Link to Grammar Exercise

UTOPIA

 

UTOPIA - an excerpt from More's book

They cultivate their gardens with great care, so that they have
vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers in them; and all is so well
ordered, and so finely kept, that I never saw gardens anywhere
that were both so fruitful and so beautiful as theirs. And this
humor of ordering their gardens so well is not only kept up by the
pleasure they find in it, but also by an emulation between the
inhabitants of the several streets, who vie with each other; and
there is indeed nothing belonging to the whole town that is both
more useful and more pleasant. So that he who founded the town
seems to have taken care of nothing more than of their gardens;
for they say, the whole scheme of the town was designed at first
by Utopus, but he left all that belonged to the ornament and
improvement of it to be added by those that should come after him,
that being too much for one man to bring to perfection. (Thomas More: Utopia)

VOCABULARY

"Utopian horizons"   
Visitor from Mars.  
Utopia  
Dystopia  
Ideas  
Hyperreality  
Reality  
No conflicts  
Consensus  
Class divisions  
Totalitarian society  
Participative democracy  


DYSTOPIA

The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.



Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.

1. Above an extract of George Orwell's famous book 1984. It seems like a slightly old-fashioned way of describing a totalitarian society. What would a modern, present-day Big Brother society look like?
2. Is it possible to find modern examples of Thought Police, Newspeak and other manipulative phonomena of the Big Brother society?

 

Grammar exercise: Active and passive form. Find the examples of active and passive form in the text below

Characterise forms of verb: Turn into passive:
ANGUISHED Sir Paul McCartney dashed to daughter Stella’s side as his marriage broke up, it emerged yesterday. He flew there:
He flew by helicopter to her country estate to pour out his feelings before his split from Heather Mills, 38, was announced. He poured out his feelings:
Ex-Beatle Sir Paul, 63, took off from his own vast spread in Sussex and touched down near Stella’s 250-acre pile near Pershore, Worcestershire. They took him to the helicopter airport:
A source said: “Paul landed on the Sunday afternoon. A source said:
“He looked very tired and drawn and deep in thought.
 		 They expressed worry at his condition:
“Obviously he wanted to break the news of his split with Heather to Stella in person before it became public knowledge.” They broke the news:
Sir Paul is believed to have flown out again the following day. They said  he flew out:
He has not been seen publicly since.
 		 They report his whereabouts are unknown:

 

 

 Damanhur - an Italian utopia

Christiania

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Socialist Utopia