Study the following phrasal verbs. The article says: “He ended up resigning in June ”

 

The article says: “He ended up resigning in June …”

Remember other expressions with ‘up’:

To back smb up, to break up, to catch up (with/on smth), to clear smth up, to cover up (for smb), to hold smb up, to look up, to keep up (with), to own up, to pick smb up, to set smth up, to set smb up, to speed up, to split up, to turn up, to wind up.

Choose one of these expressions to translate the words and wordcombinations given in italics in the following sentences.

 

1. Gerald tried (скрыть) his guilt by lying.

2. How can you (содержать в порядке) a house as large as this without help?

3. This powerful radio can (принимать сигналы) stations from halfway round the world.

4. We need more facts (в поддержку) your statement.

5. The jewel thieves agreed (разделить) the profit from the robbery equally between them.

6. There was no news about the accident at the plant. It was clear the authorities (покрывали) big businessmen.

7. Most members of the board were against Mr Jones, who would have lost his position if you (не поддержали бы его).

8. Their marriage (распался) because of money problems.

9. When you’ve been away, it takes a long time (узнать / ликвидировать пробелы) on the local news.

10. Even professional politicians have difficulty (быть осведомленными) the changes in public opinion.

11. When the police interfered, the crowd (разбежалась).

12. The thief tried (подставить) his companions (-), but he was caught too.

13. Things (улучшаются) now that we got that new contract.

14. After his illness Kevin spent six months (наверстывая) his studies.

15. The committee can (разделиться) into small groups to talk about each of these matters in greater detail.

16. Jane will have to (продолжить) her piano practice if she wants to be a professional concert performer.

17. If you don’t know the meaning of a word, (посмотри его) in a good dictionary.

18. The police have been trying (прояснить) the mystery of the man’s death.

19. We (были задержаны) on the road by a nasty traffic accident.

20. They needed the money (основать) a special school for gifted children.

21. It used to be a matter of honour among schoolboys that the guilty member of the class would (честно признался) and save the others from punishment.

22. Guess who (неожиданно пришел) at Mary’s wedding? Our long-forgotten friend Ray!

23. Jim and Mary have been quarreling so much recently that their friends are afraid they might (разойтись).

24. You will have to (ускорить) your rate of work if you want to finish by the agreed date.

25. It’s no good waiting for something to (подвернется), you have to take action.

26. Can you think of a good joke I could use to (закончить) my speech?

27. With Jim driving, you never know where you are going to (оказаться).

 

Reading and Speaking 2

9. Read Article 1 and do the multiple choice task given below.

 

Article 1

Reading between the Lies

Given the chance, Macarena Hernandez might have done great things at the New York Times. With a gift for detail and musical prose, she was offered a job after working as a summer intern in 1998 and planned to take it – right until the day that August when her father, a construction worker, was killed by an 18-wheeler. Her mother needed her, so Hernandez went to Texas. With no journalism jobs in sight, she began teaching English to mostly poor Mexican-American kids at her old high school. She urged them to follow their dreams.

One of her fellow interns that summer, Jayson Blair, was also talented and ambitious, and quite a bit luckier. Despite some reprimands for sloppy reporting – like missing the fact that a murder victim was not shot but strangled – he rose fast at the Times, made friends, wooed mentors and eventually was sent to Washington to join the team covering the hunt for the Beltway sniper. There he brought glory to the paper with front-page scoops that left rivals shaking their heads in wonder – and disbelief.

In spring 2003, when he began writing about the families of soldiers who died fighting in Iraq, Blair and Hernandez crossed paths again. Now 28, she found a job at Texas’ San Antonio Express-News; on April 18 the paper published her story about Juanita Anguiano, the mother of a missing soldier from Los Fresnos, Texas. Blair’s article about Anguiano landed on the front page of the Times eight days later. Both were moving, vivid portraits of a mother’s love and loss. But only one was original. “He stole her story,” says Express-News editor Robert Rivard, who wrote to Howell Raines, executive editor of the New York Times, asking him to look into the matter.

Which is how it came to pass that Blair resigned, and America’s most prestigious newspaper found itself answering ever sharper questions about just who Jayson Blair was, how much of the material in his 700 or so Times stories over the past five years was made up and what the paper of record was going to do to correct that record. As soon as national editor Jim Roberts began calling sources in some of Blair’s pieces, says Raines, “in every case … there was apparent falsification.”

