1. Discuss the following questions in groups of 2-4. Make good use of topical vocabulary (See Section 3, task 8)

1. Do you agree or disagree with the statement in paragraph 4 that not many people make their livings at tasks that interest them? Give examples to support your position.

2. What do you think of people who, like the author, do what they want to do with little or no interest in their effect on other people? What are your reasons for feeling as you do?

3. The author finds his greatest means of attaining happiness in work and in relationship with family and friends. What is yours?

4. What factors determine an individual human activity?

5. Support or refute the ideas.

a) “The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined … by his heredity”.

b) Troubles tend to foster the most admirable human qualities – courage and its analogues.

c) What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand.

d) Christian faith is full of palpable absurdities.

2. Work in pairs. Basing on the words and phrases below in A), B), C) guess the number of each of the 3 paragraphs, taken out of the text, and add words and expressions which may help retell them. Try to be as close to the source text as possible. Correct your partner’s retelling and help to improve.

A) a means of, attain happiness, domestic affection, day to day intercourse, bitter sorrow, serious disputes, associate with, friends of old standing, delight sb, turn to sb, general tastes, see sth alike, give pleasure.

B) individual’s activity, determine, equipment, for the same reason, get oneself done, lie easiest to one’s hand, intense, insatiable, interest in, play with sth, the average facility, put sth into words, dealer, concocter.

C) worship, debasing rather than ennobling, grovel before, denounce instead of respect, goodness of, on the strength of, villainous, a clear conscience, treat sb, with vast politeness, can’t help doing, the rest of humanity, revere sb

3. Working with a partner and discussing every point fill in the blanks with the links from the box below:

1)

which In other words rather more than which

of course For the same reason because that (2)

as or (3) In consequence and thus

The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, ______, by the equipment with _______ he came into the world. _________, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, ____ a hen does, _________ I was born without any equipment for it. __________ I do not get myself elected to Congress, ____ play the violoncello, _____ teach metaphysics in a college, _____ work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens ______ I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, ________ to play with them. It happens also ______ I was born with _____ the average facility for putting them into words. _________, I am a writer and editor, _____ is to say, a dealer in them and concocter of them.

2)

At other times until all the same

but still and at the same time just as

But like even though

There is very little conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful _____ subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, _________ my poor father tried to make me a business man. _________, ____ any other relatively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. ____ I became a writer ______, and shall remain one ______ the end of the chapter, _____ a cow goes on giving milk all life, _______ what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.