NORTHERN IRELAND: TOPIC HEADINGS

For each paragraph, choose the most suitable heading from the list which follows.
There is one extra heading you do not need to use.

LIVING WITH THE TROUBLES IN BELFAST

A. Boys riot out of boredom.

B. Successful children are disliked.

C. No communication between Catholics and Protestants.

D. Belfast has many different problems.

E. People get used to the violence.

F. Nothing for little children to do.

G. Need to keep children off the streets.

H. The troubles affect studies.

1.

For over twenty years Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland, was divided, torn
by riots, blasted by car bombs, patrolled by armoured cars. A whole generation has
grown up in the city knowing nothing else but what the Irish call “the troubles”. The
place suffers not only from violence, but from poverty, low expectations, lack of
incentive, lack of a future.

2.

Violet Strain lives in the Protestant Shankill area. She has five children, aged from
3 to 10. Her hus-band has been unemployed for four years. She says: “There’s no
playgrounds. What do children do round here? They run wild. The wee ones, I’m
terrified to let them out with that road down there. In the holidays all the schools
are shut, even the play schools for the tiny ones. Even the Sunday school shuts
down. Mostly the children go throwing stones. It’s the only sport they have.”

3.

A Protestant lad, aged 15, explained: “A lot of the time there’s nothing to do.
You’re confined. You don’t go anywhere. This is one place to go and that’s it. You
get about half way up the Shankill Road and there’s Catholics. If you go in there,
you could end up with a terrible beating. In the long summer days, there is nothing
to do. You get bored. If all your mates join, then you feel left out. Last summer we
had a riot almost every day, whenever you felt like it. We’d go down the Shankill
and start throwing. There’s been that many riots you forget them. When you go
away from Belfast, you feel free.”

4.

Michelle Mcnally is 16 years old and lives in the hard-line Catholic New Lodge area.
She has lived in the same cramped terrace house all her life. Her father is
unemployed and her mother is a cook at a local school. Armoured cars with soldiers
regularly patrol the street. She is waiting for her examination results. She says:
“The Irish Troubles were one of the options on our history syllabus, but our
teachers wouldn’t let us take it because they thought we’d lose marks for being
biased. So we did the Arab-Israeli conflict instead. I loved it. I’m really into that.
I’m more for the Palestinians: I think it’s so like here.

5.

“Most round here don’t do exams, they all leave school and joy-ride. There’s two in
our street go to a grammar school. A lot don’t talk to me, they think I’m a snob
because I go to grammar school. No one round here really takes an interest in
school. Even in primary school they would fight with their teacher. I got pushed out
in front of a car last term - he didn’t even know me - there were these fellow, about
14 years old, messing about. The back wheel ran over my leg. They said in hospital
I was lucky. Had it been the front wheel, my leg would have been amputated.

6.

“Usually girls are safer, less likely to get beaten up. I can’t stand anyone getting
beaten up and all. It really hurts me, seeing it. There was shooting last night. I was
sitting in bed and a bottle came over. We all stayed in. If no one came out they
couldn’t fight with anyone, There were two petrol bombs - it wasn’t even a month
ago, so it was -the police didn’t do anything about it. Everybody just goes on. It
doesn’t annoy us, the only thing that frightens us is that they’d actually come in
and burn us out, but it’s just a part of life.

7.

“There’s nothing, absolutely nothing to do. If there were discos or youth clubs I
think it would help - it would stop them hanging about on street corners. In the
park across the way there’s fights every night between the kids. There’s a line that
divides the park into Catholic and Protestant areas. It’s so funny - a park, you
wouldn’t believe it. People know where not to go. It’s just funny, you know.”
 SICK BUILDING SYNDROME: TOPIC HEADINGS

For each paragraph, choose the most suitable heading from the list which follows.
There is one extra heading you do not need to use.

A SICK WORKING ENVIRONMENT

A. Sick buildings are usually modern.

B. People may be suffering from mental illness.

C. People may suffer eye-strain.

D. Sick buildings make people sick.

E. There is no escape.

F. The office worker has become an industrial worker.

G. It is hard to know if it is the people or the buildings that are sick.

H. The air may be polluted.

Like people, buildings get sick. When they do, the people inside them also get sick.
They suffer from coughs, colds, wheezes, skin rashes, sickness, tiredness,
headaches, eye troubles. They work slowly and inefficiently. They stay away from
work. In a typical case in a large London office block, about 25 years old, staff
complained about constant tiredness and lack of natural light. The complaints
dragged on for years. A survey in 1987 found that 80 per cent of British office
workers suffered sickness related to the buildings in which they worked. Tiredness
was cited by 57 per cent, followed by stuffy nose, dry throat and headaches.

