Choose the best answer for each question.

1. What is the main purpose of NRA News, according to the article?

a. To oppose the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry.

b. To campaign for the right to own firearms.

c. То fight for free speech.

2. How did the NRA get round the new laws curbing political campaigning?

a. It used a satellite network.

b. It used the first amendment.

с It started its own radio station.

3. What is the second amendment?

a. The right to keep and carry firearms.

b. The right to freedom of political expression.

с The right to oppose the government.

4. How do the NRA's opponents interpret the second amendment?

a. They say it only applies to the army.

b. They use big media conglomerates.

с They say it is illegal.

5. What is a lobby group?

a. A political group.

b. A group that tries to influence politicians on a particular subject.

с A group that is only interested in one subject.

IV. Vocabulary collocations

The 5 verbs on the left each 'go with' two of the nouns or phrases on the right. Decide which ones they collocate with.

1. to drum up	a. the rules
	b. people's fears
2. to disband	с support
	d. inflation
3. to bend	e. a group
	f. political activity
4. to play on	g. the law
	h. publicity
5. to curb	i. people's prejudices
	j. an association

V. Vocabulary - definitions

Fill the gaps using one of these words from the text:

nebulous warped vigorous partisan (adj)

unease smart lobbyist Pandora's Box

1. Someone who is … has ideas that most people think are strange or frightening.

2. If you open …, you do something that could cause a lot of problems.

3. A … is a person who goes to politicians in order to campaign for a particular issue.

4. If something is … it is not developed or clear enough to describe.

5. … is another word for 'intelligent'.

6.______ is an adjective meaning 'full of energy, enthusiasm or

determination'.

7. If something is described as …, it is very one-sided or biased.

8. … is a feeling of being uncomfortable or unhappy about a situation.

VI. Grammar focus

Look at this sentence from the text:

'The NRA was formed to get involved in elections' The infinitive is used here to express purpose. Match the beginnings and endings to form similar sentences:

1. The main aim of the NRA is...

2. Apart from getting involved in elections, the NRA was formed...

3. NRA News has been described as an attempt...

4. The NRA says US politicians want to create an agency...

5. Critics say the NRA is simply trying...

6. The NRA's vice-president says the aim of NRA News is...

a.... to get round new US laws limiting political campaigning.

b.... to drum up publicity.

с... to decide who can and who cannot broadcast.

d.... to lobby Congress.

e.... to be "balanced and objective and to tell the truth".

f.... to defend the right "to keep and bear arms".

VII. Discussion

In the USA people have the right to own and carry firearms. Do you agree with this right?

If everyone owned a firearm to protect themselves, would the world be a safer place?

 

READING 4

BROTHERS

By Sylvester Monroe

They say you can't go home again. So when I returned to the Chica­go housing projects where I grew up, it was with ambivalence. I was journeying back to my past, and I didn't know what I would find.

It wasn't that I was afraid. I'd been back to the Robert Taylor Homes and Prairie Courts many times in the 20 years since I left in 1966. But this time I was returning as a reporter, to retrace my life and those of my friends. What had happened to us, to-Half Man and Honk, Pee Wee and Billy, and what did it say about growing up black? Black men are six times as likely as white men to be murder victims. We are two and a half times as likely to be unemployed. We finish last in practically every socioeconomic measure from infant mortality to life expectancy. Through portraits of our lives together and apart, I thought, we might find some answers as to why black men in America seem almost an endangered species.

No middle name: When I left Chicago for St. George's School in the fall of 1966, through an out­reach program called A Better Chance, all 11 of us were still in school. And at the wide-eyed age of 14 and 15, we still had dreams. I wanted to be a writer. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald and dreamed of authoring my own novel. I even started signing my name S. Vest Monroe, a bit miffed that my mother had not given me a middle name. The dream gave me hope. And my mother convinced me that without an education the dream was impossible.

