What was the most surprising thing you’ve read about? Has the article made you feel that you should change any of your habits and attitudes? Why/Why not? (Write about 200 words)

III ВАРІАНТ

Read and translate the following text.

All in the Memory...

Many people complain that their memory is bad, particularly as they get older. Phone numbers, names, facts we studied only a few days ago - life would be so much easier if we could remember them all effortlessly. So how can we improve our memory?

Many people think that repeating things is the best way to remember them. While this undoubtedly helps short-term memory (remembering telephone number- for a few seconds, for example), psychologists doubt whether it can help you to remember things for very long. The British psychologist E.C. Stanford seemed to prove this point when he tested himself on five prayers that he had read aloud every morning for over 25 years. He found that he could remember no more than three words of some of them! More helpful, especially for remembering numbers, is “chunking”,or grouping the information. The following numbers would be impossible for most of us to remember: 1492178919931848. But look at them in “chunks”, and it becomes much easier: 1492 1789 1993 1848.

So what about “memory training”? We've all heard about people who can memorise packs of cards by heart — how is this done and can anyone learn how to do it? According to experts, there are various ways of training your memory. Many of them involve forming a mental picture of the items to be memorised. One method, which may be useful in learning foreign languages, is to create a picture in your mind associated with a word you want to remember. For example, an English person wishing to learn “pato” (the Spanish word for “duck”), could associate it with the English verb “to pat”, imagining someone patting a duck on the head would remind the learner of the Spanish word.

Another method is to invent a story that includes all the things you want to remember. In experiments, people were asked to remember up to 120 words using this technique; when tested afterwards, on average, they were able to recall 90 per cent of them! Surprisingly however, there is nothing new about these methods - they were around even in ancient times. Apparently the Roman general Publius Scipio could recognise and name his entire army – 35,000 men in total!

However; not all of us are interested in learning long lists of numbers just for fun. For those studying large quantities of information, psychologists suggest that the best way to “form meaningful connections” is to ask yourself a lot of questions as you go along. So, for example, if you read about a particular disease, you would ask yourself questions like “Do peple get it from water?”, “What parts of the body does it affect?” and so on. This is said to be far more effective than time spent “passively” reading und re-reading notes

Finally, what about the opposite problem? What happens when people lose their memories? Memory loss can take many forms: cases of people who forget their identity and end up wandering the streets are, sadly, relatively common. Rarer cases include the man who lost his memory for faces and believed that a stranger was watching him every time lie looked in the mirror; or the man who lost his visual memory, and could not recognise everyday objects, confusing a pan with a knife, for example. In the end, he preferred to wear dark glasses and pretend that he was blind!

Answer the Questions to the text

1. What happens to our memory as we get older?

2.  According to the text, which techniques are useful for:

• remembering things for a few seconds?

• remembering foreign words?

• remembering long numbers?

• remembering long lists of words?

• remembering information you are studying?

3. The text mentions several cases of people who lose their memories. What was the problem in each case? What happened?

3. Find the English equivalents in the text:

- старіти

- без зусиль

- короткочасна пам’ять

- розбивати інформацію на групи

- формування образу в думках

- запам’ятовувати

- в середньому

- в цілому

- губити пам’ять

- вештатися по вулицях

- випадки…вельми поширені

How good is your memory? Have you ever had a problem remembering facts, names, English irregular verbs, etc.? Did you discover any useful idea as for remembering things from the text? Which of the techniques mentioned do you use for remembering different things? Which other techniques do you know? (Write about 150-200 words).

IV ВАРІАНТ

Read and translate the following text.

Cooperative Kids

The concept of cooperative learning is alien to all of us who were taught the traditional way, but it offers our children the adventure of finding their own answers. Di Lilford reports.

If you took a doctor from the 19th century and put her in a modern operating theatre, she would have no idea what to do, but if you put a teacher from the 19th cen­tury into a modern classroom she would be able to carry on teaching without pause. Teaching methods have hardly changed in one hundred years. The idea remains that students are empty containers which the teacher fills with knowledge, and that all stu­dents have to do is listen and write.

Education consultant Alyce Miller says: "This approach does not work in today's changing world. We are not teaching creative problem-solving. We encourage competition, believing that this brings out the best in people." But this is not so. Encouraging children to concentrate on getting the best marks destroys motivation and takes the fun out of learning. She goes on to say that the teacher's role is no longer to feed stu­dents with information. "The facts are available in libraries, on CD-ROMs and on the Internet. What stu­dents need are the skills to find this information, to use it and to think creatively in order to solve the problems of our world."

Miller believes that cooperative learning is the future of education and thinks of it as the best way to encourage responsibility, tolerance and helpfulness towards others. She says that good relationships are the key to effective learning.

In cooperative learning classes, the traditional classroom physical layout is abandoned. Children do not sit in straight rows of desks facing the teacher, but rather face one another to make it easier to share ideas. Pupils learn to work first in pairs, then in threes, and finally in teams of four. Students are required to parti­cipate actively in discussing and shaping their own knowledge. The teacher, who is still very important to the process, becomes the helper rather than the master.

Aarnout Brombacher, head of the mathematics depart­ment at Westerford High School, says: "The incorrect assumption that many people make about cooperative learning is that it is merely group work. It is much, much more. It recognises that pupils do not have the skills to work together. With this technique, most of the time in the classroom is spent teaching them these skills - life skills."

Brett Melville, a 17-year-old pupil at the school, agrees. "You learn the same material as you would using the normal method, but this way you learn how to work with others at the same time. In our class, we are given enough time to discuss issues and problems in detail." He adds that it might take longer than simply listening to the teacher lecture, but the students remember much more afterwards.

One teacher, Lynne Gedye, has been using cooperative learning in her classes for two years. She says, "This year we have several pupils in the class who can hardly speak a word of English. I was tearing my hair out, wondering what to do, but I need not have worried. The children's response was amazing. The stronger ones coached the weaker ones endlessly so they could participate in the question time, too.

All in all, it seems that cooperative learning turns the classroom from a competitive arena into a place where learning facts and life skills is both more fun and more effective for pupils and teachers alike.