Read the article below. Learn the language of the passage.

TEXT 1
We’re a Passionate, Brutal Bunch

Jeremy Paxman and the government's "patriotism envoy" Michael Wills

have corrupted the idea of Englishness. The two have led us to believe that the
English are a pragmatic, politically acquiescent and innately tolerant tribe. The
English have become the dreary residents of middle England. Yet any sustained
reading of British and Irish history, not least the civil wars of the 1640s, shows the
English to be a passionate, revolutionary and frequently brutal people.
Jeremy Paxman's The English, a Portrait of a People has been one of the
silent forgers of modern English patriotism. In an era wracked by national
selfdoubt, Paxman sets out a well-crafted credo for Englishness. The book lovingly
pokes fun at every cherished aspect of our "national character" - rural nostalgia,
laughing at foreigners, obsessional wordplay - but reassuringly concludes that
ultimately Englishness is a conservative state of mind. Yes, there might have been
riots and rebellions, but at heart we are modest and pragmatic.
The government has fallen in behind this view. Michael Wills has defined
the values that might be included in a national code for new immigrants as
tolerance and, in true Edwardian style, "a sense of the importance of fair play".
Generously, Wills also attributes to us a sense of duty.
Wills leaves us 'with still the same cloying vision of Englishness which
Stanley Baldwin, George Orwell and John Major revelled in. The land of anvils,
cycling maids and long shadows, pigeon fanciers and red telephone boxes. Come
what may, the gently resolute Englishman lives on.
But history relates that the English are not an especially tolerant, pragmatic
or just people. They have a long history of political radicalism, militant religiosity
and, sometimes, staggering brutality. Nowhere is this more evident than during the
defining years of these islands' history - the civil wars of the 17th century.
In the 1640s the English went to war against themselves, the Scottish and
then the Irish in a savage conflict, which killed more than a quarter of a million
people - the greatest loss of life prior to the First World War. What sparked it were
the supposedly un-English attributes of fervent religious belief and deeply held
political principles. According to Paxman, "the English are not a churchy people'.
They like their religion "understated and reasonably reliable". Not in the 17th
century they didn't.
A vicious doctrinal tussle over the Church of England between Puritans and
a high church faction set off the civil war. King Charles I's quasi-Catholic reforms
led thousands to rebel. The fabled English pragmatism, the third way solution, was
far from evident as Roundheads and Cavaliers thrashed out their religious
differences in battlefields across the country.
The English tradition of tolerance was not much in evidence as Cromwell
massacred his way through Catholic Ireland. In England, he presided over a
soulless war state, abolishing parliament and introducing just the kind of military
dictatorship.
On into the 18th century, the English spirit happily connived at the brutal
suppression of Jacobites in Scotland and the enforcement of Anglican supremacy
in England, to say nothing of its "outward looking" approach to the Atlantic slave
trade.
Every nation has a dark past, and England's is certainly less dark than many.
Yet the dearly held idea of English exceptionalism, our supposedly unique history
of tolerance and openness compared with the continent, no longer seems viable.
The English civil war or revolution has often been regarded as an aberration - a
moment when the nation and then the king lost its head. Yet perhaps the passion,
brutality, and intellectualism of the civil war years should more accurately be
regarded as just as peculiarly English as tolerance and openness.
TASK 1. Explain the meanings and give examples of usage of the
following words from the text above. Use the chart below.

Examples of usage other than in the text

Word Meaning(s)
other than in the text

susceptible, resent, categorize, stereotype, pigeonhole, acquiescent

brutal, cloy, revel in, fervent, tussle, thrash out, aberration
TASK 2. Match the words in the left and right columns to restore the
collocations from the text.

sustained years
national religiosity
 pokes reading
obsessional radicalism
political fun at smth
militant wordplay
defining self-doubt
savage solution
doctrinal conflict
fabled tussle
third way at suppression
thrashed out his way
massacred differences
connived English pragmatism