Order of adjectives

Adjectives follow an order before a noun:

Opinion	Size	Age	Shape	Colour	Origin	Material	Purpose	+Noun
good bad	huge tiny	young elderly	round square	black white	Spanish Japanese	leather plastic	riding sleeping	boots bag

EXERCISES

1. Put in right order the adjectives and translate into Kazakh/Russian

1. white/small/cat

2. reddish-orange color/nocturnal antelopes/The Bongo

3. antelopes/medium-sized/Bontebok

4. long spotted white-tipped tail/ slender build/spotted coat with single black spot/carnivore/Cheetah

5. Gray/African/talkative/ parrot

2. Make up sentences by using following adjectives and nouns in the box:

Golden beautiful sand fox red fur poisonous snake dangerous small big rhino skin African Asian thick nails bear brown long eyes domestic cats wild herbivorous carnivorous grey large

Listening

Pre-listening activity

1. Translate following words and word combinations

• Tortoises

• Endangered animals

• Habitat

• Conservationists

• To become extinct

Post-listening activity 2. Listen again and answer the questions

• How many Giant Galapagos tortoises are left by 1960s?

• Who is James Gibb?

• Where do Giant Galapagos tortoises live?

• How many years do Giant Galapagos tortoises live?

• How many Giant Galapagos tortoises will get the Galapagos Islands next year?

Reading 1

Pre-Reading Activities

1. List all the words and word combinations that comes to your mind about title of the text below

2. Read the text and translate unknown words. Entering a New World: Environment and Civilization

Lester R. Brown

To understand our current environmental dilemma, it helps to look at earlier civilizations that also got into environmental trouble. Our early twenty-first century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question is how we will respond.

As Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, some of the early societies that were in environmental trouble were able to change their ways in time to avoid decline and collapse. Six centuries ago, for example, Icelanders realized that overgrazing on their grass-covered highlands was leading to extensive soil loss from the inherently thin soils of the region. Rather than lose the grasslands and face economic decline, farmers joined together to determine how many sheep the highlands could sustain and then allocated quotas among themselves, thus preserving their grasslands. The Icelanders understood the consequences of overgrazing and reduced their sheep numbers to a level that could be sustained. Their wool production and woolen goods industry continue to thrive today. 

Today, our successes and problems flow from the extraordinary growth in the world economy over the last century. The economy’s annual growth, once measured in billions of dollars, is now measured in the trillions. Indeed, just the growth in the output of goods and services in 2007 exceeded the total output of the world economy in 1900. 29

While the economy is growing exponentially, the earth’s natural capacities, such as its ability to supply fresh water, forest products, and seafood, have not increased. A team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel concluded in a 2002 study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by an estimated 25 percent. This means we are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse. 30

In our modern high-tech civilization, it is easy to forget that the economy, indeed our existence, is wholly dependent on the earth’s natural systems and resources. We depend, for example, on the earth’s climate system for an environment hospitable to agriculture, on the hydrological cycle to provide us with fresh water, and on long-term geological processes to convert rocks into the soil that has made the earth such a biologically productive planet.

There are now so many of us placing such heavy demands on the earth that we are overwhelming its natural capacities to meet our needs. The earth’s forests are shrinking. Each year overgrazing converts vast areas of grassland into desert. The pumping of underground water exceeds natural recharge in countries containing half the world’s people, leaving many without adequate water as their wells go dry. 31

While the continuing erosion of the economy’s environmental support systems has convinced environmentalists, natural scientists, and others of the need to restructure the global economy, many others are not yet convinced. What is happening in China may change their minds.

Post-Reading Activities