Universidad Nacional De La Plata Facultad De Humanidades Y Ciencias

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE LA PLATA FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES Y CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACIÓN LENGUA INGLESA IV – Año: 2009 TRABAJO PRÁCTICO N° 3: SUMMARY

Nombre: Legajo:

Bad News – The New Yorker1 From time to time, people complain that the papers do not print any good news. (Presidents, especially, tend to complain about this.) First off, it isn’t entirely true. If we never see another story about a man who wins a million dollars playing Lotto or Millionaire’s Roulette or Lucky Bucks and is going to keep his job at the post office because he likes to work, but maybe he’ll buy an Oldsmobile2 – if we never see another story like that, we won’t kick. But, anyway, good news is not a newspaper’s job. We don’t mean the way it sounds, in some civics-class, watch-dog-of-thedemocratic-process, Fourth Estate sense. We mean that psychologically there is something reassuring about the newspaper because it is full of bad news – the same bad news each morning. Not precisely the same bad news, but close enough. On any given morning, the front page of the Times should leave people in tears. As we write this, we are looking at the top stories from last Wednesday. The Soviet Union is reported overrunning a valley in Afghanistan after using highaltitude bombing to soften up he resistance, talk continues about outer-space laser weapons; in the Dominican Republic people are dying in riots sparked by increases in food prices. We should be angry, sad and moved to action, but we are, at worst, mildly depressed in a familiar, unfocussed way. Colonel Qaddafi3 says something evil, or was it Ayatollah Khomeini4? There are thugs on the F train; last week they rode the No. 6. A house burns down in Brooklyn, and another the next day, and two more the day after that. There is no sense reacting, we think; this is how the world is. Everything bad has already happened and will happen again. On slow news days – the days when the New York Times actually leads with a story about something taking place in New York – we sometimes feel a little uneasy. If not much is going wrong this morning, what could be in store for tomorrow? And occasionally, when something does give pause, likely as not it’s only because it is something freakish – something we hadn’t worried about before – and we accept it into our picture of the inevitable world, and read about it from then on with detachment. Last week, Kitty Wolf was driving her grandson Robert to the airport so that he could catch a flight back to school. When they were near Exit 13-A on the New Jersey Turnpike, more than a hundred ounce-and-a-half jars of Dickinson’s Pure Fancy sweet Orange Marmalade fell from the sky, shattering the windshield of the car but not hurting anyone seriously. The jellies apparently fell from a transcontinental airliner, but no one knows just how. “It’s a puzzlement trying to find out how it happened,” an airline spokesman told the Times. If every single morning, or even twice a month, you opened the paper just to find an account of grocery items falling onto passing Volkswagens, Mrs. Wolf’s travail would not be so arresting. But marmalade – marmalade, usually so marvelously inert, an inmate of its jar until you choose otherwise and reach for a knife. Here it is, though, on the exit lane of the New Jersey Turnpike, an orange bolt from the blue. It is hard to imagine to imagine a more meaningless story; yet – and this is truly sad – it made think twice as hard as any food riot in Santo Domingo. • 1

According to the writer, why are newspaper stories psychologically reassuring? Summarise the writer’s ideas in 70 – 90 words.

Taken from The New Yorker Magazine, which publishes some of the best and most influential social and political commentary of leading American writers. 2 A brand of automobile. 3 Facto leader of Libya. 4 Leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he ruled the country until his death.