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Man of Few Words Everyone chases success, but not all of us want to be famous. South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee is 1 for keeping himself to himself. When the 63-year-old was named the 2003 Nobel Prize winner for literature earlier this month, reporters were warned that they would find him "particularly difficult to 2 ". Coetzee lives in Australia but spends part of the year teaching at the University of Chicago. He seemed 3 by the news he won the $1.3 million prize. "It came as a complete surprise. I wasn’t even aware they were due to make the announcement," he said. His 4 of privacy led to doubts as to whether Coetzee will attend the prize-giving in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10. But despite being described as 5 to track down, we critics agree that his writing is easy to get to know. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, to all English-speaking family, Coetzee 6 his breakthrough in 1980 with the novel Waiting for the Barbarians. He 7 his place among the world’s leading writers with two Booker prize victories, Britain’s highest honour for novels. He first 8 in 1983 for the Life and Times of Michael K and his second title came in 1999 for Disgrace. A major theme in his work is South Africa’s former apartheid system, which divided whites from blacks. 9 with the problems of violence, crime and racial division that still exist in the country, his books have enabled ordinary people to understand apartheid 10 within. "I have always been more interested in the past than the future," he said in a rare interview. "The past 11 its shadow over the present. I hope I have made one or two people think 12 about whether they want to forget the past completely." In fact this purity in his writing seems to be 13 in his personal life. Coetzee is a vegetarian, a cyclist rather than a motorist and doesn’t drink alcohol. But what he has 14 to literature, culture and the people of South Africa is far greater than the things he has given up. "In looking at weakness and failure in life," the Nobel prize judging panel said, "Coetzee’s work 15 the divine spark in man."
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Some Things We Know about Language Many things about language are a mystery, and many will always remain so. But some things we do know. First, we know that all human beings have a language of some sort. There is no race of men anywhere on earth so backward that it has no language, no set of speech sounds by which the people communicate with one another. Furthermore, in historical times, there has never been a race of men without a language. Second, there is no such thing as a primitive language. There are many people whose cultures are undeveloped, who are, as we say, uncivilized, but the languages they speak are not primitive. In all known languages we can see complexities that must have been tens of thousands of years in developing. This has not always been well understood; indeed, the direct contrary has often been stated. Popular ideas of the language of the American Indians will illustrate. Many people have supposed that the Indians communicated in a very primitive system of noises. Study has proved this to be nonsense. There are, or were, hundreds of American Indian languages, and all of them turn out to be very complicated and very old. They are certainly different from the languages that most of us are familiar with, but they are no more primitive than English and Greek. A third thing we know about language is that all languages are perfectly adequate. That is, each one is a perfect means of expressing the culture of the people who speak the language. Finally, we know that language changes. It is natural and normal for language to change; the only languages which do not change are the dead ones. This is easy to understand if we look backward in time. Change goes on in all aspects of language. Grammatical features change as do speech sounds, and changes in vocabulary are sometimes very extensive and may occur very rapidly. Vocabulary is the least stable part of any language. According to the author, people of undeveloped cultures can have ______ languages.
Plants and Mankind Botany, the study of plants, occupies a peculiar position in the history of human knowledge. We don’t know what our Stone Age ancestors knew about plants, but from what we can observe of preindustrial societies that still exist, a detailed learning of plants and their properties must be extremely ancient. This is logical. Plants are the basis of the food pyramid for all living things, even for other plants. They have always been enormously important to the welfare of people, not only for food, but also for clothing, weapons, tools, dyes, medicines, shehers, and many other purposes. Tribes living today in the jungle of the Amazon recognize hundreds of plants and know many properties of each. To them botany has no name and is probably not even recognized as a special branch of "knowledge" at all. Unfortunately, the more industrialized we become the farther away we move from direct contact with plants, and the less distinct our knowledge of botany grows. Yet everyone comes unconsciously on an amazing amount of botanical knowledge, and few people will fall to recognize a rose, an apple, or an orchid. When our Neolithic ancestors, living in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, discovered that certain grasses could be harvested and their seeds planted for richer yields the next season, the first great step in a new association of plants and humans was taken. Grains were discovered and from them flowed the marvel of agriculture: cultivated crops. From then on, humans would increasingly take their living from the controlled production of a few plants, rather than getting a little here and a little there from many varieties that grew wild and the accumulated knowledge of tens of thousands of years of experience and intimacy with plants in the wild would begin to fade away. Tribes living today in the jungle of the Amazon teach botany to their children at school.
Plants and Mankind Botany, the study of plants, occupies a peculiar position in the history of human knowledge. We don’t know what our Stone Age ancestors knew about plants, but from what we can observe of preindustrial societies that still exist, a detailed learning of plants and their properties must be extremely ancient. This is logical. Plants are the basis of the food pyramid for all living things, even for other plants. They have always been enormously important to the welfare of people, not only for food, but also for clothing, weapons, tools, dyes, medicines, shehers, and many other purposes. Tribes living today in the jungle of the Amazon recognize hundreds of plants and know many properties of each. To them botany has no name and is probably not even recognized as a special branch of "knowledge" at all. Unfortunately, the more industrialized we become the farther away we move from direct contact with plants, and the less distinct our knowledge of botany grows. Yet everyone comes unconsciously on an amazing amount of botanical knowledge, and few people will fall to recognize a rose, an apple, or an orchid. When our Neolithic ancestors, living in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, discovered that certain grasses could be harvested and their seeds planted for richer yields the next season, the first great step in a new association of plants and humans was taken. Grains were discovered and from them flowed the marvel of agriculture: cultivated crops. From then on, humans would increasingly take their living from the controlled production of a few plants, rather than getting a little here and a little there from many varieties that grew wild and the accumulated knowledge of tens of thousands of years of experience and intimacy with plants in the wild would begin to fade away. It is logical that a detailed learning of plants and their properties must be extremely ancient.
Plants and Mankind Botany, the study of plants, occupies a peculiar position in the history of human knowledge. We don’t know what our Stone Age ancestors knew about plants, but from what we can observe of preindustrial societies that still exist, a detailed learning of plants and their properties must be extremely ancient. This is logical. Plants are the basis of the food pyramid for all living things, even for other plants. They have always been enormously important to the welfare of people, not only for food, but also for clothing, weapons, tools, dyes, medicines, shehers, and many other purposes. Tribes living today in the jungle of the Amazon recognize hundreds of plants and know many properties of each. To them botany has no name and is probably not even recognized as a special branch of "knowledge" at all. Unfortunately, the more industrialized we become the farther away we move from direct contact with plants, and the less distinct our knowledge of botany grows. Yet everyone comes unconsciously on an amazing amount of botanical knowledge, and few people will fall to recognize a rose, an apple, or an orchid. When our Neolithic ancestors, living in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, discovered that certain grasses could be harvested and their seeds planted for richer yields the next season, the first great step in a new association of plants and humans was taken. Grains were discovered and from them flowed the marvel of agriculture: cultivated crops. From then on, humans would increasingly take their living from the controlled production of a few plants, rather than getting a little here and a little there from many varieties that grew wild and the accumulated knowledge of tens of thousands of years of experience and intimacy with plants in the wild would begin to fade away. People can not survive without plants.
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