In the belief that “the proper response to bad journalism is to do good journalism,” Raines assigned three editors and five reporters to re-report Blair’s suspicious stories and comb through his computer files and expense accounts. The result was unbelievable. According to the investigation, Blair “fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He stole material from other newspapers and wire services.” He described the houses of grieving parents he never visited, the nightmares of wounded soldiers who deny discussing them, the tears of people who seldom cry. “It’s a huge black eye,” said publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whose family has controlled the paper since 1896.

The revelations gave the Times a hard shove into the company of the nation’s other great but occasionally humbled papers: the Boston Globe, whose columnists Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith resigned in 1998 after charges of serial plagiarism; the Wall Street Journal, whose financial columnist Foster Winans was convicted on 59 counts of conspiracy and fraud in 1985 for using his articles to make money in the stock market; and the Washington Post, which had to return the 1981 Pulitzer Prize won by reporter Janet Cooke for the haunting story of Jimmy, the 8-year-old heroin addict who turned out to be nothing more than a ghost from her typewriter.

Like every other news organization, the Times has had its share of embarrassments, but it also has a custom of obsessively addressing them in a corrections section on page 2 that is so meticulous about the smallest mistakes that it suggests the paper would never make big ones. Any reporter with 5% or 6% correction rate comes under scrutiny; the Times found 36 errors in 73 articles Blair wrote between October and the end of April. Some of the editors who suspected his methods were reluctant to condemn him. Others neglected to share their concerns, or their warnings just got lost.

Whether or not this is a scandal born of ambition, it is also being cast as a story about race^[5]. Publications like the Times work hard to find and keep the best black reporters. That sometimes involves hiring minority reporters whose experience was “significantly below what we’d normally require because we wanted a lot of minority reporters,” says one Times senior manager, who notes that a special training program helps bring young reporters up to speed. As Blair’s record came to light, some colleagues concluded that he got second chances that others might not have. But others deny that race ensured Blair’s rise or delayed his fall. He is variously described as charming and cunning, ambitious and lazy. “He was a picture of affability; he had a big hello for everyone. He was a hell of a fun, nice guy,” says one colleague. “Most people rooted for him, most people were thrilled by his success, and now people are heartbroken.”

Journalism may worship truth, but it is built on trust, and honest editors will admit that a determined and creative liar is hard to catch. The Times will remember this catastrophe for a long time but will, in all likelihood, not suffer much for it.

(From ‘Time’, abridged)

Choose the best answer to the following questions.

1. Where did Macarena Hernandez and Jayson Blair first meet?

A. At high school where Hernandez taught English.

B. They were colleagues at the New York Times.

C. At Texas’ San Antonio Express-News.

2. Jayson Blair was sent to Washington to cover the hunt for Beltway sniper because

A. he was talented and ambitious.

B. he could bring glory to the paper.

C. he knew how to win over his superiors.

3. How did Blair and Hernandez cross paths again?

A. They met in Los Fresnos, Texas, interviewing the mother of a missing solder.

B. They met at Texas’ San Antonio Express-News.

C. They didn’t actually meet. Blair just used Hernandez’s story to write his own article for the Times.

4. The Times is described in the article as ‘the paper of record’, which means

A. it has set a record in reporting.

B. it is a reliable and highly respected source of information.

C. it keeps records of all published materials.

5. By saying “It is a huge black eye” Arthur Sulzberger Jr. means that

A. Jayson Blair has done great harm to the newspaper.

B. Jayson Blair is black.

C. The newspaper has overlooked much false information.

6. It was hard to believe that the Times could publish false information because

A. it is very careful about correcting every small error.

B. it is one of the leading American newspapers.

C. it had never made big mistakes.

7. Why wasn’t the Times executive editor aware of Blair’s falsifications before the full-scale investigation?

A. Being too arrogant, he wouldn’t listen to the editors who were warning him.

B. The editors didn’t condemn Blair before the investigation.

C. The editors didn’t take the problem of falsification seriously and didn’t insist on their accusations.

8. Many people believe that Blair’s falsifications and plagiarism were not dealt with earlier because

A. he is black.

B. he is talented.

C. the Times editors prefer to keep minority reporters.

9. Those who deny the race aspect in Blair’s case like him because

A. he is as lazy and ambitious as they themselves are.

B. he is very friendly and charming.

C. they are thrilled by his success.

10. Dishonest journalists like Jayson Blair are hard to catch because

A. they are determined and creative.

B. all journalists are supposed to worship truth.

C. journalism is built on trust.

 

