Reading and Speaking
Task I. Read the following article fairly quickly.
Seven Banks a Day are Robbed in la
OCTOBER 4, 1979, is a day of fond memory for FBI agents in Los Angeles. It’s the last day that the city did not have a bank robbery.
Last year there were 1,844 bank robberies in the city and its suburbs, an average of about seven every business day, and a quarter of all the bank robberies committed in the United States. The total haul was around four million dollars.
There are several reasons why Los Angeles heads the bank-robbery league – way ahead of San Francisco, second with 546, and New York, third with 443. The place has an awful lot of banks – 3300 – and many stay open until 5 or 6 in the evening and at weekends.
The robberies are usually quite genteel, with none of the machine-gun violence of the old movies. Usually, the robber passes a stick-up note to a letter, pockets the cash while the surveillance cameras click away, then makes a getaway via the nearest freeway. Tellers have orders to hand over the money immediately. “The banks believe, quite rightly, that you can replace money, but you can’t replace lives,” says one FBI man.
Most of the robbers are drug-addicts. But they also include “pregnant women, one-legged men, husband-and-wife and father-and-son teams,” according to Joseph Chefalo, who heads the FBI’s bank-robbery squad.
The FBI is particularly keen to find the “Yankee Bandit,” who may have earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records with 65 bank holdups. Before making his getaway, he always doffs his Yankee baseball cap, with a smile in the direction of the cameras. For a while, the FBI thought he had retired with his haul of 155,000 dollars. He was not seen over the Christmas holidays. But when the first working day of the new year started off with 14 robberies, there he was, smiling for the cameras, Yankee cap in one hand, the cash in the other [4].
Task II. Say whether the following statements are true or false, and why.
True False
S
even
banks are robbed every day in LA.B ank robbers frequently injure banks staff or customers.
B anks tell their staff not to try and resist robbers.
T he FBI disapproves of the bank’s advice to staff.
T he FBI has no idea what the “Yankee Bandit” looks like.
T here were no bank robberies in LA before 1979.
B ank robbers don’t usually need to speak to bank staff.
L A banks have a more relaxed atmosphere than banks in other US cities.
Task III. Classify the following cases of homicide into murder and manslaughter. Motivate your choice.
Bill arrives home to find a stranger attacking his four-year old daughter. He is so furious with rage that he kills the stranger.
Sally discovers that her husband is having an affair with another woman. She slowly poisons him to death over the next four weeks.
James drives his car so carelessly and at such speed that he cannot stop at a pedestrian crossing and he knocks down and kills him.
The accused received a friendly challenge by his step-father to see who was “quicker on the draw” with shotguns. Both men were drunk, but good friends. Moloney shot and killed his step-father, although he claimed he had no intention to do so and did not appreciate that the gun was aimed at the victim.
Task IV. Read the following article.