Reading activity

As you know, although Paco thinks he does not need any help at all,
he loves helping people. In fact, he helps some NGOs which send
basic aid supplies to countries which need some kind of help. "I wish I
could found an NGO", he sometimes thinks. Not only would he like to
found one, he would also love to help all the NGOs worldwide.
However, there are too many. But what is an NGO?

NGOs1
Non-governmental organization (NGO) is a term that has
become widely accepted as referring to a legally constituted, nongovernmental organization created by natural or legal persons with
no participation or representation of any government. In the cases in
which NGOs are funded totally or partially by governments, the NGO
maintains its non-governmental status and excludes government
representatives from membership in the organization. In many
jurisdictions these types of organization are defined as "civil society
organizations" or referred to by other names.
The number of internationally operating NGOs is estimated at
40,000. National numbers are even higher: Russia has 277,000
NGOs. India is estimated to have between 1 million and 2 million
NGOs.
National NGOs go back to antiquity. International non-governmental
organizations have a history dating back to at least 1839. It has been
estimated that by 1914 there were 1083 NGOs. International NGOs
were important in the anti-slavery movement and the movement for
women's suffrage, and reached a peak at the time of the World
Disarmament Conference. However, the phrase "non-governmental
organization" only came into popular use with the establishment of
the United Nations Organization in 1945 with provisions in Article 71
of Chapter 10 of the United Nations Charter for a consultative role for
organizations which are neither governments nor member states. The
vital role of NGOs and other "major groups"
in sustainable development was recognized in Chapter 27 of Agenda
21, leading to intense arrangements for a consultative relationship
between the United Nations and non-governmental organizations.
Globalization during the 20th century gave rise to the importance of
NGOs. Many problems could not be solved within a nation.
International treaties and international organizations such as the
World Trade Organization were perceived as being too centred on the
interests of capitalist enterprises. Some argued that in an attempt to
counterbalance this trend, NGOs have developed to emphasize
humanitarian issues, developmental aid and sustainable
development. A prominent example of this is the World Social Forum
which is a rival convention to the World Economic Forum held

annually in January in Davos, Switzerland. The fifth World Social

Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2005 was attended by
representatives from more than 1,000 NGOs. Some have argued that
in forums like these, NGOs take the place of what should belong to
popular movements of the poor. Others argue that NGOs are often
imperialist in nature, that they sometimes operate in
a racialized manner in dominant countries, and that they fulfil a
similar function to that of the clergy during the high colonial era. The
philosopher Peter Hallward argues that they are an aristocratic form
of politics. However, this philosophy would suggest that organizations
of indigenous peoples are not represented, which is untrue. Whatever
the case, NGO transnational networking is now extensive.
Answer the following questions:
1. According to the text, why did NGOs become more and more
important last century?

2. According to the text, what do most NGOs devote their efforts to?

In the passage above there are several relative clauses, whose

antecedents are objects.
Try to identify them before filling in the chart.
noun
term

relative pronoun

relative clause
has become widely accepted as...

NGOs

send stuff to countries...

organizations

are neither governments nor member

states.

World Social Forum

is a rival convention to...

IMPORTANT:
When we want to emphasize a negative adverb, we change the
structure of the sentence and say it as if it were a question (avoid
rising intonation).
Find a structure of this kind in the text.

"I wish" and "If only" are frequently used in English to express wishes
and regrets.
Find an example of this structure in the passage above; say
what tense has been used after it and if it refers to a present
or a past wish.

Imagine you are looking forward to become a member of a

famous NGO in your city. Tell a friend of yours how much you
desire it. Use "I wish" or "If only".

Write the following sentence in the forms and tenses asked in

the chart:
'The vital role of NGOs and other 'major groups' in sustainable
development was recognized in Chapter 27 of Agenda 21.' (Pay
attention: the verb is in the passive voice).
Answer
Tense and form
Negative
Interrogative negative
Future
Interrogative of the future
Negative of the Present Perfect

Multi-word verbs

The verb "recognize" in the sentence above is not a multi-word

verb, is it? There are a lot of multi-word verbs in English. Remember
that multi-word verbs are verbs made up of more than one word. Do
you remember prepositional verbs in unit 3? As we will mention later
in the unit, prepositional verbs are multi-word verbs. However, there
are other multi-word verbs such as phrasal verbs. It is important that
you remember that phrasal verbs are mainly used in informal speech.
That means that you must avoid using phrasal verbs when writing a
composition or essay unless it is a very informal letter to a friend, for
example.

