| Noun | Adjective + Noun | Russian equivalent |
| politics | political elite | |
| public | __________ commotion | |
| judge | judicial investigation | |
| democracy | __________ institutions | |
| damage | __________ information | |
| government | ____________ bodies | |
| environment | ____________ mismanagement | |
| expense | ___________ lawsuits | |
| diversity | _____________ types | |
| investigation | _______________ reporting | |
| Congress | ______________ actions | |
| account | ______________ government | |
| continue | ______________ press attention | |
| finance | _____________ institutions | |
| effect | _____________ mechanism |
B) With your partner, practice giving Russian and English equivalents of the phrases above.
WORD-BUILDING 3: NEGATIVE PREFIXES
| un in im il ir non dis de dys mis anti |
A) Choose the right negative prefix for these words. The right answers can be found in the text (Core reading 2).
| dispensible | indispensible |
| honesty | |
| function | |
| justice | |
| enunciation | |
| fame | |
| management | |
| withstanding | |
| evitable | |
| governmental | |
| corruption | |
| true | |
| complete | |
| trustworthy | |
| legal | |
| relevant | |
| lawful | |
| compose | |
| integrate |
IV. FOCUS ON LEGAL VOCABULARY
Complete the table. Put (-) where impossible.
| Verb | Noun | Person |
| commit crime | crime | |
| corruptor | ||
| investigation | ||
| judge | judgment | judge |
| defamation | - | |
| do sth wrong | wrongdoing | wrongdoer |
| prosecute | ||
| denunciation | denunciator | |
| perpetrate | ||
| abuse |
COLLOCATIONS
a) Match the verb to the noun to form collocations:
| Verb | Noun | Collocation | Russian equivalent |
| 1) make | information | 1) make contribution | |
| 2) leak | wrongdoing | 2) | |
| 3) reveal | investigation | 3) | |
| 4) trigger | contribution | 4) |
| 5) prosecute | public records | 5) | |
| 6) monitor | performance | 6) | |
| 7) access | duties | 7) | |
| 8) fulfill | abuses | 8) |
| 9) affect | inquiries | 9) | |
| 10) conduct | requirements | 10) | |
| 11) meet | citizens life | 11) |
B) Translate the collocations into Russian. Practice them with your partner.
CORE READING 3
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Noam Chomsky: The US Behaves Nothing Like a Democracy
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements. The following is a transcript of his speech delivered in Bonn, Germany, at DW Global Media Forum.
According to received doctrine, we live in capitalist democracies, which are the best possible system, despite some flaws. Theres been an interesting debate over the years about the relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even compatible? I wont be pursuing this because Id like to discuss a different system what we could call the really existing capitalist democracy, RECD for short, pronounced wrecked by accident. To begin with, how does RECD compare with democracy? Well, that depends on what we mean by democracy. There are several versions of this. One, there is a kind of received version. Its soaring rhetoric of the Obama variety, patriotic speeches, what children are taught in school, and so on. In the U.S. version, its government of, by and for the people. And its quite easy to compare that with RECD.
The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work thats essentially the gold standard in the field, its concluded that for roughly 70% of the population the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale they have no influence on policy whatsoever. Theyre effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; its plutocracy.
Inquiries of this kind turn out to be dangerous stuff because they can tell people too much about the nature of the society in which they live. So fortunately, Congress has banned funding for them, so we wont have to worry about them in the future.
In the past, the United States has sometimes, kind of sardonically, been described as a one-party state: the business party with two factions called Democrats and Republicans. Thats no longer true. Its still a one-party state, the business party. But it only has one faction. The faction is moderate Republicans, who are now called Democrats. There are virtually no moderate Republicans in whats called the Republican Party and virtually no liberal Democrats in whats called the Democratic Party. Its basically a party of what would be moderate Republicans and similarly, Richard Nixon would be way at the left of the political spectrum today. Eisenhower would be in outer space.
Well, another important feature of RECD is that the public must be kept in the dark about what is happening to them. The herd must remain bewildered. The reasons were explained lucidly by the professor of the science of government at Harvard thats the official name another respected liberal figure, Samuel Huntington. As he pointed out, power remains strong when it remains in the dark. Exposed to sunlight, it begins to evaporate. Bradley Manning is facing a life in prison for failure to comprehend this scientific principle. Now Edward Snowden as well. And it works pretty well.
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The role of the PR industry in elections is explicitly to undermine the school-child version of democracy. What you learn in school is that democracies are based on informed voters making rational decisions. All you have to do is take a look at an electoral campaign run by the PR industry and see that the purpose is to create uninformed voters who will make irrational decisions. For the PR industry thats a very easy transition from their primary function. Their primary function is commercial advertising. Commercial advertising is designed to undermine markets. If you took an economics course you learned that markets are based on informed consumers making rational choices. If you turn on the TV set, you see that ads are designed to create irrational, uninformed consumers making irrational choices. The whole purpose is to undermine markets in the technical sense.
