❖ Read the texts and answer the following questions:
➢ What is the main idea of each text?
➢ What are the elements that helped you identify these ideas?
➢ Are there any similar texts? which ones? What sort of similarities do they
share?
➢ Are all the texts meaningful? Which ones are not? Why?
➢ What possible contexts can you assign to each text?
1st text :
He is just what a young man ought to be,’ said she, ‘sensible, good-humoured, lively; and I never saw such happy
manners!—so much ease, with such perfect good breeding.
‘He is also handsome,’ replied Elizabeth, ‘which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character
is thereby complete.’
‘I was very much flattered by his asking me to dance a second time. I did not expect such a compliment.’
‘Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always take YOU by surprise,
and ME never. What could be more natural than his asking you again? He could not help seeing that you were about
five times as pretty as every other woman in the room. No thanks to his gallantry for that. Well, he certainly is
very agreeable, and I give you leave to like him. You have liked many a stupider person.’
2nd text :
I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements
are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out
the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
3rd text :
Of course, in one sense, the first essential for a man’s being a good citizen is his possession of the home virtues
of which we think when we call a man by the emphatic adjective of manly. No man can be a good citizen who is not a good husband and a good father, who is not honest in his dealings with other men and women, faithful to his friends and fearless in the presence of his foes, who has not got a sound heart, a sound mind, and a sound body; exactly as no amount of attention to civil duties will save a nation if the domestic life is undermined, or there is lack of the rude military virtues which alone can assure a country’s position in the world. In a free republic the ideal citizen must be one willing and able to take arms for the defense of the flag, exactly as the ideal citizen must be the father of many healthy children. A race must be strong and vigorous; it must be a race of good fighters and good breeders, else its wisdom will come to naught and its virtue be ineffective; and no sweetness and delicacy, no love for and appreciation of beauty in art or literature, no capacity for building up material prosperity can possibly atone for the lack of the great virile virtues.
4th text :
To assail the great and admitted evils of our political and industrial life with such crude and sweeping generalizations as to include decent men in the general condemnation means the searing of the public conscience. There results a general attitude either of cynical belief in and indifference to public corruption or else of a distrustful inability to discriminate between the good and the bad. Either attitude is fraught with untold damage to the country as a whole. The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well-nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There is nothing more distressing to every good patriot, to every good American, than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter.
