Task 3. Read the article below and define its genre. What are the constituent parts of the text? House prices: Heading south

By the turn of this year, the housing market was enjoying a very fragile recovery,

but in the last few months it has begun to suffer a relapse

Let us start with two propositions. First, house prices are going down. And second, that is a very good thing.

The first proposition is riskier to make but rather more straightforward – because if you want to see what a double-dip recession¹ actually looks like, just take a look at a graph of house prices over the last few years. From around the time Northern Rock² collapsed in 2007, prices went a long way south. At the tail end of 2008, after governments had contained the financial crisis and put the economy on life support, prices began to come off the floor. By the turn of this year, the housing market was enjoying a very fragile recovery, but in the last few months it has begun to suffer a relapse. That trend was confirmed by yesterday’s survey from Nationwide³. Crash followed by recovery followed by relapse: the housing market provides practically a textbook definition of a double dip.

Nor is there likely to be a letup in the downturn. The coming spending cuts will cost both economic growth and hundreds of thousands of jobs – not the assertion of a newspaper, but the admission of this Conservative-led government in its budget red book. It would be a brave and possibly foolhardy person who took out a stonking great home loan if they were anxious about their job.

Contrary to what you might read in some newspapers, falling house prices would be a blessing. The house bubble of the noughties⁴ has handed billions of pounds to the older generation from young people who have had to take on giant mortgages to buy their homes. That was unsafe both for the purchasers and for the wider economy. But runaway prices also served to reinforce the wealth gap as rich parents were able to bung their kids big deposits, while middle- and working-class children got no such leg-up. An end to that unfair, unsafe regime can only be a good thing.

The Guardian, September 3, 2010

Task 4. Write out all the arguments the author puts forward to prove his point. Give your understanding of the headline.

Task 5. Read the text below. Determine its genre, say what stylistic devices prevail in the text? Why?

I was a terrible teenage drinker – I couldn't get hold of alcohol How do young people drink so much today? And how do they get served, asks Michael Deacon

Astonishing. One in five young people today aged 11-15 drinks 600 units of alcohol a year – the equivalent of around 214 pints of lager. I’m shocked. When I was a teenager, I drank nowhere near as much.

Not that I was more high-minded than today’s teenagers – I just couldn’t have hoped, however hard I tried, to get hold of such flabbergasting volumes of booze. How do they manage it? What’s their secret? How come my friends and I were so useless at it?

This is what baffles me most about statistics for teenage drinking. In my day (I can’t believe I’ve just typed that phrase – I don’t turn 30 until November), procuring alcohol was more stressful than sitting exams. Curiously, the people at school who were worst at exams always seemed to be the best at procuring alcohol. For me and my fellow timorous swots, though, it was a nightmare.

Entering the off-licence in threes or fours – I don’t know where we got the idea that buying alcohol was a group activity – we’d stare solemnly at the shelves of Skol and McEwan’s, nodding and pursing our lips, as if we were art connoisseurs scrutinising a Caravaggio for signs of forgery. At last we’d make our selections and carry them to the counter as nonchalantly as possible, which was about as nonchalantly as we could have unicycled down the fast lane of the M25.

Listlessly, the cashier would demand ID, at which we point we’d rummage in our pockets and exclaim, with looks of innocent surprise, that we appeared to have left the house without any. I recall one friend offering a bus ticket as ID. His reasoning was that the ticket showed he’d paid an adult fare. To be charged an adult fare, the cashier pointed out, you only had to be 15. On that occasion, as on almost every other, we slunk out of the shop.

Yet now, if these figures are true, teenagers buy booze with ease. Do they look older than we did? Do they have more accommodating older brothers, who buy it on their behalf? Have standards soared in fake ID?

It all seems dreadfully unfair.

The Daily Telegraph, August 10, 2010

Task 6. There are at least seven words in the article above considered to be realia. Identify them all.