И. А. Фомченкова, Н. А. Шайдорова
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Give Russian equivalents for the following words and expressions from the text and use them in the sentences of your own: Face smb, glance at smth, pull oneself together, keep one’s eyes on smb, be impressed with smth, suffer from smth, read books on smth, come across, find smth hateful, make smb do smth, be shy of doing smth, waste life (time), master doing smth. IX. Discuss the following using the story you have read as the basis for discussion:
X. The story Wonderful People by Richard Hagopian is a love story, very briefly sketched, with which almost anyone can identify oneself. Try to understand the author’s intention behind the epithets “wonderful” and “tall” in relations to the characters. Answer the questions below: I saw her and liked her because she was not beautiful. Her chin was not just right and something about her nose fell short of perfection. And when she stood up, well, there wasn’t much to see but her tallness, the length from her hips to her feet, and the length from her hips to her shoulders. She was a tall girl and that was all. She was the first tall girl I had ever liked, perhaps because I had never watched a tall girl get up from a table before; that is, get up the way she did, everything in her rising to the art of getting up, combining to make the act look beautiful and not like just another casual1 movement, an ordinary life motion. Maybe I liked her because when I talked to her for the first time I found that she had tall ideas too, ideas which like her chin and nose did not seem just right to me, but like her getting up were beautiful. They hung together. They were tall ideas, about life and people, morals and ethics. At first they seemed shockingly loose to me, but when I saw them all moving together, like her body, they hung together. They looked naturally beautiful. They had the same kind of pulled-out poetry that sometimes defies the extra-long line and hangs together; hangs together when you see the whole thing finished, when you've scanned it up and down and seen all the line endings melt into a curious kind of unity, which makes strange music-strange because everything is long yet compact. She was music. I see it now, her getting up impressed me at the time because for the first time I felt poetry in a person rising—music in body parts moving in natural rhythms. I liked the tall girl. By stature I was not tall. I was built almost too close to the ground. Perhaps that is why I had old-fashioned ideas, ideas as simple and as pure as the good soil. Maybe my eyes saw more in the ground than other people's because I was closer to it. I was what you might call compact. Everything was knitted together strongly, like my ideas about life, morals and ethics, all squeezed together, rhyming easily, making music of a strong, dominant sort. Call it smugness if you wish. But I really couldn't move far without taking along everything I had. My ideas were like that too. I could take a radical fling once in a while, but sooner or later, mostly sooner, the rest of me ganged up and compressed the wild motion with one easy squeeze. We were a funny pair, the tall girl and I, funny because we were so different in everything. She was a slow walker and I had to hold back. She talked in long lines and I used the short one. She ate easily and I ate hard and fast. We were different. The tall girl and I fell in love with each other. Why, I do not know. We just did, that's all. We did crazy things: tall things and compact things, like running madly up and down a beach laughing and feeling loose and free, or like sitting down and knitting our minds together to feel after a piece of music or a problem. Something made us agree. We couldn't figure out what, but we agreed. And after looking at each other and seeing our bodies and the stuff behind them, we couldn't quite understand, but we accepted our good luck and we called ourselves wonderful people. After a while we talked about marriage, children, and a home. For a few months we didn't agree on a couple of things, but, as I said, we were wonderful people, and one day we decided to get married. But the tall girl and I didn't get married. For one moment somewhere I think we stopped being wonderful people, and she must have felt her tallness for the first time, and maybe the ground came up too close to my face. But that was all; it was the end. Something had come between the tall girl and me. I don't know what it was, but something died and with it went all the funny music and poetry in people. Many years have passed and sometimes I get a strange feeling—I mean about walking and getting up. I don't seem to hang together as I used to. Only last week my best friend told me to pull myself together. And when I looked around, I'll be damned if I wasn't just all pieces and parts, going this way and that, down and . . . up. Up! That was it. I felt taller. And I felt good. I liked the freedom. I could reach for an idea now without straining everything in me to hold it; and I didn't care about the rest of me. What music there was left in me, what music I heard in others, was the strange kind one finds in long-line poetry. It made me happy. Sometimes I think of the tall girl; but she doesn't seem tall any more. She just seems natural—arms, legs, ideas, and everything. I wonder what I thought was tall? Sometimes I wonder if she is the same girl I first saw rising from a table. I don't know. But people grow taller, I know that. Perhaps they grow shorter and more compact too. Maybe that's what makes us wonderful people. 1. Why did the girl and the young man call themselves “wonderful people”? What was unusual about their falling in love? 2. Do you think that two very different people who fall in love and part may grow more like each other in time? 3. In what way do people grow taller? In what way do they grow shorter and more compact? XI. Substitute the appropriate term from the list below for the boldface term in each sentence from the text you have just read: annoying, beautiful, believes, challenges, closely examined, closely fitted, disturbing, forcing, moral principles, pleased, pressed, read, self-satisfaction, strongly affected, uncertainty, unplanned, virtues, wide.
