerns. The Brontės' transcendent masterpiece, however, is almost certainly Emily's novel Wuthering Heights, a story of passionate love, in which irreconcilable principles of energy and calm are ultimately harmonized. Emily Brontė was a mystic, as her poetry shows, and Wuthering Heights dramatizes her intuitive apprehension of the nature of life.

The first book about the Brontės, The Life of Charlotte Brontė (1857), by her friend the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, is a classic biography. Another notable book is Fannie E. Ratchford's The Brontės' Web of Childhood (1941); it first indicated the significance for their art of the Angria and Gondal sagas of their childhood.

Context

Wuthering Heights, which has long been one of the most popular and highly regarded novels in English literature, seemed to hold little promise when it was published in 1847, selling very poorly and receiving only a few mixed reviews. Victorian readers found the book shocking and inappropriate in its depiction of passionate, ungoverned love and cruelty (despite the fact that the novel portrays no sex or bloodshed), and the work was virtually ignored. Even Emily Brontė's sister Charlotte-an author whose works contained similar motifs of Gothic love and desolate landscapes-remained ambivalent toward the unapologetic intensity of her sister's novel. In a preface to the book, which she wrote shortly after Emily Brontė's death, Charlotte Brontė stated, "Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know. I scarcely think it is."

Emily Brontė lived an eccentric, closely guarded life. She was born in 1818, two years after Charlotte and a year and a half before her sister Anne, who also became an author. Her father worked as a church rector, and her aunt, who raised the Brontė children after their mother died, was deeply religious. Emily Brontė did not take to her aunt's Christian fervor; the character of Joseph, a caricature of an evangelical, may have been inspired by her aunt's religiosity. The Brontės lived in Haworth, a Yorkshire village in the midst of the moors. These wild, desolate expanses-later the setting of Wuthering Heights-made up the Brontės' daily environment, and Emily lived among them her entire life. She died in 1848, at the age of 30.

As witnessed by their extraordinary literary accomplishments, the Brontė children were a highly creative group, writing stories, plays, and poems for their own amusement. Largely left to their own devices, the children created imaginary worlds in which to play. Yet the sisters knew that the outside world would not respond favorably to their creative expression; female authors were often treated less seriously than their male counterparts in the nineteenth century. Thus the Brontė sisters thought it best to publish their adult works under assumed names. Charlotte wrote as Currer Bell, Emily as Ellis Bell, and Anne as Acton Bell. Their real identities remained secret until after Emily and Anne had died, when Charlotte at last revealed the truth of their novels' authorship.

Today, Wuthering Heights has a secure position in the canon of world literature, and Emily Brontė is revered as one of the finest writers-male or female-of the nineteenth century. Like Charlotte Brontė's Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights is based partly on the Gothic tradition of the late eighteenth century, a style of literature that featured supernatural encounters, crumbling ruins, moonless nights, and grotesque imagery, seeking to create effects of mystery and fear. But Wuthering Heights transcends its genre in its sophisticated observation and artistic subtlety. The novel has been studied, analyzed, dissected, and discussed from every imaginable critical perspective, yet it remains unexhausted. And while the novel's symbolism, themes, structure, and language may all spark fertile exploration, the bulk of its popularity may rest on its unforgettable characters. As a shattering presentation of the doomed love affair between the fiercely passionate Catherine and Heathcliff, it remains one of the most haunting love stories in all of literature.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

- Contest 15 -

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