The trouble is the difficulty of knowing whether it is the people who are sick, or
suffering from hysteria, or whether something has gone seriously wrong with the
place they work in. A professor of design analysis at Cornell University gives the
example of a building in Anchorage, Alaska, where three women, all heavy
smokers, developed bronchitis. One of them was advised to wear a mask to work.
The reaction of her colleagues led to an evacuation of the building, an investigation
by consultants wearing full protec-tive clothing, newspaper reports, and many
lawyers. No cause was ever found. On the other hand, he also cites the example of
the headquarters of the US Environmental Protection Agency where 70 people fell
ill. The outbreak was traced to 4PC, a chemical produced by the interaction
between adhesive and foam backing on new carpets.

The United States Institute for Occupational Health investigates about 50 buildings
a year. These are mainly energy-efficient “tight” buildings which save money by
using recycled warmed air rather than cold air from outside. They are usually open-
plan or “deep” offices, where daylight has been replaced by artificial lighting.
Thirdly, they are offices dominated, of course, by the data processor.

What goes wrong? For a start, the whole place can be at the wrong temperature,
usually too warm. A four degree rise above a comfortable 20C can half productivity.
It is almost certainly too dry, with a relative humidity below 40 per cent, resulting
in stuffy and stale air. Equally certainly, the air is dirty: too many people still
smoke, and smoke containing ammonia, formaldehyde, phenols and hydrogen
cyanide is breathed by nonsmokers. Gases are given off by synthetic carpets and
furniture. Ozone is produced by malfunctioning photocopiers.

The lighting may be all wrong. Low-frequency fluorescent lights produce a flicker
which the eye cannot see but the brain can. It causes anxiety and headaches.
Medical studies have shown that headaches are less frequent on higher floors which
receive more natural light. Headaches fall by half when high-frequency lights are
introduced. If you wanted a building not to work in, it would be air-conditioned,
dusty, date from the mid-seventies, have tinted and sealed windows, and house
batteries of clerical workers.

The trouble may lie less in the building itself, and more in the design of the
workplace and the jobs that people are expected to do. The office worker has
become more like a factory worker, tied to a work station in an assembly line. You
can introduce full spectrum lighting and you can litter the office with spider plants
to eat the carbon monoxide, but the central problem remains. The modern office
has been built to house machines, not people.

The new technology creates a prison, and people go “prison crazy”. An occupational
health specialist says: “If you are trying to get the best out of your equipment, then
the easiest thing is to chain your operator to the chair. Everything in the working
environment is geared to keeping people working. Restaurants are close by. You
can carry out food, People even come round selling sandwiches at the work station.
But you are wringing the sponge dry, allowing it no time to recover.
 STEROIDS AND ATHLETICS: TOPIC HEADINGS

For each paragraph, choose the most suitable heading from the list which follows.
There is one extra heading you do not need to use.
.

STEROIDS AND ATHLETICS

A. Athletes are becoming dependent on drugs.

B. Even the most successful athletes may use drugs.

C. Athletes appear to accept the situation.

D. The issue is complicated.

E. There remains the problem of where to stop.

F. Rules were broken first in areas other than drugs.

G. A wide variety of drugs is used.

H. The sports authorities may turn a blind eye.

I. Experts suggest that the matter should be left to individual choice.

1.

In 1988, the Tour de France suffered from an all-too-common sporting scandal, one
which confirmed to some cynical outsiders that the demands made on professional
cyclists force them to become pedalling chemistry sets. After the 17th stage, Pedro
Delgado was found to have a drug called Probenecid in his sample. Probenecid
helps the kidneys to clear uric acid from the system. It can also mask steroids.
Delgado was saved the stigma of disqualification because the drug was not on the
banned list of the International Cycling Union. Eight days after the end of the Tour,
the drug was banned.

2.

1988 was in fact the year when the steroid superstars finally came out into the
open after years of gossip and suspicion. It was the year when Ben Johnson was
stripped of his 100-metre title. This was not a Bulgarian weightlifter, but an athlete
who commanded the attention of the world. It took another eight months before
Johnson finally admitted, in front of a televised Canadian enquiry, that he had
taken drugs in the full knowledge that it was against the rules.

3.

The situation is not a simple one of individual athletes, helped by coaches and
doctors, taking pills and injections. Rather, it is a very complex matter at the root
of which lie nationalism and greed.

4.
Professor Romano Tordelli was for 15 years responsible for Italian middle distance
runners. In 1987, he claimed that famous athletes, such as Alberto Cova, former
Olympic 10,000-metre champion, had been blood-doped. He went on to say that
taking steroids had been under the control of the governing organization. An
investigation did show that the Italian Federation had indeed purchased substantial
quantities of anabolic steroids. These, it was said, were for experimental purposes.
There was no official inquiry.

5.

