Английский язык. Ч. 4. Гималетдинова Г.К - 13 стр.

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would be neuter in English are there either masculine or feminine. Some help
in these languages is afforded by distinctive endings that at times characterize
the two classes. But even this aid is lacking in the Germanic languages, where
the distribution of the three genders appears to the English student to be quite
arbitrary. Thus in German sonne (sun) is feminine, mond (moon) is masculine,
but kind (child), madchen (maiden), and weib (wife) are neuter. The distinction
must be constantly kept in mind, since it not only affects the reference of pro-
nouns but also determines the form of inflection and the agreement of adjec-
tives. In the English language all this was stripped away during the Middle
English period, and today the gender of every noun in the dictionary is known
instantly. Gender in English is determined by meaning. All nouns naming living
creatures are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and
all other nouns are neuter. Attributive gender, as when we speak of a ship as
feminine, sun and moon as masculine or feminine, is personification and a
matter of rhetoric, not grammar.
to enjoy an exceptional ad-   feminine                    to strip away
   vantage                    distinctive endings         the Middle English period
to adopt natural gender       arbitrary
heavy burden of memorizing    to keep in mind
masculine                     adjective
     Задание 2. Сделайте письменный перевод текста В.
                                      Teкст В
                                 F. Scott Fitzgerald
      F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is best known for his novels and short sto-
ries which chronicle the excesses of America’s ‘Jazz Age’ during the 1920s.
      Born into a fairly well-to-do family in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, Fitzger-
ald attended but never graduated from Princeton University. Here he mingled
with the monied classes from the eastern seaboard who so obsessed him for
the rest of his life. In 1917 he was drafted into the army, but he never saw ac-
tive service abroad. Instead, he spent much of his time writing and rewriting his
first novel, This Side of Paradise, which on its publication in 1920 became an
instant success. In the same year he married the beautiful Zelda Sayre and to-
gether they embarked on a rich life of endless parties. Dividing their time be-
tween America and fashionable resorts in Europe, the Fitzgeralds became as
famous for their lifestyle as for the novels he wrote. Fitzgerald once said,
‘Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are char-
acters in one of my novels.’ He followed his first success with The Beautiful
and the Damned (1922), which Fitzgerald considered his masterpiece. It was
also at this time that Fitzgerald wrote many of his short stories which helped to
pay for his extravagant lifestyle.
      The bubble burst in the 1930s when Zelda became increasingly troubled by
mental illness. Tender is the Night (1934), the story of dick Diver and his schizo-
phrenic wife Nicole, goes some way to show the pain that Fitzgerald felt. The
book was not well received in America and he turned to script-writing in Holly-
wood for the final three years of his life. It was at this time he wrote the autobio-
graphical essays collected posthumously in The Crack-Up and his unfinished
novel, The Last Tycoon. He died in 1940.