Having to leave the safety and familiarity of home to get it was as difficult a decision as I've ever made. If it had been entirely up to me, I might never have gone to St. George's at all. I was happy at Wendell Phillips High, making straight A's, running on the track team, hanging out with a gang called Satan's Saints and dis­covering the wonders of women. Now I was being told that I could do better, much better, but it meant leaving home to attend an all-boys boarding school in New­port, R.I. It might as well have been the other side of the universe. Not only would I be away from my family and friends, there wouldn't be any girls and barely any other blacks. In fact, when I arrived at the front steps of St. George's on a damp Septem­ber night in 1966, I was one of only five blacks enrolled at the 200-student Episcopal school. It was culture shock on a mammoth scale.

The first person I met was Gil Burnett, my first faculty adviser. He was nice enough, but some­thing seemed to bother him. "Do you have other clothes?" he asked, scanning my wide-brimmed Dun-lop hat, dark glasses, Italian knit shirt, reversible-pleated baggy pants and brown and white Stacy-Adams wing tips.

"Yeah," I said. "Just like this." The next day he took me in his Land-Rover to the Anderson-Little knitting mills in Fall River, Mass., bought me a blue blazer, two pairs of gray flannel slacks and a plain pair of black tie shoes. I was thankful for the new duds. They gave me the look of a preppy. But I still found myself won­dering why I agreed to leave 39th Street.

The main reason I was there, I reminded myself, was to please my mother and Leroy Lovelace, the schoolteacher largely respon­sible for getting me the scholar­ship. And my mother had given me an out, or so I thought. She said to me at the outset that I would never forgive myself if I didn't at least go and see what it was like; I could always come home. Secretly, I resolved to stay at St. George's exactly two weeks, long enough to make a show of it, then head for Chicago.

Sick call: After roughly two weeks, I had what I thought was a stroke of luck: I got sick — so sick, in fact, that 1 was admitted to the school infirmary. It was perfect. I'd call my mother, tell her what a godawful place boarding school was, and catch the first ride home. To make my pitch even stronger, I decided to find out exactly what was wrong with me.

“Hey, Doc, what’ve I got, anyway?” I asked.

“Oh, I think you’re suffering from a really bad case of nostalgia,” she said.

I hadn’t the foggiest notion what that meant, but it sounded pretty serious to me. Wonderful, I thought. There’s no way Mom won’t let me come home now. I went to the phone, already planning my return.

“Hey, Ma,” I began.

“Hey. How you doin’?’

“Not so good. I’m sick as a dog, Ma. This place is always cold, the food is terrible, and now I’m in the infirmary.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I can’t keep anything down,” I said. “The doctor says I’ve got a bad case of nostalgia. I think I ought to come home, OK?”

“Sure, you can come home – but under one condition,” she said.

"What's that?" I asked.

"The only way you're coming home before you're supposed to is in a box."

It was one of the hardest things she'd ever done, she confided years later. But she also knew she had to. It was three months before I got home again, for Christmas vacation, and somehow I man­aged to survive. I even found myself actually beginning to like the place and its teachers, who tempered no-nonsense classes with a touch of compassion.

My own capacity for learning hadn't been stunted by life in the Taylor Homes. In some ways, in fact, I was on an equal footing with my wealthier classmates. I had that love and support, that sense of self-worth, that can only come from the family. And as my mother proved, it could happen whether there was one parent or two, a few kids or a houseful.

Faint disquiet: Looking back on it, I was pleased to show what black boys were capable of. Yet, there was a faint disquiet. What bothered me was that some people found it easier to pretend I was something else. "We're colorblind here," a well-meaning faculty member once told me. "We don't see black students or white students, we just see students." But black was what I was; I wasn't sure he saw me at all.

Another St. George's teacher was surprised at my reaction when he implied that I should be grate­ful for the opportunity to attend

St. George's, far away from a place like the Robert Taylors. How could I be, I snapped back, when my friends, my family, everyone that I cared most about, were still there? But you're different, he continued. That's why you got out.

I'm not different, I insisted. I'm just lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time.

What the teacher failed to understand was that my back­ground was not something to be ashamed of. As in the old James Brown song of the '60s, I wanted to "say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud!"