1. I had old-fashioned ideas. a) pure; b) traditional; c)rigid 2. The girl and I did crazy things, like running madly down the beach. a) wild and unusual; b) unhealthy, dangerous; c) insane, psychopathic 3. Once in a while I would take a radical fling. a) an immoral idea thrown at me; b) a step in the wrong direction; c) a wild departure from the customary 4. My friend told me to pull myself together. a) to get hold of myself; b) to stop feeling sorry for myself; c) to avoid worrying about myself 5. Sooner or later everything ganged up on me. a) came together in; b) went away from; c) got together against
What is Personality? Most people think they know what personality is. But here are some questions that might make you think. Is everything about you part of your personality? Which aspects are and which are not? Do some people have more personality than others? Do animals have personality? Do cars? Let's deal with the last question first. Of course cars have personality! Alissa's Porsche S/EX definitely has a different personality than Marco's 1970 VW Beetle. But wait, you might say. A car can't have personality—it's just a machine. So what do we mean when we talk about a car's "personality"? Obviously, we are using the term as a metaphor. What we mean is that there is something about these cars that is like personality. We may simply be referring to the fact that they have different characteristics (fast vs. slow; handles well vs. poorly). Or we may be referring to the thoughts and feelings the cars bring out in us. When we say the Porsche is “sexy”, we mean it excites us, gives us pleasure, is desirable. A car's personality, then, boils down to (1) a description of its characteristics or (2) our reactions to it. Some psychologists would say that when we talk about people's personalities, we are also just describing or summarizing their characteristics. Some would even say that personality exists more in the eye of the beholder than in the beheld. For these psychologists, the term personality is not all that different whether applied to people or to cars. Other psychologists would disagree. They would say that the term personality implies the existence of a living being with an inner mental life consisting of thoughts, feelings, desires, and goals as well as behaviors. Personality is not merely a description of behavior, but involves processes in the person that are responsible for this behavior. People behave as they do, at least in part, because of their personalities. To say a person is sociable or aggressive or honest is to say there are inner characteristics that cause him or her to be sociable or aggressive or honest. From this perspective, cars most decidedly do not have personalities. What about animals? When we asked our students this question, the great majority insisted that animals have personalities. They described their pet dog as friendly, or intelligent, or aggressive. And they argued that this is very different from calling a car sexy. What do you think? Here is another question. Do some people have more personality than others? We sometimes describe someone as having “lots of personality”, often as a way of saying the person makes a strong impact on others or is charismatic. Do charismatic people have more personality than boring people, or are their personalities just different? Virtually all personality psychologists would answer “different, not more or less.” But in another way, the idea of some people having more personality than others may make sense. To see this, we need to move on to the question of whether all of a person's behavior is a reflection of his or her personality. Consider career choice. Some people seem to have a strong sense of what they want to do. They are strongly driven to become an athlete, or a computer scientist, or an artist, or a journalist. Others make their career choices in more haphazard ways. They get a job through a friend or relative, they work 9 to 5, and if they do well maybe they get a promotion. Although both kinds of people are influenced by aspects of their personalities, there is a sense in which inner characteristics in the first kind of person are playing a more influential role. We would argue that not everything we do is equally influenced by personality. Some things we do just because everybody does