Write a précis of the following text

One Saturday in June, I got off the train from Vienna at Altenberg Station, in the midst of
gathering of bathers, such as often flock to our village at fine weekends. I had gone only a few
steps along the street and the crowd had not yet dispersed when, high above me in the air, I saw a
bird whose species I could not at first determine. It flew with slow measured wing-beats, varied
at set intervals by longer periods of gliding. It seemed too heavy to be a buzzard; for a stork, it
was not big enough and, even at that height, neck and feet should have been visible. Then the
bird gave a sudden swerve so that the setting sun shone for a second full on the underside of the
great wings which lit up like stars in the blue of the skies. The bird was white. By Heaven, it
was my cockatoo! The steady movements of his wings clearly indicated that he was setting out
on a long-distance flight. What should I do? Should I call the bird? Well, have you ever heard
the flight-call of the yellow-crested cockatoo? No? But you have probably heard pig-killing
after the old method. Imagine a pig squealing at its most voluminous, taken up by a microphone
and magnified many times by a good loud-speaker. A man can imitate it quite successfully,
though somewhat feebly, by bellowing at the top of his voice “O-ah.” I had already proved that
the cockatoo understood this imitation and promptly “came to heel.” But would it work at such a
height? A bird always has great difficulty in making the decision to fly downward at a steep
angle. To yell, or not to yell, that was the question. If I yelled, and the bird came down, all
would be well, but what if it sailed calmly on through the clouds? How would I then explain my
song to the crowd of people? Finally, I did yell. The people around me stood still, rooted to the
spot. The bird hesitated for a moment on outstretched wings, then folding them, it descended in
one dive and landed upon my outstretched arm. Once again, I was master of the situation. (372
words)
Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring
THE DIFFERENT IDEAS OF THE TEXTE
Here are twenty-one statements taken from the story. If you were writing a summary of the story. Only
nine of them would be essential to make the point. Pick out the nine essential steps and then write a
summary of the story as briefly as possible

1) It happened on a Saturday in June

2) Lorenz had travelled from Vienna to Altenberg

3) Lorenz was in a crowd leaving the local railway station

4) Most of the people were going the bathe

5) When he saw a strange bird overhead

6) Sometimes, it beat its wings sometimes it gilded

7) It was a neither a buzzard nor a stork

8) The bird swerved suddenly

9) He recognized his cockatoo

10) It was flying away from home

11) Lorenz knew the bird might come to him if he cried like a cockatoo but

12) The cockatoo’s call is very noisy indeed

13) It is like the sound of a pig being killed

14) You have probably heard a pig being killed

15) The call can be feebly imitated by a man

16) Any bird find it difficult to decide to fly down steeply

17) if the cockatoo ignored Lorenz’s call. Lorenz would look foolish

18) Lorenz decided to yell

19) The bird hesitated

20) It came to Lorenz

21) It landed on this arm

Little resume of the text

3)-5)-8)-9)-11)-12)-17)-18)-21)