One of the greatest frustrations of my three years at St. George's was that people were always trying to separate me from other black people in a manner strangely rem­iniscent of a time when slave owners divided blacks into "good Negroes" and "bad Negroes." Somehow, attending St. George's made me a good Negro, in their eyes, while those left in Robert Taylor were bad Negroes or, at the very least, inferior ones.

Ever since — through Harvard, through my 14-year career as a journalist — I have found myself looking over my shoulder on occa­sion. My mother had been right: having worked hard, I'd caught the break I needed to get out of the ghetto. But the men of my family were right, too: race is an inescapable burden for every black man.

Though economic-class divisions are rapidly producing a nation of haves and have-nots, for blacks, race still tends to over­shadow all else. It doesn't matter whether you are rich man, poor man, beggar or thief, if you are black, there's an artificial ceiling on your ambition. Many people still perceive blacks, especially black men, as less intelligent, less productive and generally more violent than the rest of society.

I didn't have to go back to the Robert Taylor Homes to under­stand that. Recently, I waited 45 minutes one evening on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan before a cab finally stopped for me. More than a dozen cabbies had passed me by for a "safer" white fare. It's the same in other cities, and it's not just cabdrivers. More than a few times, I've stepped into an elevator and no­ticed a woman clutch her purse a little tighter under her arm, or I've been walking on a deserted sidewalk with a black, male com­panion, when a white couple spots us and suddenly decides to cross the street.

To be sized up, categorized and dismissed all within the space of a nervous glance solely on the basis of race is more than annoying; it's demeaning and damaging to the psyche of an entire people.

Even among people of good will, race relations is old news, it seems — unless somebody gets killed. Sometimes I get the feeling people are thinking, "Why are there still Negroes?"..

Robert Taylor Homes, Prairie Courts: public housing projects in Chicago.

outreach program "A Better Chance": a program providing disadvantaged students with better educational chances.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896-1940): American author of novels (e.g. The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise) and short stories.

to make straight A's: always get the best marks (A's) at school.

Episcopal school: school run by the Protestant Episcopal Church, an American church, which before 1789 was associated with the Church of England.

Stacy-Adams wing tips: shoes with perforated parts covering the toes and sides.

Harvard: prestigious private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636 by John Harvard (1607-38), an English Puritan clergyman in America

 

Text analysis

I. Characterize this sort of text. How do the last four paragraphs differ from the rest?

II. Subdivide the text into different sections and find a headline for each section.

III. Sylvester Monroe is one of the relatively few blacks who managed to get out of the black urban ghetto. Explain how this was facilitated by certain conditions and persons.

IV. Why do you think he recalls the fact the fact that he got new clothes at St.George’s School? Why importance was attached to those new clothes by his former faculty advisor and the other students?

V. Can you account for Mrs Monroe’s reaction when her son wanted to leave St.George’s School? How must Vest Monroe have felt after his mother’s remark?

VI. What did he find disquieting and frustrating about the way the whites treated him at St.George’s School? What were his objections?

VII. What kind of racial discrimination does Sylvester Monroe mention?

VIII. Have you heard of any examples of racial discrimination in the US that confirm Sylvester Monroe’s views?

 

READING 5

"Welfare Migrants: Getting a Cold Shoulder in Wisconsin A Controversial Plan to Limit Newcomers' Benefits"

James N. Baker with Tim Padgett (Kenosha) & Gregory Cerio (Detroit) Newsweek (14 August 1989):23

All fifty states traditionally have an open-door policy for migrants from other parts of the country, but some Wisconsin officials want to qualify their welcome. Since 1986,21,000 welfare families, nearly one third of them from Illinois, have poured into Wisconsin, drawn in part by the state's generous benefits. Wisconsin, a traditionally progressive state, offers the nation's ninth highest monthly Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) payments: $517 to a mother with three children, compared with $342 in Illinois. To stem the tide, Republican Governor Tommy Thompson is backing a plan in which newcomers' benefits would be adjusted to homestate levels for up to six months. "We should not [offer a] financial incentive for poor people to move here," says state Senator Joseph Strohl, a Democrat who drafted the plan. "If they're coming for other reasons, fine, but at least we won't be asking taxpayers to artificially stimulate that migration."