Theyre well aware of it, incidentally. So for example, after Obamas election in 2008, a couple of months later the advertising industry had its annual conference. Every year they award a prize for the best marketing campaign of the year. That year they awarded it to Obama. He beat out Apple computer, did an even better job of deluding the public or his PR agents did. If you want to hear some of it, turn on the television today and listen to the soaring rhetoric at the G-8 Summit in Belfast. Its standard.
Obamas now conducting the worlds greatest international terrorist campaign the drones and special forces campaign. Its also a terror-generating campaign. The common understanding at the highest level is that these actions generate potential terrorists. Ill quote General Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus predecessor. He says that for every innocent person you kill, and there are plenty of them, you create ten new enemies.
One of the striking examples was the invasion of Iraq. U.S. and British intelligence agencies informed their governments that the invasion of Iraq was likely to lead to an increase in terrorism. They didnt care. In fact, it did. Terrorism increased by a factor of seven the first year after the Iraqi invasion, according to government statistics. Right now the government is defending the massive surveillance operation. Thats on the front pages. The defense is on grounds that we have to do it to apprehend terrorists.
If there were a free press an authentic free press the headlines would be ridiculing this claim on the grounds that policy is designed in such a way that it amplifies the terrorist risk. But you cant find that, which is one of innumerable indications of how far we are from anything that might be called a free press.
So how do you deal with the threat, whatever it is? Actually, there are ways. Im short of time so I wont go through details but theres one very striking one: Weve just passed an opportunity last December. There was to be an international conference under the auspices of the non-proliferation treaty, UN auspices, in Helsinki to deal with moves to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. That has overwhelming international support non-aligned countries; its been led by the Arab states, Egypt particularly, for decades. Overwhelming support. If it could be carried forward it would certainly mitigate the threat. It might eliminate it. Everyone was waiting to see whether Iran would agree to attend.
In early November, Iran agreed to attend. A couple of days later, Obama canceled the conference. No conference. The European Parliament passed a resolution calling for it to continue. The Arab states said they were going to proceed anyway, but it cant be done. So we have to live with the gravest threat to world peace. And we possibly have to march on to war which in fact is being predicted.
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The population could do something about it if they knew anything about it. But here, the free press enters. In the United States there has literally not been a single word about this anywhere near the mainstream. You can tell me about Europe.
POST-READING TASKS
1. Write a summary of the text.
| A summary is a brief statement of the texts main ideas. 1. Read the article trying to get a sense of its general focus and content 2. Write the articles thesis. (A thesis is a one-sentence summary of the entire text/article.) 3. Read each paragraph (or divide the passage into logical sections). Underline key ideas and terms. 4. Write each paragraphs topic. Follow the principle of the lead in most newspaper stories what, who, why, where, when and how. 5. Combine all the sentences to form your summary: organize your summary sentences in the same order as the main ideas in the original text. 6. Use standard phrases and linking words to connect the ideas in the summary. |
2. Why does the author think that the US does not behave like a democracy? List all the reasons mentioned in the text. Do you agree with the author?
3. Topic for discussion: Is Democracy Fact or Fiction?
II. GRAMMAR FOCUS: Relative clauses
A relative clause is a subordinate clause which begins with a relative pronoun who / which or the word that. There are two types of relative clauses: defining and non-defining.
A defining relative clause identifies a thing or person.
| Subject | Object | Possessive | |
| for people | who that | whom/who that | whose |
| for things | which that | which that | whose/of which |
e.g. The student who achieves the highest GPA score will be awarded a prize of $20,000.
Computer games that involve fighting and shooting have a negative effect on young people.
Whom is highly formal. We normally use who or that for the object and it is still more common to omit the object pronoun altogether:
e.g. The car (that) I hired a week ago broke down.
The police identified him as the man (who) they saw in the area yesterday.
A non-defining relative clause provides additional information about a thing or person. The relative pronoun who or which is always preceded by a comma.
| Subject | Object | Possessive | |
| for people | who | whom/who | whose |
| for things | which | which | whose/of which |
e.g. Albert Einstein, who was born at Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879, is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence E = mc2.
The United Nations, which is headquartered in New York, aims at promoting international cooperation and world peace.
(!) Do not use the relative pronoun that in non-defining relative clauses.
(!) You cannot omit the relative pronoun in non-defining relative clauses.
Relative Adverbs Level: intermediate
A relative adverb can be used instead of a relative pronoun plus preposition.
e.g. This is the shop in which I bought my bike.→ This is the shop where I bought my bike.
| relative adverb | meaning | use | example |
| when | in/on which | refers to a time expression | the day when we met him |
| where | in/at which | refers to a place | the place where we met him |
| why | for which | refers to a reason | the reason why we met him |
Connective clauses
Connective clauses do not define or describe a thing or object in the main clause they continue the story. Connective clauses are preceded by a comma.
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e.g. The clock struck thirteen, which made everyone laugh.
He refused to do his share of the chores, which annoyed the others.
PRACTICE