Write a précis of the following text

A PRECIS OF THIS TEXT: How Lorentz risked looking foolish in trying to recovery his bird
 In the 2002 football World Cup, France, the reigning world champions, suffered a
humiliating defeat to the unglamorous Senegal. All 11 members of the victorious Senegalese team
had played for European clubs. They were not alone. By 2000, the first and second divisions of
Europe’s leagues had poached enough African players to field 70 teams. So, the question is
whether greedy European clubs have deprived Senegal of its best footballers, or whether the
prospect of a lucrative career in Europe encouraged more Senegalese to take up the beautiful game.
The authors of the book “Give Us Your Best and Brightest”, Devesh Kapur and John
McHale, see the emigration of African players as a highly visible example of the “brain drain”.
Less visible, but more worrying, is the departure of the poor world’s doctors, nurses and teachers to
more lucrative jobs in the rich world. Ghana, e.g., has only 6.2 doctors per 100,000 people.
Perhaps three-quarters of its doctors leave within ten years of qualifying.
The answer to the Senegal conundrum is of course “both”: the best players leave, and the
dream of emulating them motivates many others to take their place. The real question is whether
the second effect outweighs the first, leaving the game in Senegal stronger or weaker than it
otherwise would be. Another group of authors think that the net effect of the brain drain is similarly
ambiguous. The prospect of securing a visa to America or Australia should tempt more people in
poor countries to invest in education, something that these authors call a “brain gain”. If the
temptation is strong enough, and the chances of landing a visa low enough, the poor country could
even come out ahead: it might gain more qualified (if disappointed) doctors and engineers than it
loses.
As with the debate about the brain drain, theory has run ahead of evidence. The numbers on
international flows of people are much patchier than those on cross-border flows of goods or
capital. In a recent paper, Mr. Stark and his co-authors investigate internal migration instead. The
rural villages of Mexico lose many of their brightest sons and daughters to jobs in cities or border
towns. Those Mexicans who leave their home villages tend to be better educated than those who
stay. But despite this, the example the leavers set (and the job leads they provide) raises the average
level of schooling of those left behind. Because they can aspire to a world beyond the village, even
if they never reach it, young Mexicans have an added reason to stay in school beyond a ninth year,
these authors show.
The other question is whether the brain drain does leave a country with a better-educated
populace, that is, whether this necessarily a good thing or not. Education is not free, and some of
those who gambled on a diploma as a ticket overseas will regret their decision. But Mr. Stark
assumes that people in poor countries tend to demand too little education. A person’s productivity
depends on the skills of those around him, as well as his own. Because of these spillovers, an
individual’s education is worth more to the economy as a whole than it is to himself, and he will
under invest in it as a result. Mr. Stark sees limited emigration as one way to fix this market failure.
Emigration, as Mr. Stark suggests, might be a spur to greater accomplishment, and the poor
world’s talent, like Senegal’s footballers, deserves a chance to compete on a global stage. But it is
not easy to run a managed “emigration” policy. The drain of educated minds from poor countries is
mostly determined by host countries’ rules, not home countries’ interests. There will be tremendous
pressure to loosen those rules in the future, not least because, as the baby-boom generation retires, it
will seek to “backfill the taxpaying workforce behind it”. The rich world no longer welcomes the
tired and the huddled; it looks set to compete ever more fiercely for the bright and the qualified.
(672 words)
 Anglais : Epreuve de rattrapage du Semestre 1 Durée : 2 heures

Read the text very carefully and then write a précis using 90 words of its original length, providing
it with a title and indicating the number of words at the end; a margin of 10% is allowed:

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the
nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or
cricket they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from
concrete examples that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce
it from general principles.
Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great
part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire
how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient
origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the
nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later
part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public
school, looked on games simply as a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United
States, games were built into a heavily-finance activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and
rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most
violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be
much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism—that is, with the
lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms
of competitive prestige. Also, organized games are more likely to flourish in urban
communities, where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and
does not get much opportunity for creative labor. In a rustic community, a boy or young man
works off a great deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees,
riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cock-fighting
and ferreting for rats. In a big town, one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet
for one’s physical strength or for one’s sadistic impulses. Games are taken seriously in London
and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome and Byzantium: in the Middle Ages they
were played, and probably played with much physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with
politics nor a cause for group hatred.
By George Orwell (411 words)
 Anglais : Epreuve de rattrapage du Semestre 2 Durée : 2 heures
Read the text very carefully and then write a précis using 200 words of its original length, providing
it with a title and indicating the number of words at the end; a margin of 10% is allowed:

The division and ascription of statutes with relation to sex seems to be basic in all social systems.
All societies prescribe different attitudes and activities to men and to women. Most of them try to
rationalize these prescriptions in terms of the physiological differences between the sexes or their
different roles in reproduction. However, a comparative study of the statutes ascribed to women and men
in different cultures seems to show that while such factors may have served as a starting point for the
development of a division the actual ascriptions are almost entirely determined by culture. Even the
psychological characteristics ascribed to men and women in different societies vary so much that they can
have little physiological basis. Our own idea of women as ministering angels contrasts sharply with the
ingenuity of women as torturers among the Iroquois and the sadistic delight they took in the process.
Even the last two generations have seen a sharp change in the psychological patterns for women in our
own society. The delicate, fainting lady of the middle eighteen-hundreds is as extinct as the dodo.
When it comes to the ascription of occupations, which is after all an integral part of status, we
find the differences in various societies even more marked. Arapesh women regularly carry heavier loads
than men “because their heads are much harder and stronger.” In some societies women do most of the
manual labor; in others, as in the Marquesas, even cooking, housekeeping, and baby-tending are proper
male occupations, and women spend most of their time primping. Even the general rule that women’s
handicap through pregnancy and nursing indicates the more active occupations as male and the less active
ones as female has many exceptions. Thus among the Tasmanians seal-hunting was women’s work.
They swam out to the seal rocks, stalked the animals, and clubbed them. Tasmanian women also hunted
opossums, which required the climbing of large trees.
Although the actual ascription of occupations along sex lines is highly variable, the pattern of sex
division is constant. There are very few societies in which every important activity has not been
definitely assigned to men or to women. Even when the two sexes cooperate in a particular occupation,
the field of each is usually clearly delimited. Thus in Madagascar rice culture the men make the seedbeds
and terraces and prepare the fields for transplanting. The women do the work of transplanting, which is
hard and back-breaking. The women weed the crop, but the men harvest it. The women then carry it to
the threshing floors, where the men thresh it while the women winnow it. Lastly, the women pound the
grain in mortars and cook it.
When society takes over a new industry, there is often a period of uncertainty during which the
work may be done by either sex, but it soon falls into the province of one or the other. In Madagascar,
pottery is made by men in some tribes and by women in others. The only tribe in which it is made by
both men and women is one into which the art has been introduced within the last sixty years. I was told
that during the fifteen years preceding my visit there had been a marked decrease in the number of male
potters, many men who had once practiced the art having given it up. The factor of lowered wages,
usually advanced as the reason for men leaving one of our own occupations when women enter it in force,
certainly was not operative here. The field was not overcrowded, and the prices for men’s and women’s
products were the same. Most of the men who had given up the trade were vague as to their reasons, but
a few said frankly that they did not like to compete with women. Apparently the entry of women into the
occupation had robbed it of a certain amount of prestige. It was no longer quite the thing for a man to be
a potter, even though he was a very good one. (676 words)
1. Women and men are attributed different roles in society
2. Most societies try to rationalize these prescriptions in terms of the physiological
differences between the sexes or their different roles in reproductions.
3. Nevertheless, these different statues are due to culture
4. . The last two generations have seen a sharp change in the psychological patterns for women in
our own society.
5. Different task are scribed to women and men according to their societies.
6. In addition, Marquesas, traditionally female activities are performed by men. In most
societies.
7. In any new venture, there is a time of uncertainly on the sex which performed it,
8. Therefore in Madagascar, pottery was done by both men and women in others countries
or by all.
9. There is a competition between them but most men gave up because competition with
women leads to lower wages but also
La division et la désignation des statuts en matière de sexe semblent être fondamentales dans
tous les systèmes sociaux. Toutes les sociétés prescrivent des attitudes et des activités
