Comprehension Exercises

Exercise 1. Answer the following questions about the text.

1. Who are the participants of the conversation?

2. Where is the scene of the conversation laid?

3. Why did Jack want the envelope the father had received?

4. What did George think about collecting stamps?

5. What did the Swiss stamp feature?

6. What is the Latin name for Switzerland?

7. Could the mountain on the stamp be Mt.Blanc?

8. What helped Mary understand that it was Lake Geneva on the stamp?

9. How do stamps teach arithmetic?

10. Are all people in Switzerland trilingual?

Exercise 2. Sum up what the dialogue says about the educating role of stamps.

Guided Conversation

1. Speak about your collection of stamps or coins and what you have learnt from it?

2. Find out the Latin names for some other European countries including parts of Great Britain. Share your findings with the groupmates.

Text D. E-Mail Signals Return To Written Romance

If Romeo and Juliet communicated via e-mail, would they have ended up happy and alive, or would they have forwarded each other Top 10 lists that ended with:)?

While e-mail isn't as romantic as snailmail, it may help long-distance relationships stay afloat.

It's a tough call, experts say, because e-mail can maintain relationships, revive them or doom them. But what is certain is electronic mail is changing the modern day long-distance romance. E-mail has become the great facilitator for those far apart physically but only a heartbeat away emotionally, says Katherine Maguire, a University of Texas instructor and researcher who is writing her doctoral dissertation on how e-mail affects such relationships.

“I hear repeatedly from couples, especially from military couples, that their relationships are forever changed with the advent of e-mail,” she says from her Austin, Texas, laboratory. “It' s letting that day-to-day talk back into their lives”.

Witness this couple: “Harland”, a psychologist, and “Astrid”, a photographer, both 26, were high school sweethearts who lived together in New York for two years before Harland moved to London, Now e-mail supplies the seemingly mundane but critical daily chit-chat they can't otherwise share for less than 15 cents a minute. Like the other lovers in this story, Harland and Astrid asked that their real names not be used.

When we were living together, we e-mailed one another often but the tone was different, for example, “I bought some broccoli today,” Harland e-mailed. Now it is different: “I could buy no broccoli today because of a broccoli strike in France and a fuel strike and flood in England.”

Frank, 32, and Morgan, 26, were both television reporters who dated while working together in the Midwest. But when Morgan left for a job on the East Coast, they called it quits. Two months later, Morgan got an e-mail from her ex-beau. “We started talking only on e-mail”, Morgan writes in an e-mail. “I found it was very easy to communicate that way. Very slowly the e-mails went from friendly nice to a little flirty and then I MISS You. I don't know if we would have started up again without e-mail.”

Maguire says e-mail can provide a comfortable forum for people to express their more intimate feelings, helping a relationship get into the fast lane where it might otherwise have stalled with a single awkward conversation.

“For some people who are in an early relationship or those who started online, they feel safer expressing love and what they call the 'mushy stuff on this medium because it's safer,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of people say they feel much safer on e-mail, especially those who are shy."

Text E. E-Mail Etiquette

Don't Be A Novelist

Messages should be concise and to the point. Think of it as a telephone conversation, except you are typing instead of speaking. Nobody has ever won a Pulitzer Prize for a telephone conversation nor will they win one for an e-mail message.

It’s also important to remember that some people receive hundreds of e-mail messages a day (yes, there are such people), so the last thing they want to see is a message from someone who thinks he/she is the next Dickens.

Too Much Punctuation!!!

Don't get caught up in grammar and punctuation, especially excessive punctuation. You' ll see lots of e-mail messages where people put a dozen exclamation points at the end of a sentence for added emphasis. Big deal. Exclamation points (called "bangs" in computer circles) are just another form of ending a sentence. If something is important it should be reflected in your text, not in your punctuation.

Formatting Is Not Everything

Formatting can be everything, but not here. Plain text is it. Period. End of sentence. Using HTML, or heaven forbid the Microsquish Rich Text Format, to format messages so that they have fancy fonts, colors or whatever is asking for trouble. There are lots of e-mail clients (and some servers) which can not handle messages in these formats. The message will come in as utter gibberish or in the worst case, crash the e-mail client. I've seen it happen.

Abbreviations

Abbreviation usage is quite rampant with e-mail. In the quest to save keystrokes, users have traded clarity for confusion (unless you understand the abbreviations). Some of the more common abbreviations are listed below. I would recommend that you use abbreviations that are already common to the English language, such as FYI and BTW. Beyond that, you run the risk of confusing your recipient.

BCNU - be seeing you

BTW - by the way

FWIW - for what it's worth

FYI - for your information

IMHO - in my humble opinion

OBO - or best offer

ROTFL - rolling on the floor laughing

RTFM - read the funny manual

TNSTAAFL - |there’s no such thing as a free lunch

TTFN - ta ta for now

TTYL – talk to you later

Smilies

Part of the nature of a good one-on-one conversation is the use of visual cues. How important are facial expressions and body gestures to a conversation? A simple eye movement can mean the difference between "yes" and "YES". What about auditory cues? The results are the same. Since there are no visual or auditory cues with e-mail, users have come up with something called "smilies", They are simple strings of characters that are interspersed in the e-mail text to convey the writer’s emotions (cues). The most common example is :-). Turn your head to the left and you should see a happy face (the colon are the eyes, the dash is the nose and the parentheses is the mouth). Here are some more examples.

:-) Smiley face

;-) Wink (light sarcasm)

:-I Indifference

:-> Devilish grin (heavy sarcasm)

8-) Eye-glasses

:-D Shock or surprise

:-/ Perplexed

:-( Frown (anger or displeasure)

:-P Wry smile

;-} Leer

:-Q Smoker

:-e Disappoinrment

:-@ Scream

:-O Yell

:-* Drunk

:-{} Wears lipstick

:- Male

>- Female

Please don't ask me to interpret, because I don't understand them all.

They are typically found at the end of sentences and will usually refer back to the prior statement. I would recommend you use these sparingly. There are hundreds of these things and their translations are by no means universal (a miss-interpreted smilie could lead to a flame).