Unit 4. The British Waste Line (by Cyril Northcote Parkinson)

Part 1

I 1.What do you think of people involved in scientific research? How do you picture them? Is the research work they spend money on always important and justified?

2.The following words are from the text. Match them with their synonyms on the right.

husbandry discard grudge conceivable inasmuch layman lavish on the brink of niggardly hitherto

owing to the fact that mean, stingy farming give unwillingly give generously throw out, get rid of near to amateur, not professional up until now believable, imaginable

II1.Read the first part of the text. Some of the phrases are left out. While reading put them into their right places.

1)in time of emergency 2)the layman’s suspicion 3)an eventual dividend 4)initiated and financed

5)have the courage to ask 6)a very respectable sum 7)influence and prestige 8)with demands for more

The British Waste Line

Wasteful war should give place, in theory, to the husbandry of peace. But the habit of waste is not, in practice, so easy to discard. People who grudge nothing –(1)– seem often to have lost all sense of cost by the time the crisis has passed.

Take research as an example. Research nowadays is so respectable a word that few –(2)– whether all expenditure under this heading is justified. On the one hand, the whole thing is wrapped in mystery. On the other, it is commonly assumed that research will pay –(3)– or at least that a failure to do research will have appalling consequences in terms of international –(4)–. In all this there is an element of truth, but it is worth noticing that some large sums are involved. Great Britain, for example, had an estimated expenditure of £26,100,000 on Research and Development in 1958/59, with another £106,000,000 on Atomic Energy and separate research projects –(5)– by the separate Ministries under the headings of Defence, Agriculture, Medicine and so forth. Add to these figures a proportion of the Vote for Universities and the grand total reaches –(6)–. Is it conceivable that any part of this sum is wasted?

Waste is, of course, inseparable from research, inasmuch as negative results are necessarily frequent. But is the waste larger than inevitable? There is good reason for thinking that it is, but for reasons the opposite of what the layman might expect. –(7)– is that money is lavished on dreamy-eyed eccentric professors who wander off vaguely and then reappear –(8)–, no one knowing what (if anything) they have discovered. They picture the scientist’s approach to the civil servant in cinematic terms, the scientist being visualized as an oldish man with untidy white hair, a dirty woolen scarf and a wild gleam behind his spectacles.

“Glad to see you, Dr. Cloudsley,” says the Assistant Under-Secretary. “I hope you have brought with you the papers we have been needing.”

“Well, no, actually. But I can tell you how things have been going. A year ago we thought we were on the brink of a great discovery, but we found this morning that the whole thing was based upon a small arithmetical mistake. You know – the decimal point in the wrong place. Poor Cartwright! Yes, yes, a sad business.”

“You mean that Cartwright was disappointed at the failure?”

“Well, no. There was hardly time, was there? He would have been disappointed, of course, had he lived to realize the mistake we had made. A very sad loss, and the laboratory gone too!”

“The laboratory destroyed?”

“Oh, in an instant. All except that cupboard under the staircase where the janitor kept his brooms. That was saved by the fire brigade.”

“Good God – that laboratory cost millions! And I expect Cartwright left a widow we shall have to pension?”

“Yes, indeed. Well, well, there it is. We shall have to rebuild. Actually, we should have had to rebuild anyway. The laboratory was simply not big enough.”

“All this is horrible news. But do tell me what you were trying to discover; in so far, I mean, as a layman can be expected to understand.”

“Oh, didn’t you know? Well, it began with a scheme to produce a new kind of fuel for use in rockets. Then we tried to see whether the same stuff would do as a preparation for removing old paint. We ended up trying to use it as a cure for coughs. Then it blew up. Very sad.”

“And now you will be wanting a new grant to cover the next phases of your work?”

“That is really what I wanted to see you about. I can’t give you an exact estimate of course.”

“No, no, I understand that.”

“But it doesn’t do to be niggardly. That only wastes money in the end.”

“So you want, in effect, the largest possible grant?”

“Exactly! All you can get for us.”

“Well. I’ll do my best. Good-bye, and do please convey my sympathy to Cartwright’s widow.”