Captain Cook's early life1

After visiting the Opera House, Paco wanted to know more about
when, why and who colonized Australia and turned it into a place to
take all kinds of convicts from the British Isles. Thus, he visited the
Australian National Maritime Museum at Sydney's Darling Harbour,
where he could read and see documents about the well-known British
navigator and explorer, Captain Cook.
Captain James Cook was born in the village of Marton in Yorkshire,
which today is a suburb belonging to the town of Middlesbrough, in
1728. He was baptised in the local church of St. Cuthbert's where
today his name can be seen in the church register. Cook was the
second of eight children of James Cook, a Scottish farm labourer, and
his locally born wife Grace Pace from Thornaby on Tees. In 1736, his
family moved to Airey Holme farm at Great Ayton, where his father's
employer, Thomas Skottowe paid for him to attend the local school,
which is a museum nowadays. In 1741, after five years schooling, he
began to work for his father, who had by now been promoted to farm
manager. For leisure he would climb a nearby hill, Roseberry
Topping, enjoying the opportunity for solitude. Cook's Cottage, his
parents' last home, which he is likely to have visited, is now in
Melbourne, having been moved from England and reassembled brick
by brick in 1934.
In 1745, when he was 16, Cook moved 20 miles (32 km) to the
fishing village of Staithes to be apprenticed as a shop boy
to grocer and haberdasher William Sanderson. Historians have
speculated that this is where Cook first felt the lure of the sea
while gazing out of the shop window.
After 18 months, not proving suitable for shop work, Cook travelled
to the nearby port town of Whitby to be introduced to friends of
Sanderson's, John and Henry Walker who were prominent local shipowners and Quakers, and were in the coal trade. Their house is now
the Captain Cook Memorial Museum. Cook was taken on as
a merchant navy apprentice in their small fleet of vessels plying coal
along the English coast.
As part of this apprenticeship, Cook applied himself to the study of
algebra, geometry, trigonometry, navigation and astronomy, all skills
he would need one day to command his own ship.
His three-year apprenticeship completed, Cook began working on
trading ships in the Baltic Sea. He soon progressed through the
merchant navy ranks, starting with his 1752 promotion to Mate
(officer in charge of navigation) aboard the collier brig Friendship. In
1755, within a month of being offered command of this vessel, he
volunteered for service in the Royal Navy, as Britain was re-arming

for what was to become the Seven Years' War. Despite the need to
start back at the bottom of the naval hierarchy, Cook realised his
career would advance more quickly in military service and entered
the Navy at Wapping on 7 June 1755.
He died on February 14, 1779.
Answer the following questions:
1. According to the text, why did Captain Cook have the chance to
attend school at Great Ayton?
2. According to the text, what happened to Cook's Cottage?
3. Why did Captain Cook enter the Navy in 1755?

Let's have a look at some sentences from the passage above

which contain a relative clause:

Thus, he visited the Australian National Maritime Museum at

Sydney's Darling Harbour, where he could read and see
documents about the well-known British navigator and explorer,
Captain Cook.
Captain James Cook was born in the village of Marton in
Yorkshire, which today is a suburb belonging to the town of
Middlesbrough, in 1728.
Cook travelled to the nearby port town of Whitby to be introduced
to friends of Sanderson's, John and Henry Walker who were
prominent local ship-owners and Quakers.

Answer the following questions:

1. There are four relative clauses in the sentences, which ones?
2. Which are defining and which ones non-defining?
3. Can you recognize the relative pronouns in each of them?
4. And how about the antecedents of those pronouns?

As you can see in the passage, relative clauses are very frequently
used in all languages, since they provide extra information about
nouns. Remember that defining relative clauses are essential to
understand who, what or where we are referring to (that is why no
commas are added), whereas non-defining relative clauses are not so
necessary to understand the main clause, that is, to know who, what
or where we are talking about (that is why they are placed between
commas within a sentence).
Let's concentrate on defining relative clauses for a while. In order to
do so, surf the web to find a good English definition for the
following words from the passage:
convict (n.) - navigator - suburb - farm

Imagine a friend of yours wants to join the navy because he

doesn't know what else he/she could do for a living. Tell
him/her not to do so giving him/her a good reason.

Write the following sentence in the forms and tenses asked in

the chart:
"For leisure he would climb a nearby hill, Roseberry Topping, enjoying
the opportunity for solitude."
Tense and form
Future
Present Perfect Continuous
Interrogative of the Present Perfect
Present Continuous
Interrogative negative
Interrogative of the Past Simple

