The Roaring Twenties

 

The following are paragraphs of one text. Read them carefully and place them in the correct order. Explain your choice.

 

A In 1928 the American people elected a new President, Herbert Hoover. Hoover was sure that American prosperity would go on growing and that the poverty in which some Americans still lived would be remembered as something in the past. He said that there would soon be “a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage.”

 

B Girls dancing the Charleston. Gangsters carrying machine guns. Charlie Chaplin playing comical tricks. These are some of the pictures that come into people’s minds when they think of the United States in the 1920s. The “roaring twenties.” Good times. Wild times.

 

C Yet there were lots of poor Americans. A survey in 1929 showed that half the American people had hardly enough money to buy sufficient food and clothing. In the industrial cities of the North, such as Chicago and Pittsburgh, immigrant workers still labored long hours for low wages in steel mines, factories and slaughter houses. In the South thousands of poor farmers, both black and white, worked from sunrise to sunset to earn barely enough to live on. The wealth that Republicans said would benefit everyone never reached people like this…

 

D Coolidge’s words help to explain the policies of American governments in the 1920s. These governments were controlled by the Republican Party. Republicans believed that if the government looked after the interests of the businessman, everybody would become richer. Businessmen whose firms were doing well, they claimed, would take on more workers and pay more wages. In this way their growing would benefit everybody…

 

E Looking at the way their standard of living had risen during the 1920s, many other Americans thought the same.

 

F The United States was very rich in these years. Because of the First World War, other countries owed it a lot of money. It had plenty of raw materials and plenty of factories. Its national income – the total earnings of all its citizens – was much higher, than that of Britain, France, Germany and Japan put together…

 

G Businessmen became popular heroes in the 1920s. Men like Henry Ford were widely admired as the creators of the nation’s prosperity. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple,” said Calvin Coolidge, the President from 1923 to 1929. “The man who works there, worships there.”

 

H The growth of industry made many Americans well-off. Millions earned good wages. Thousands invested money in successful firms so that they could share in their profits. Many bought cars, radios and other new products with the money. Often they obtained these goods by paying a small deposit and agreeing to pay the rest of the cost through an “installment plan.” Their motto was “Live now, pay tomorrow” – a tomorrow which most were convinced would be like today only better, with even more money swelling their wallets.

 

HEMINGWAY'S PARIS ~ Part 2

I. Read the passage and find the following information in it:

a) the name that the Latin Quarter got in the 17^th century;

b) one of the possible reasons why the term ‘Lost Generation’ appeared;

c) the reasons why Paris was attractive for writers;

d) the place where Hemingway preferred to write;

e) Common problems of many writers of this period which in some cases had a tragic outcome