them. People who sit quietly in church during a sermon are not displaying behavior strongly influenced by their personalities (although the fact that they are in church at all may reflect their personalities). But a person who stands up and starts whistling “Dixie” during a sermon clearly is. So it is possible that some things we do are more strongly influenced by our personalities than other things. This brings us to the first question we asked: Is everything about you related to your personality? Is “personality” just another word for “person”? If so, personality psychology has a formidable task, because it must be concerned with everything that makes you who you are. From this perspective, personality psychology would not be a subspeciality of psychology, but rather a central discipline drawing not only from general psychology, but from anthropology, biology, sociology, literature, history, cultural studies, and all the other disciplines devoted to understanding people. Obviously, there is no “true” or “correct” answer to the question we have raised. We could define personality so that it includes almost everything about people: “The sum total of a person's thoughts, feelings, desires, intentions, and action tendencies, including their unique organization within the person.” (In fact, this definition captures much of what is common to definitions of personality given by various psychologists.). Perhaps this is what most people mean by the word personality. Scientists, however, need not define their subject matter in everyday terms. A definition has a purpose in science: it serves to specify the domain that one intends to study and understand. We believe that this definition takes in too much and sets an impossible goal. Our preference is for a more limited definition that can set a more realistic agenda. As a way of specifying the subject matter of personality psychology, we shall define personality as those thoughts, feelings, desires, intentions, and action tendencies that contribute to important aspects of individuality.
1. What definition of personality would allow us to talk about the “personality” of a car/ a coat/ an armchair, etc.? 2. Would a car or any of the inanimate objects still have a “personality” if suddenly all human beings are annihilated? Would you say that animals have personalities? 3. Does the behavior of a person who is all alone and waits patiently at a street crossing for the traffic light to turn green although no cars or policemen are in sight suggest anything about his/her personality? If so, what? 4. Is personality quantifiable? What is the problem with the definition of personality which begins “The sum total of a person’s...”? 5. In the definition of personality given by the authors, the word “individuality” is of central importance. What in general terms is “individuality”? 5. What are the components of a person’s inner mental life mentioned in the text? 6. What people do we call charismatic? Do you know any? 7. How is career choice usually made? In what way is your career choice influenced by your personality? Do you have a strong sense of what you want to do in future? Vocabulary tasks VIRTUOUS CHARACTERISTICS: affable, amiable, good-natured, good-humoured, kind, kind-hearted, communicative, sociable, friendly, modest, discreet, generous, considerate, attentive, thoughtful, earnest, sincere, enthusiastic, calm, quiet, composed, self-possessed, honest, merciful, impartial, just, patient, forbearing, sympathetic, respectable, cordial, broad-minded, witty, intelligent, dignified, capable, benevolent, philanthropic, scrupulous, consistent, easy-going, affectionate, devoted, loyal, courageous, persevering, industrious, hard-working, sweet, gentle, proud. EVIL CHARACTERISTICS: ill-natured, unkind, hard-hearted, reserved, uncommunicative, unsociable, hostile, haughty, arrogant, dashing, showy, indiscreet, unscrupulous, greedy, inconsistent, tactless, insincere, hypocritical, false, vulgar, double-faced, indifferent, dispassionate, fussy, unrestrained, dishonest, cruel, partial, intolerant, conceited, self-willed, willful, capricious, perverse, insensible, inconsiderate, servile, presumptuous, deceitful, harsh, sulky, sullen, obstinate, coarse, rude, vain, impertinent, impudent, revengeful. |
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