Why do we have these drug problems in sport? One reason may lie in the long
period when the Olympic movement was supposed to exist for amateurs: the time
of “shamateurism”. As far as money was concerned, sportsmen broke the rules day
after day. It was but a short step to breaking the rules over drugs. Officials who
walked about stadia with briefcases full of cash found no difficulty in bending the
rules on drug-testing. It was all good for a good cause: good meetings for the
sponsors and for television, and good for the sport. Anyway, everyone else was
doing it.

6.

A new attitude has arisen. One writer in the Observer newspaper, taking the
example of Delgado,observed that none of the other 180 competitors protested at
Delgado’s drug-taking. None of them refused to race with him.

7.

The writer concludes: “The demands of the Tour make drugs essential and athletes
should make up their own minds on whether or not to use them. Moreover, Dr
Andrew Nicholson, writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, suggests that “the
amount of unfairness introduced by drug-taking is no greater than that of runners
using pacemakers or of a few athletes having access to advanced physiological and
sports medicine laboratories while the majority do not.” Dr Nicholson also points
out that the effects on health have been exaggerated, and side-effects are mostly
negligible. The argument appears to be that if everyone takes drugs then the
question of fairness has been settled.

8.

But surely athletic achievement should depend on natural talent? Or is that naive?
And where would the drug-taking stop? Should it move down into the schools?
Should we create a chemical man? And if we did, would his achievements be
human, or would they be those of a “sporting” Dr Frankenstein?
 GARBAGE: TOPIC HEADINGS

For each paragraph, choose the most suitable heading from the list which follows.
There is one extra heading which you do not need to use.

GARBAGE

A. Getting rid of waste is a huge problem.

B. Garbage no longer just dumped.

C. Smell unbearable.

D. New regulations introduced.

E. New wrapping materials.

F. Man makes rubbish.

G. Difficulties for the householder.

H. Many examples of problems caused by waste.

Universally, to be human is to be a garbage-dispenser, and summer is the season

of stink. The garbage champion of the world is the United States which holds the
lead by a narrow margin over Australia. Americans have a garbage pile of 750 kilo
for every man, woman and child in the country against 730 kilo for Australian. The
waste dumped by the average German or Japanese is about one half of that
amount.

Between 1960 and 1985, the amount of American rubbish dumped every year
almost doubled, and it is still on the increase. People in New York produce almost
twice as much waste per person as Parisians, and in California they produce enough
to fill the Dodgers’ baseball stadium every nine days - it’s a big stadium. About 80
per cent of American garbage lies buried under thin layers of earth at landfill sites.
Many of these have now been filled, and closed, in the past ten years.

Various scandals have made Americans aware of their garbage problem, and the
dangers inherent in it. By and large, the average American has a low tolerance for
dirt. He doesn’t like it. In 1987, there was the saga of the Long Island garbage
barge which sailed to Belize and back seeking desperately a dumping ground for its
odiferous cargo: eventually the 3,000 tons of solid waste ended up in a Brooklyn
incinerator. In the summer of 1989, medical waste - needles, syringes and plastics
started turning up on beaches up and down the east coast. In addition there have
been the estimates that 100,000 sea mammals and countless fish die each year
around American shores because of internal damage caused by swallowing plastic.
Such scandals have given rise to organisations such as CRAP - Citizens Reacting
against Pollution. CRAP fights against the opening of new landfills.

What does one do about all this garbage? Americans have come to take it very
seriously indeed. Municipalities now have garbage police with the power to impose
$500 fines on offenders. There has been a rubbish revolution. Americans spend a
lot of time testing cans with magnets to see if they contain iron, and ripping the
wax paper out of cereal packets.

In most American states it is now the law to separate your waste: for example, as
far as bottles are concerned, you must separate the coloured from the clear, and
the brown from the green. The New York Times ran a front page story about a
working class family, the Wilkersons of Woodbury, New Jersey.The Wilkersons must
separate their waste into 11 separate containers. As The Times observed, putting
out the trash is not as easy as it used to be. The Wilkersons have seven rubbish
bags outside their home, and not an item, not a paper towel, is discarded without
thinking which bin to put it in.

The biggest recent item of change has been to biodegradable plastics. Increasingly,
plastic food packaging is banned, unless it is degradable. The old polyethelene
containers might survive 400 years or more. The new degradable ones begin to
crumble after only three to four weeks exposure to sunlight: although sunlight is
usually in short supply on garbage dumps and landfills. The latest idea is to make
plastics with added cornstarch that will be eaten by bacteria. In theory, the plastic
disintegrates into pieces small enough to be eaten by micro-organisms.

In the bad old days, before the clean air acts of the early sixties, most garbage was
incinerated or burnt in open dumps. Now, however, most of it is used to recover
energy or is recycled. For the USA, such a change in attitude is an achievement,
although the problem of creating garbage, as opposed to its disposal, remains.