Outraged opponents, who note that most of the migrants are minorities, call the plan everything from impractical and illegal to racist and un-American. "This is veiled racism," says state Representative Rebecca Young. "It's the Willie Horton stuff, playing well in Wisconsin." Thompson's critics argue that migrants of every race come to Wisconsin in search of a better quality of life; as proof, they cite studies made in Michigan and California in the early 1980s in which recipients said family connections and the prospect of better jobs, not fat monthly checks, mainly attracted them to those two high-benefit states. The newcomers argue that it's a matter of civil liberties. "I'm a citizen," says a Chicagoan who brought her four children to Kenosha, Wisconsin, six months ago to escape urban life. "Whether I choose to breathe polluted or unpolluted air is supposed to be my right, isn't it?"

Those on both sides of the issue acknowledge that the influx has created serious problems. Growing numbers of welfare migrants have put a strain on schools, created a housing crunch, introduced street gangs and driven up the crime rate. In Kenosha, a small city of 74,000, school officials complain that big-city transfer students, many of whom need remedial attention to catch up with the mostly middle-class student body, often think nothing of arriving more than an hour late to school. Last year a new student sprayed gang graffiti on the walls of a junior-high school. "He couldn't believe we made such a big deal of it," says Joseph Mangj, principal of a nearby high school. For their part, migrant mothers say they are pleased with the new schools. The schools here do so much to keep my kids' interest," says the Chicago mother. "[They] get more attention and materials, I can tell."

The most alarming consequence of the newcomers' arrival has been the surging crime rate, largely tied to the rise of street gangs. These are people moving out of areas where the gang influence is high, and they tend to bring it along with them," says Detective Louis Perri of Kenosha's three-year-old gang-crimes unit. Gang-related crimes—ranging from dealing drugs to extortion to assault-have jumped by 25 percent. Police believe that some people involved in criminal activity are on the lam. "A lot of them are under pressure from authorities in Illinois," says Perri, "so they figure they should come here." Cops aren't the only ones upset by the gangs. The people who moved in right above me [are] into drugs," says another welfare mother. They're starting to make nights here seem like the projects [in Chicago]."

Many new arrivals to Kenosha move into low-rise, single-family units built for autoworkers in the prosperous postwar era. Longtime residents say that once tidy yards now go untended and out-of-work men loiter on every corner. But not everyone holds the newcomers entirely responsible for re-creating the symbols of urban decay. "Landlords here encourage these people to live in junk homes just so they can get fat on other people's welfare checks," says Elizabeth Dimitrijevic, a World War П refugee from Europe who settled in Kenosha in 1950. Her hunch is right: some welfare migrants have told social workers that Wisconsin apartments are advertised in Chicago newspapers.

Though not all newcomers are minorities, the debate has raised the ugly specter of racism in a state relatively unused to it. By official count, minorities constitute only 6 percent of Wisconsin's adult population—a number almost certain to rise in next year's census. Some blacks worry about intra-racial tension caused by newcomers competing for jobs with longtime black residents. "We would become each other's own worst enemy," says Matthew Stelly, a Milwaukee journalist. Other local blacks sympathize with newcomers after they experience firsthand how their own image has been altered. "When I go to a store here, until they find out I'm assistant principal of the high school, I'm looked upon as a welfare recipient myself," says Kenosha resident Nob Starling-Ratliff.

If Thompson and Strohl succeed, they could be taking on the US Supreme Court. In 1969 the court ruled that residency requirements for welfare benefits deny citizens equal protection under the law. With a more conservative court, the governor believes they can get around the 1969 ruling: under their plan benefits will not be denied, just reduced. Last year welfare-reform advocates around the country hoped Congress would create "floors" to make state payments more equitable, but a federal floor provision to a welfare-reform bill was dropped by a House committee. This fall activists will be watching Wisconsin to see if the governor can persuade the state legislature to join him on a controversial political limb.

 

LISTENING

Fighting terrorism

Into the open

May 14th 2009

From The Economist print edition