Speak and write about: Washington Irving “The legend of Sleepy Hallow”.

Foreign literature

Білет №1

Speak and write about: Washington Irving “The legend of Sleepy Hallow”.

BACKGROUND

This story takes place in a small town in New York State. It is a folktale. The "legend" of sleepy hollow is that there is a headless horseman who rides around and disappears in a flash of fire. There is a cartoon movie that is based on this story that they always play around Halloween.

MAIN CHARACTERS

Ichabod Crane: He is the main dude of the story. He is this weak, ugly schoolteacher. He is well read.

Katrina Van Tassel: A voluptuous 18 yr. old chick. She is one of Ichabod's students.

Abraham "Brom Bones" Brunt: Katrina's boyfriend. He is big and handsome. He is nicknamed "Brom Bones" because he is a hulk.

PLOT

The story starts off with this guy named Ichabod coming from Connecticut to Sleepy Hollow, NY to teach. The only skill he has is teaching. He moves around from neighborhood to neighborhood tutoring kids and staying in people's houses. He keeps all of his belongings in a big handkerchief. Then he gets a student named Katrina Van Tassel. Her family is very rich. Ichabod wants to marry her so he can get to her family's money. He has one big problem, because she has a boyfriend (Brom Bones). Brom Bones knows Ichabod is hitting on his woman so he plays a lot of pranks on Ichabod. Then Ichabod is invited to a party at Katrina's house. He goes there to try and get Katrina. Ichabod gets to dance with her and Brom Bones gets really jealous. After the party, Ichabod finds out that the only reason she danced with him was to make Brom Bones jealous.

Ichabod gets mad and rides away. When he is riding, the headless horseman rides up to him and throws his head at Ichabod. The next day the people find Ichabod's horse but can't find Ichabod. They spread rumors about him. Some say he is dead, some say he is afraid to come back to Sleepy Hollow. Whenever Brom Bones hear people talk about the headless horseman and Ichabod, he smiles.

 

Translate idioms, word-combinations, words: to snore, serene, to sniff, to weep, to wrinkle, to take a nap, to watch pennies, stingy, obstinately, to store up, tought.

To snore – хропіти

Serene – безтурботний, ясний, безхмарний; спокій.

To sniff – нюхати, сопіти, чмихати, шморгати

To weep – плакати

To wrinkle – морщитися, м’яти, насуплювати

To take a nap – подрімати

To watch every penny – трястися над кожною копійкою

Stingy – скупий

Obstinately – наполегливо, завзято, уперто.

To store up – накопичувати

Tought – навчав

 

Білет №2

Speak and write about: Irving Show “Return to Kansas City”.

 

“Return to Kansas City” was published in The New York in 1939. The action takes place in Arline and Eddie’s flat. The author skillfully gives an atmosphere of a usual family scandal. There are quite a lot of small details which contributes to readers’ trust and make the story true to life. The story tells of Arline, the wife of Eddie a prizefighter who starts to nag him about going back to Kansas City to see her folks again. She complains because he sleeps so much and that she's lonesome. He tries to argue her out of going but she's insistent.

Shaw depicts a usual family row of husband and wife. There are two protagonists in the text. In their quarrel we can see the positions of the both, Arline and Eddie. The author manages to open their points of view and in this way he open the protagonists’ characters The images are shown indirectly, through their speech and actions. In this aspect author’s remarks are of great importance. One of their aims is to expose the characters.

 

Білет №3

· Speak and write about: Theodore Dreiser “Sister Carrie”.

 

Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser about a young country girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream, first as a mistress to men that she perceives as superior, and later becoming a famous actress. It has been called the "greatest of all American urban novels."

Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is perhaps the perfect example of American Naturalism. In it, a small-town Wisconsin girl, Carrie Meeber, moves to Chicago to live with her sister and brother-in-law. While on the train into the city, she meets a man named Charles Drouet, and this encounter (characterized by Carrie’s adoration of his fancy clothes and well-to-do appearance) will set in motion Carrie’s entire future. Carrie’s life is filled with example after example of good fortune and coincidence, so that, without taking any real agency of her own, she finds herself elevated from the lowest levels of society (once forced to work in the harshest of factory conditions) to the ranks of wealth and stardom, on Broadway. Concurrently, the life of her second lover, Hurstwood, begins to deteriorate as of the day he meets her. At the start, he is a powerful, charming, and accomplished business man. His wife and children are normal and healthy, although rather self-absorbed. Soon, the powers of fate and destiny converge on Hurstwood & Carrie – their lives are linked and their livelihoods inverted. Hurstwood falls tragically and cannot seem to find his way back, while Carrie rises ever higher, without ever putting in much effort of her own. But, though she ultimately achieves her dreams, she is never happy, never satisfied. She is lost in a world of “cosmopolitan morality,” where success is defined by things and where possessions are consumed at an ever-growing rate, in an attempt to fill an un-fillable void.

 

Білет №4

Білет №5

Who was Charles Dickens?

He was born in 1812 at Portsmouth on the English south coast and came to London at the age of 10. Two years later, he was working in a boot-blacking warehouse in Charing Cross, a three-mile walk from his home in Camden Town. The young Charles was well acquainted with the working-class world of London, which would provide the setting for many of his novels.

Dickens’s father was a government clerk, but mismanagement of his financial affairs led his family into poverty. For a short time he was imprisoned for debt. Despite this, Charles managed to attend school. He worked as a solicitor’s clerk, then as a reporter of Parliamentary debates for the Morning Chronicle.

His literary career was launched in 1835 by a series of cameos of London life, written for the Evening Chronicle and other periodicals, and published the following year as Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People. The same year his Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was issued in 20 monthly parts. The humorous adventures of Mr Pickwick and his companions was an instant success, achieving literary recognition for Dickens and providing new financial security.

Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby soon followed. In 1842 he made the first of two trips to America, where he spoke passionately against slavery and in favour of international copyright. He set up the weekly periodical Household World in 1850, succeeded by All the Year Round nine years later. Both provided vehicles for the publication by instalments of his later novels.

He died suddenly in 1870, shortly after his second speaking tour of America, leaving Edwin Drood unfinished. In its obituary, the Penny Illustrated Paper described Dickens as “one of the chief literary glories of the Victorian era”. “Prematurely dead at fifty-nine!” the paper exclaimed, but “where was there a man with more of a life?”

Foreign literature

Білет №1

Speak and write about: Washington Irving “The legend of Sleepy Hallow”.

BACKGROUND

This story takes place in a small town in New York State. It is a folktale. The "legend" of sleepy hollow is that there is a headless horseman who rides around and disappears in a flash of fire. There is a cartoon movie that is based on this story that they always play around Halloween.

MAIN CHARACTERS

Ichabod Crane: He is the main dude of the story. He is this weak, ugly schoolteacher. He is well read.

Katrina Van Tassel: A voluptuous 18 yr. old chick. She is one of Ichabod's students.

Abraham "Brom Bones" Brunt: Katrina's boyfriend. He is big and handsome. He is nicknamed "Brom Bones" because he is a hulk.

PLOT

The story starts off with this guy named Ichabod coming from Connecticut to Sleepy Hollow, NY to teach. The only skill he has is teaching. He moves around from neighborhood to neighborhood tutoring kids and staying in people's houses. He keeps all of his belongings in a big handkerchief. Then he gets a student named Katrina Van Tassel. Her family is very rich. Ichabod wants to marry her so he can get to her family's money. He has one big problem, because she has a boyfriend (Brom Bones). Brom Bones knows Ichabod is hitting on his woman so he plays a lot of pranks on Ichabod. Then Ichabod is invited to a party at Katrina's house. He goes there to try and get Katrina. Ichabod gets to dance with her and Brom Bones gets really jealous. After the party, Ichabod finds out that the only reason she danced with him was to make Brom Bones jealous.

Ichabod gets mad and rides away. When he is riding, the headless horseman rides up to him and throws his head at Ichabod. The next day the people find Ichabod's horse but can't find Ichabod. They spread rumors about him. Some say he is dead, some say he is afraid to come back to Sleepy Hollow. Whenever Brom Bones hear people talk about the headless horseman and Ichabod, he smiles.