Reading and understanding newspapers. Пыж А.М. - 47 стр.

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and even panic. And when fear comes to dominate social policy, reason and
tolerance are at risk. That is our predicament.
Commentary
The headline of the editorial by Mortimer B. Zuckerman is an allusion
to a very popular song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” by Pete Seeger,
the famous American folksinger. The song is very sad as it must have seemed
to Seeger that every generation of American boys was doomed to go to war.
In this song the flowers are picked by the girls, who marry young men, who
go off to war. Seeger goes on to report that the young men are killed (“gone
to graveyards, everyone”) and that the graves are soon forgotten. Wild
flowers begin to grow on these graves and they are picked by the next
generation of girls who do not realize that there are graves under the flowers.
These girls in turn marry their sweethearts, who then go off to war. As
Seeger asks in his song, “When will we ever learn? Oh, when will we ever
learn?”
Surprising as it may seem, the idea of the song was inspired by a
Cossack lullaby which was introduced in the West through Mikhail
Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don. The lullaby tells us about the
Cossacks who go to the war leaving their wives and sweethearts behind. The
message of this sing was borrowed by Seeger in his song which is performed
very often and was translated into other languages.
After-reading task 1: read the editorial one more time using a dictionary
to translate the words and phrases which are not familiar to you. Now that
you know the allusion underlying the headline you can comment on the
message of the editorial and its general tone. What are they?
After-reading task 2: vocabulary study
• Write out from the text the words with negative and positive connotations
which can be used in reference to the message of the editorial. Classify
them into nouns, verbs and adjectives.
• Make up a list of phrases which describe the pitiful condition of the
morale of American society together with the context in which they are
used in the editorial.
• Give definitions to the following words: druggies, thugs, exhibitionists,
patriarchy, homophobia, matrimony, liberalism, nostalgia, yesteryear.
• Find idioms used in the text and explain their meaning.

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