Answer

The Internet1
After visiting Melbourne Park and enjoying the fantastic visit to the
courts where the Australian Open is held, Paco feels like visiting one
of the most famous universities in Melbourne, Swinburne University
of Technology, which has six campuses in the state of Victoria and
one in Malaysia. This university, founded in 1908 by George
Swinburne, who was a famous engineer and politician, is one of the
best ones in the state. In fact, there exists a guide in Australia known
as Good Universities Guide of Australia which ranked Swinburne
University of Technology the best in Melbourne for teaching quality,
equal best for graduate satisfaction, along with a five-star rating for
cultural diversity in 2009.
Among all the Faculties, he visited the Faculty of Information and
Communication Technologies. As soon as he entered the main
building he picked up a pamphlet lying on the floor which talked
about the Internet, which brought back to his mind how useful
computers and the Internet are. Paco, who loves new technologies,
as we already know, couldn't avoid reading it at that very moment:
The Internet is a global system of interconnected
computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite
(TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of
networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic,
business, and government networks of local to global scope that are
linked by a broad array of electronic and optical networking
technologies. The Internet carries a vast array of information
resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext
documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to
support electronic mail.
Most traditional communications media, such as telephone and
television services, are reshaped or redefined using the technologies
of the Internet, giving rise to services such as Voice over Internet
Protocol (VoIP). The Internet has enabled or accelerated the creation
of new forms of human interactions through instant messaging,
Internet forums, and social networking sites.
The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United
States funded research projects of its military agencies to
build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This
research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by
the National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in
the development of new networking technologies and led to the
commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s, and
resulted in the following popularization of countless applications in
virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated

quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the Internet, which

turns it into the most useful and quickly way of communicating and
getting information.
The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological
implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent
network sets its own standards. Only the overreaching definitions of
the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol
address space and the Domain Name System, are directed by a
maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and
standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of looselyaffiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by
contributing technical expertise.
Answer the following questions:
1. According to the text, does the Internet consist of the hypertext
documents of the WWW and the infrastructure to support electronic
mail?
2. According to the text, has the Internet changed human
interactions?
3. Who governs the Internet?

In the text, we can find a lot of relative clauses.

1. Identify all the defining relative clauses you can find in it.
Underline the antecedent they modify in red.
2. Identify all the non-defining relative clauses in it. Underline the
antecedent they modify in blue.
3. There are also three "reduced relative clauses". Identify them and
underline the antecedent they modify in black. How would you say
the whole relative clause?
4. There are also two "sentential relative clauses", that is, two
relative clauses which modify or refer to a whole previous sentence.
Identify them in green.

Imagine a friend of yours isn't sure of how useful the Internet

is and that is why he/she isn't an Internet user yet. Convince
him or her to begin using the Internet. Give him or her a good
reason for doing so.

Write the following sentence in the forms and tenses asked in

the chart: "An estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the
services of the Internet."
Answer
Tense and form
Negative interrogative
Future simple
Interrogative of the Present Perfect
Negative of the Past Simple
Interrogative

Turn the following sentences into the passive voice.

a. The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and
services.
b. The Internet has enabled or accelerated the creation of new forms
of human interactions through instant messaging.
c. An estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the
Internet.
Turn the following sentence into the reported speech:
"After visiting Melbourne Park and enjoying the fantastic visit to the
courts where the Australian Open is held, Paco feels like visiting one
of the most famous universities in Melbourne"
The narrator said...

Join the following pairs of sentences by means of a relative

clause. Remember to decide if they are defining or nondefining.
a. Paco visited all the courts at Melbourne Park. It is in the north of
the city.
b. He was helped by a guide. The name of the guide was Phillip.
c. He got astonished when he saw the Rod Laver Arena court. Rafa
Nadal was training there.

Reading activity
Hardly ever has Paco read about this fantastic library. So, he decides
to sit down in a comfortable armchair next to a window and goes on
reading about the Library of Alexandria.

A research institution1
No sooner was the Letter of Aristeas discovered than scholars
knew the library of Alexandria had initially been organized
by Demetrius of Phaleron, a student of Aristotle, under the reign of
Ptolemy Soter.
Built in the style of Aristotle's Lyceum, in service of the Musaeum (a
Greek Temple or "House of Muses", hence the term "museum"), not
only did the library consist of a reading room, lecture halls and
meeting rooms, but also gardens, and a room for shared dining.
However, the exact layout is not known. This model's influence may
still be seen today in the layout of university campuses. The library
itself is known to have had an acquisitions department, and a
cataloguing department. The hall contained shelves for the collections
of scrolls (as the books were at this time on papyrus scrolls), known
as bibliothekai (). It was rumored that had you looked at
the wall above the shelves, a famous inscription could have been
read: The place of the cure of the soul.
The first known library of its kind to gather a serious collection of
books from beyond its country's borders, the Library at Alexandria
was charged with collecting all the world's knowledge. It did so
through an aggressive and well-funded royal mandate which involved
trips to the book fairs of Rhodes and Athens. They hung on to the
original texts and made copies to send back to their owners. This
detail is informed by the fact that Alexandria welcomed trade from
the East and West, and soon found itself the international hub for

trade, as well as the leading producer of papyrus and, soon enough,

books.
Not only did the library collect books from the past, it was also home
to a host of international scholars, well-patronized by the Ptolemaic
dynasty with travel, lodging and stipends for their whole families. As
a research institution, the library filled its stacks with new works in
mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural sciences and other
subjects. It was at the Library of Alexandria that the scientific method
was first conceived and put into practice, and its empirical standards
applied in one of the first and certainly strongest homes for serious
textual criticism. As the same text often existed in several different
versions, comparative textual criticism was crucial for ensuring their
veracity. Once ascertained, canonical copies would then be made for
scholars, royalty and wealthy bibliophiles the world over, this
commerce bringing about income to the library.
Read the text carefully. Answer the following questions:
1. According to the text, where does the word "museum" come from?
2. Why can the model of the Library of Alexandria be seen in
university campuses nowadays?
3. According to the texts, why did so many scholars go to live in
Alexandria?

