RENDERING. Богатова С.М - 12 стр.

       Â Opinions are often expressed as comparisons (more, strong-        Narnia, loves English schoolchildren, and appears whenever hope
          est, less, most, least efficient, but):                          seems lost.
       The painter Pablo Picasso was far more innovative than any of              Although Narnia has survived countless perils, the Chronicles
his contemporaries.                                                        themselves are now endangered. On one front they face the dubious
       Â Opinions are often expressed by adjectives (brilliant, vindic-    honour of corporate marketing. On another literary voices have begun
          tive, fair, trustworthy):                                        to denounce them as racist and sexist works. What's in progress is a
       Ronald Reagan was a convincing speaker when he read a pre-          struggle of sorts for the soul of children's fantasy literature.
pared address but was not effective at press conferences.                         Only British readers are likely to be familiar with the Chronicles'
       Â Opinions often involve evaluations:                               second tribulation: critics attacking the books' reputation. The centen-
       The excellence of her science project was a model for other stu-    ary of Lewis's birth was widely celebrated in England in 1998, but
dents.                                                                     amid the general affection was prominent dissent. The novelist and
       Â Opinions are often introduced by verbs and adverbs that sug-      critic Philip Hensher, a rising figure in the London literary establish-
          gest some doubt in the writer's mind:                            ment (he's a Booker Prize judge), censured the Chronicles as «poison-
          • It appears she was confused.                                   ous» and «ghastly, priggish, half-witted» books intended to «corrupt
          • She seems to have the qualifications for the position.         the minds of the young with allegory». Corruption by allegory? Bailiff,
          • They probably used dirty tricks to win.                        take him away! Never mind that one of Hensher's own books, Kitchen
                                                                           Venom (1996), all but glorifies pederasty. What Hensher meant by cor-
       Some opinions obviously deserve more attention than others do.      rupting the young was exposing them to what he derided as «Lewis's
When expert economists, such as John Kenneth Galbraith or Paul Vol-        creed of clean-living, muscular Christianity».
cher, discuss the U.S. economy, their opinions are more informed and              The Atlantic Monthly; October 2001 #3
therefore more reliable than the opinions of people who know very lit-
tle about economic policy. Similarly, when someone is a specialist on            EXERCISE 2. Read an except from an article and underline
the poet John Keats, that person's opinion of Keat's poems should be       words or phrases that introduce opinions. Is the author’s opinion
given considerable weight.                                                 of Putin’s decision positive or negative? What helped you under-
                                                                           stand?
       EXERCISE 1. Read an excerpt from an article and identify
facts and opinions mentioned in it. What is the author’s attitude to                        The Fuzzy Shape of Things to Come
C.S. Lewis, to Philip Hensher? What helped you figure it out?                      President Vladimir Putin's decision to dismiss his government
                                                                           less than three weeks before the presidential election, when the gov-
         «In Defence of C. S. Lewis» by Gregg Easterbrook                  ernment would have had to resign in any case, certainly seems to have
       The seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, by the mid-century           been a masterful PR stunt, provoking a frenzy of speculation and
Irish writer C. S. Lewis, has some 65 million copies in print in thirty    breathing new life into the moribund election campaign. But is that all,
languages. In the books several English schoolchildren are transported     or is there more to it?
to a realm where a human society coexists with strange creatures, intel-           By announcing that he would unveil his new prime minister and
ligent animals, and magic. Always the young visitors perform some          Cabinet before the election and making this a plank of his campaign,
improbable feat to rescue the kingdom from sinister forces. Presiding      Putin has certainly upped the stakes. Indeed, some opinion polls sug-
over events is Aslan, an enormous supernatural lion who called forth       gest that getting the vote out is a major Kremlin concern, with less than

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