Practice Assignments A) Stinking buses, their passengers pale and tired, jam the crowded streets. Drivers shout at one another and honk their horns. smog smarts the eyes and chokes the senses. The scene is ‘Athens at rush hour. The city of Plato and Pericles is in a sorry state of affairs, built without a plan, lacking even adequate swerage facilities, hemmed in by mountains and the sea, its 135 square miles crammed with 3.7 million people. Even Athens’ ruins are in ruin: sulphur dioxide eats away at the marble of the Parthenon and other treasures on the Acropolis. As Greek Premier Constantine Karamalis has said, ‘The only solution for Athens would be to demolish half of it and start all over again.” So great has been the population flow toward the city that entire hinterland villages stand vacant or neatly so. About 120,000 people from outlying provinces move to Athens every year, with the result that 40% of Greece’s citizenry are now packed in the capital. The migrants come for the few available jobs, which are usually no better than the ones they fled. At the current rate of migration, Athens by the year 2000 will have a population of 6.5 million, more than half the nation. Aside from overcrowding and poor public transport, the biggest problems confronting Athenians are noise and pollution. A government study concluded that Athens was the noisiest city in the world. Smog is almost at killing levels: 180-300 mg of sulphur dioxide per cubic meter of air, or up to four times the level that the World Health Organization considers safe. Nearly half the pollution comes from cars. Despite high prices for vehicles and fuel ($2.95 per gallon), nearly 100,000 automobiles are sold in Greece each year; 3,000 driver’s licenses are issued in Athens monthly. ‘After decades of neglect, Athens is at last getting some attention. In March a committee of representatives from all major public sevice minstries met to discusss a plan to unclog the city, make it livable and clean up its environment. A save-Athens ministry, which will soon begin functioning, will prooseheavy taxes to discourage in-migration, a minimum of $5 billion in public spending for Athens alone, and other projects for the countryside to encourage residents to stay put. A master plan that will move many government offices to the city’s fringes is already in the works. Meanwhile, more Greeks keep moving into Athens. With few parks and precious few oxygen-producing plants, the city and its citizens are literally suffocating. Questions 1.Find at least two instances of synonymy in the text. 2.Find at least two cases of antonymy in the text. 3.Identify four collacations in the text. 4.Identify at least two compounds in the text. 5.Give two example of metaphors from the text. 6.What does the phrase ‘sorry stae of affairs’ mean? 7. Replace the word hemmed in ‘hemmed in by mountains and the sea’ in paragraph | 8.Replace the word flow in ‘population flow toward the city’ in paragraph 2. 9.Find a verb in the text for ‘crammed.’ 10.Find a noun for the word ‘minister.’ 11. What is the cause of overcrowding in Athens? 12.What is the result of the high rate of migration?B) In 1996, there was an estimated 3.3 billion hectares of forest worldwide. But this figure is rapidly decreasing. A 1982 survey showed that up to 11.3m hectares of rainforest are felled annully. In Africa alone, 85% of tropical forest has been felled or degraded. The forests are destroyed by plantations and cash crops, logging, urbanization and construction projects such as dams, roads and mines. Rainforests play a vital role in regulating the earth’s climate, preventing soil erosion and storing and purifyoing water. Furthermore, they are home to over half the world’s species. In just 0.4 hectares of rainforest there are some 1500 plant species and 750 tree species. The rainforest has also provided us with many products such as chocolate, vanilla, bananas and various medicinal cures. The deforestation of the world’s rainforest has massive environmental implications, threatens the homes of many indigenous people and endangers the habitat of many creatures. Questions 1 Find a pair of synonyms in the text. 2.Find an instance of antonymy in the text. 3.Replace the word ‘indigenous’ in paragraph 2 with another. A.ldentify an instance of collocation in paragraph 1. Try to replace it with another word or phrase. 5.Give a phrase that acts as an illustration-marker or expands a point in paragraph 2. 6.What are the causes for destruction of rainforests?