In the passage you can find, at least, four sentences which do

not follow the common word order of English statements:
Subject + verb. Identify them and say why they do not follow
that structure.

Imagine a friend of yours spends more than eight hours a day

studying in a library every day. Tell him or her not to do so
and give him a good reason not to do so.

Write the following sentence in the forms and tenses asked in

the chart: "The hall contained shelves for the collections of scrolls."

Tense and form

Answer

Negative interrogative
Negative
Interrogative of the Present Perfect
Negative of the Present Simple
Interrogative of the Future

Reading activity
The big red and white ship which links Tasmania and the mainland,
The Spirit of Tasmania, is docking at Hobart, the capital city. On this
occasion, before going to the hotel he will stay in, Paco must go to
the centre of the city to buy a new mobile phone, since his old mobile
had fallen into the sea. As he walks, he notices all the houses in
Hobart are of different shapes and colours. 'I wish I had a house like
that', he thinks when he sees a tall square red house on the right.
He enters the shop and asks the shop assistant for a mobile phone.
He buys a modern small black mobile ('This is the third mobile I buy
this year, If only I had been more careful', Paco says to himself).
While the kind shop assistant is preparing the bill, Paco asks him
about the beautiful houses he has seen. The man says that
Tasmanian people are very individualist and continues...
One way Australians express their individuality is through the homes
in which they live. Houses come in a great variety of shapes, sizes
and colours, some with very interesting architecture, and virtually no
two houses are alike. Houses built on level ground rarely
have basements, but of course those thousands that are built on
the steep hillsides of Tasmania have two or more levels. Houses in
town tend to be very close together. Fences are found along almost
every border between houses, as Australians value their privacy.
Most houses have a ceramic tile or corrugated tin roofvirtually no
other types of roofing are seen in Tasmania. Many Australians who
live in city or suburban areas also have a shack or vacation home in
the mountains or by the beach. An Aussie holiday shack is usually a
fully-equipped home.1
The vast majority of homes do not have central heat. Many use wood
heaters (wood stoves), but electric heat is also very popular. Most

electrical power comes from a network of hydroelectric power stations

found all over the state. Gas heaters and heat pumps are sometimes
installed...
The shop assistant was going to continue speaking, but Paco,
amazed, tells him he is in a hurry. He thanks the shop assistant for
both the service and the perfect explanation about Tasmanian houses
and leaves the shop. At the street, he says: 'I wish I hadn't asked
him about the houses...'
Read the passage carefully. Then answer the following
questions.
1. What does Paco regret in the shop?
2. According to the text, what do Australians appreciate?

In the passage above, Paco expresses some wishes and

regrets. What are the sentences he uses to express that?

As you can see Paco uses either "I wish" or "If only" plus Past simple
to express a wish for the present or the future and plus Past Perfect
to express a regret in the past.
How would you express the following wishes or regrets with a
similar structure?
1. What a beautiful mobile! I wish...
2. I didn't phone Andrs last week. If only...
3. I didn't tell my teachers I was going on a long trip. I wish...
4. I hope my friends are waiting for me at the airport when I arrive in
Madrid. If only...
5. Nobody came to wave me goodbye when I left. I wish...
Imagine a friend of yours is thinking of buying a very
expensive house. Tell him or her not to do so, as you think he
or she doesn't need such a big and expensive house.

1. Write the following sentence in the forms and tenses asked

in the chart: 'Most electrical power comes from a network of
hydroelectric power stations found all over the state.'
Verb tenses

Answer

Future
Interrogative
Negative of the past simple
Interrogative negative of the past simple
Negative of the present perfect
2. Transform the following sentence into the passive:
'While the kind shop assistant is preparing the bill, Paco asks him
about the beautiful houses he has seen.'

3. Transform the narrator's words into the indirect speech:

'On this occasion, before going to the hotel he will stay in, Paco must
go to the centre of the city to buy a new mobile phone, since his old
mobile had fallen into the sea.'
The narrator said...

4. Join the following pair of sentences by means of a nondefining relative clause:

'Paco is in a hurry. He thanks the shop assistant for both the service
and the perfect explanation about Tasmanian houses.'