But this popular conception of how scientific work is supported by government is completely false. Waste is the result of control being excessive, not of its being absent. The modern fallacy is to imagine that an elected Conservative or Socialist can decide on a line of research and then leave the scientist to work out the details. No king or minister could have instructed Newton to discover the law of gravity, for they did not know and could not have known that there was any such law to discover. No Treasury official told Fleming to discover penicillin. Nor was Rutherford instructed to split the atom by a certain date, for no politician of his day and scarcely any other scientist would have known what such an achievement would imply or what purpose it would serve. Discoveries are not made like that. They are the result, as often as not, of someone wandering off his own line of research, attracted by some phenomenon hitherto unnoticed or suddenly seen in a new light.

2.Answer the questions.

1)What is the reason of the wasteful war?

2)What are the two sides to the expenditure on research?

3)Why do research and waste always go together?

4)What typical mistake do laymen make when trying to explain the reason, why waste is inseparable from research?

5)What is the actual cause of the “waste line”?

3.There are many exaggerations in the dialogue. Find them and explain, why they produce a humorous effect.

4.a)Comment on the grammar phenomena:

1)I hope you brought with you the papers we have been needing.

2)And now you will be wanting a new grant to cover the next phases of your work?

b)What do these emphatic forms convey in the following sentences:

1)But do tell what you were trying to discover.

2)Good-bye, and do please convey my sympathy to Cartwright’s widow.

Part 2

I1.Study the words.

test-tube – пробирка

formative – образующий

reformatory – исправительное заведение для малолетних преступников

II1.Read the second part of the text. Choose the most appropriate word from those given in brackets.

Closely connected with the field of research, and linked with it by the universities, is the field of education. In considering the more wasteful (features, facets, aspects, angles) of education we must limit our inquiries to the classroom, to the expense of providing teachers, building, test-tubes and chalk. In fact, as we know, people are largely taught what they are (supposed, assumed, presumed) to know about life by television, radio, cinema, newspapers and books; also, and still more effectively, by each other. As a formative influence in society schools play a smaller part than teachers are (prone, likely, disposed) to imagine. As an item of public expenditure, education comes high on the list; so high that its cost should be a matter of interest to every taxpayer, and the more so is that much of the money is clearly wasted.

That this should be so is mainly due to the rise of an imaginary science of education, with a (dialect, slang, jargon, idiom) of its own. This is known technically, as educationalism. Broadly speaking, the difference between teaching and educationalism is that the teacher takes a difficult subject and strives to make it relatively easy, the educationalizer takes a simple subject which he has failed to master and makes it seem practically impossible. The (principal, cardinal, key, chief) result of educationalism is that everything takes very much longer and costs very much more. Education expands to fill the time available, so that years can be spent in educationalizing what used to be taught in as many weeks. Educationalism is also expensive in building and equipment. Schools have now to be built almost entirely of glass, so as to admit the sun, and have then to be fitted with plastic blinds in order to exclude it. Apart from that, a school filled with workshops and art-rooms, buildings (committed, dedicated, devoted) to home economics and interior decoration, projection theatres and visual aids, costs far more than schools consisting of ordinary classrooms and equipped with ordinary blackboards.

Studying the bill for all this apparatus, we come to realize that educationalism would be fantastically expensive even if it were of any value. As taxpayers we must pay, not merely for the schools of every grade but for the Teachers’ College, for the Education faculty and for numerous Institutes of Educational research. We have also to meet the closely (associated, allied, combined) costs of juvenile delinquency, as also the further expenses connected with the police, the reformatory and the prison.

2.Answer the questions.

1)How would you characterize the second part of the text? Does it sound funny or serious?

2)What is peculiar about the words and the syntax of the extract? Give examples from the text.

3)Explain the difference between educationalism and education.

4)Why is educationalism so expensive?

5)Does the author justify of this expense?

III 1.Act out a short argument between a teacher and an educationalizer, who are attacking each other’s standpoints and attitudes. Start: The trouble with people like you is…

2.You are a politician. Write a speech, in which you outline your views on research expenditure.

3.Additional tasks.

a)Read the story sentence by sentence and find logical mistakes.

Smith Billy is a teacher at a riding school. He always gets up to prepare his lessons in order to avoid waking his children by his singing. He takes his noiseless typewriter and writes four or five pages of notes so he will not hesitate when he lectures to his horses. For variety, when his lessons are in danger of becoming too interesting, he sometimes copies out a science fiction story from Grimm or Hans Andersen, which he can dictate to the horses. Occasionally there is an emotional reaction from his docile donkeys: when the story is sad they laugh. Billy prefers this job to the one he had in a language school because now his students never take him for a ride.

b)Read the puzzle and answer the questions to find the solution.