10. Read Article 2 and compare it with Article 1.

 

Article 2

The Times Bomb

The executive editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, was walking down the street in Times Square, preparing for one of the most difficult meetings of his life. It was Wednesday, May 14, and Raines, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of the Times, and Gerald Boyd, the managing editor, grinned gamely for the cameras as they made the short trip from the Times ’s West 43d Street newsroom to a nearby movie theater. For Raines, it was a session that could determine the course of the rest of his career, a bitter and angry showdown with a staff that had been roiled by the revelations that Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old reporter, lifted quotes, made up scenes and faked interviews – all in the pages of the most powerful newspaper in the world.

As the Times meeting was unfolding, Jayson Blair was holed up in an apartment in Manhattan, talking to his lawyer and his literary agent. The week before, friends say, Blair had checked himself out of Silver Hill, a in-patient hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had been receiving treatment for a history of alcoholism, cocaine abuse and maniac depression, NEWSWEEK has learned. Blair says he’s been clean and sober for more than a year, but even he knew that his behavior had been blindingly self-destructive.

Practically everyone who came in contact with him describes Blair in similar language: charismatic, ambitious – and unreliable. Throughout Blair’s journalism stints in high school and college, former co-workers retell a history of missed deadlines, lifted quotes, unexplained disappearances and fantastical excuses.

These only persisted at the Times, where he arrived in the summer of 1998. Almost immediately, multiple sources at the paper say, he began to brag about his close relationship with Gerald Boyd, who at the time was one of the paper’s deputy managing editors. The mentoring relationship made sense – one of Boyd’s responsibilities was to work with young reporters, and Boyd, like Blair, is Afro-American. Boyd, for his part, says he’s never had any particularly close relationship with Blair. “I’ve had less dealings with him than I’ve had with most reporters,” Boyd told NEWSWEEK.

Despite the reservations of many people at the paper, Blair was promoted to staff reporter in 2001 – a promotion that occurred, according to the Times ’s own account of the Blair scandal, “with the consensus of a recruiting committee of roughly half a dozen people headed by Gerald Boyd, then a deputy managing editor, and the approval of Mr Lelyveld,” the paper’s executive editor at the time.

But in the fall, a half year after taking a leave in the paper’s employee-assistance program and with a personnel file full of warnings and reprimands, the Times top editors tapped Blair to help cover the Washington D.C. sniper case. In the Times ’s own account, Boyd and Raines (who denied repeated requests for an interview) made the decision to include Blair on the sniper team. Six days after landing in Maryland, Blair scored a front-page story that included false information that he attributed to unnamed sources. Prosecutors hit the roof. But Blair was never asked to produce his multiple anonymous sources, and there was no discussion of pulling him off the case.

Over the next several months Blair continued to get high-profile assignments for the Times, writing about the families of missing American soldiers and staying on the sniper story.

This spring Blair pushed his deceptions to the breaking point. Staggering under the pressure of his national assignments, he stopped traveling on assignments, using his cell phone and laptop to make it seem as if he was jetting around the country. At times he was writing from inside the paper’s newsroom.

In April he plagiarized a story from San Antonio Express-News. When confronted about the charge, Blair resigned rather than produce receipts proving he had, in fact, traveled to Texas. For the week following Blair’s resignation, the scandal at the Times was a kind of low hum in the nation’s newsroom. But the Times ’s four-page report, printed on May11, turned that hum into an all-consuming roar.

Blair, meanwhile, knows his career in journalism is over. But he is still working the angles. Blair’s signed up with David Vigliano, a literary agent, and is in the talks for book, movie and television deals. Ted Faraone, a PR agent who had worked with Blair on stories at the Times, told NEWSWEEK he called the reporter after reading about his career suicide. “He called me back Wednesday,” the day of the Times ’s town-hall meeting, Faraone said. “He sounded in pretty good spirits, considering everything.” Then Faraone added another thought. “If one thing can be said about this from a literary standpoint, the American people tend to be very forgiving if you come clean. They’ll watch the TV movie and pay $9.50 to see the feature film. It’s a strange commentary on celebrity in the 21^st-century America, but in a way that’s how we rehabilitate people after they’ve fallen.”

(From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)