11. Paraphrase the following.

1. Diets that spell disaster.

2. They look as if they were wasting away.

3. Twiggy was the wire-thin icon of her time.

4. Those famine-stricken limbs are now back in fashion, as the wheel turns full circle.

5. Like ballet dancers models are “ultra slimmers”.

12. Match the following English and Russian proverbs.

Добрый повар стоит доктора.	Temperance is the best physic.
Все хорошо в меру.	Diet cures more than lancet.
Умеренность  мать здоровья.	Too much water drowned the miller.

Writing

1. Make up an outline of the article.

2. Compress the information and write a précis of the article.

3. Expand on the following.

a) Temperance is the best physic.

b) Diet cures more than lancet.

c) Too much water drowned the miller.

4. Write an essay on the following topic: Modelling is an essential part of the fashion industry nowadays.

Text 7

How life imitates screen violence

M. Driscoll

Nearly everybody has a TV set in their lounge, and most people go to the cinema ever so often. Sooner or later, they probably will watch a violent film with swear words and incredible special effects. A certain American film critic believes that these films have a damaging effect upon the young or the weaker minded and that many crimes are due to people copying what they see on TV or at the cinema.

1. Shortly after Hollywood versus America was published, Michael Melved received a letter which went a long way towards vindicating his theory. His correspondent was a retired head psychiatrist at a large hospital for the criminally insane — the American equivalent of Broadmoor.

2. After a professional lifetime analysing the motives and influences on the perpetrators of violent crime, the doctor had come to the conclusion that film and television violence did indeed have a pernicious effect on society. “He said that the explosion in violent crime over the past 20 years has been unprecedented, even though in the same period poverty has reduced, as has racism,” Melved reported. “The only explanation, he said, can be the popular culture.”

3. Scores of social scientists have done studies attempting to prove what any parent struggling to control what their child sees on television instinctively knows: that there is a direct link between screen violence and foul language and behaviour. But proving it in a strictly scientific sense is virtually impossible, making it easy for filmmakers and actors to shrug off the responsibility for violence which others  like Melved — see as a direct result of a diet of blood-spattered films.

4. Anecdotal evidence abounds: a Birmingham man, recently tried for the murder of a woman friend and her five-year-old daughter, was said to have committed the crimes after watching a video of The Morning After, starring Jane Fonda. In America last year a spate of casual violence followed the opening of the cult movie, Juice, about life in Harlem. A girl was shot dead outside a cinema in Chicago during a gang fight over tickets. In Michigan, a 17-year-old boy was shot in the leg at a cinema.

5. Film-makers defend their products by asserting that criminals who cite their movies as inspiration for their wrongdoing are simply looking for excuses. Michael Winner, for instance, points out that a rapist who claimed to have committed a sexual assault after watching his film Death Wish turned out to have eight previous convictions. Melved, however, insists that violence on the cinema screen, and on television, which shows so many Hollywood films, is a major contributor  if not the major contributor  to the youthful violence, crime and mayhem on the streets in America.

6. Hollywood wreaks its havoc, he says, by corroding the institutions that hold society together: the family, religion and even  in so far as films rarely implicitly support it — the military.

7. Melved’s evidence all comes from the United States, but he fears that everything is in place for the same thing to happen in Britain. He quotes Dr Daniel Linz, psychology professor at the University of California, who has spent many years investigating the connection between film and violence: “The consensus among social scientists is that very definitely there’s a casual connection between exposure to violence in the media and violent behaviour.”

8. In 1991, George Comstock, professor of communications in Syracuse University in New York, reviewed 190 studies carried out over 30 years, attempting to gauge the effect of screen violence. He found “a very solid relationship between viewing anti-social portrayals or violent episodes and behaving anti-socially.”

9. In Britain, those responsible for overseeing film output have become increasingly alarmed by the rise in teenage crime. James Ferman, director of the British Board of Film Classification, is particularly worried about children’s access to violent or explicit adult videos.

10. Ferman, who came to listen to Melved at the Sunday Times symposium, said on Channel 4’s Right to Reply programme last night that the board plans to launch a campaign warning parents of the dangers and feels that adult videos should be clearly labelled with a warning about their contents.

11. “The biggest problem we have is parents who don’t take the categories seriously,” he said.

“I would like to see the whole system tightened up. I don’t think children should have easy access to things and I don’t think we should have videos in the shops which are not classified.

“I would hate to think that any child would see Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. It is 18  we have to assume that the public will be responsible and 18 means 18. If, as the newspapers have been telling us recently, 18 means 12 then the system will break down. We have to say no, we can’t have freedom for adults in this country because we can’t trust adults to protect children.”

12. His words will come as some relief to worried parents, whose anxiety was summed up in Thursday’s debate by a father of three small children: “I feel that all the major institutions are failing me in the task of bringing up my children. The film industry, too, is trying to squirm out of responsibility. What I am asking is: who will give some help to me as a family man to bring up my children with positive values? We form those values through stories. Where are the stories that tell us what kind of people we are as human beings?”

E x e r c i s e s