différentes aux hommes et aux femmes. La plupart d'entre eux tentent de rationaliser ces
prescriptions en fonction des différences physiologiques entre les sexes ou de leurs différents
rôles dans la reproduction. Cependant, une étude comparative des statuts attribués à des
femmes et à des hommes de différentes cultures semble montrer que, si de tels facteurs ont pu
servir de point de départ au développement d’une division, les attributions actuelles sont
presque entièrement déterminées par la culture. Même les caractéristiques psychologiques
attribuées aux hommes et aux femmes dans les différentes sociétés varient tellement qu'elles
peuvent avoir peu de fondement physiologique. Notre propre idée des femmes en tant
qu’Anges du ministère contraste vivement avec l’ingéniosité des femmes en tant que
tortionnaires parmi les Iroquois et avec le plaisir sadique qu’elles ont éprouvé au cours du
processus. Même les deux dernières générations ont vu un changement radical dans les
schémas psychologiques des femmes dans notre propre société. La dame délicate et évanouie
du milieu des dix-huit cents est aussi éteinte que le dodo.
En ce qui concerne l'attribution des professions, qui fait partie intégrante du statut, nous
constatons que les différences entre les sociétés sont encore plus marquées. Les femmes
Arapesh portent régulièrement des charges plus lourdes que les hommes «parce que leur tête
est beaucoup plus dure et plus forte». Dans certaines sociétés, les femmes effectuent la
majeure partie du travail manuel; dans d'autres, comme aux Marquises, même la cuisine,
l'entretien ménager et la garde des bébés sont des occupations convenables des hommes, et
les femmes passent le plus clair de leur temps à préparer leurs enfants. Même la règle générale
selon laquelle les femmes sont handicapées pendant la grossesse et l’allaitement indique que
les professions les plus actives en tant qu’hommes et les moins actives en tant que femmes
comportent de nombreuses exceptions. Ainsi, parmi les Tasmaniens, la chasse au phoque était
le travail des femmes. Ils ont nagé jusqu'aux roches du phoque, ont traqué les animaux et les
ont matraqués. Les femmes de Tasmanie ont également chassé les opossums, ce qui
nécessitait l'ascension de grands arbres.
Bien que la répartition réelle des professions par sexe soit très variable, le schéma de la
division par sexe est constant. Il y a très peu de sociétés dans lesquelles chaque activité
importante n'a pas été clairement attribuée aux hommes ou aux femmes. Même lorsque
les deux sexes coopèrent dans un métier particulier, le domaine de chacun est
généralement clairement délimité. Ainsi, à Madagascar, les rizières sont cultivées par les
hommes et préparent les champs pour la transplantation. Les femmes font le travail de
transplantation, ce qui est difficile et éreintant. Les femmes sarclent la récolte, mais les
hommes la récoltent. Les femmes le portent ensuite sur l'aire de battage, où les hommes
le battent tandis que les femmes le vannent. Enfin, les femmes pilent le grain dans des
mortiers et le cuisent.
Lorsque la société s'empare d'une nouvelle industrie, il existe souvent une période
d'incertitude au cours de laquelle le travail peut être effectué par l'un ou l'autre sexe,
mais cela tombe bientôt dans la province de l'un ou de l'autre. À Madagascar, la poterie
est fabriquée par des hommes dans certaines tribus et par des femmes dans d'autres. La
seule tribu dans laquelle il est composé d'hommes et de femmes est celle dans laquelle
l'art a été introduit au cours des soixante dernières années. On m'a dit qu'au cours des
quinze années précédant ma visite, le nombre de potiers masculins avait nettement
diminué, de nombreux hommes ayant pratiqué cet art y ayant renoncé. Le facteur de
baisse des salaires, généralement invoqué comme raison pour laquelle les hommes
quittent l’une de nos professions lorsque les femmes y entrent en vigueur, n’a
certainement pas été mis en œuvre ici. Le terrain n’était pas surpeuplé et les prix des
produits pour hommes et pour femmes étaient les mêmes. La plupart des hommes qui
avaient abandonné le métier étaient vagues sur leurs raisons, mais quelques-uns ont dit
franchement qu'ils n'aimaient pas rivaliser avec les femmes. Apparemment, l’entrée des
femmes dans l’occupation l’a privée d’un certain prestige. Ce n'était plus tout à fait la
chose pour un homme d'être un potier, même s'il était très bon. (676 mots)
Sujet: Write a précis of the following text, in not more than 100 words
After half a century of women’s suffrage, the number of women in high position of
political power and influence is still small enough for them to be known by name. Only three
women have (by the mid-1970s) been prime ministers, significantly, all in new emerging
countries (India, Ceylon and Israel); and although there have been women ministers, some of
cabinet rank, in a number of countries, very few have held office outside the spheres that are
usually considered women’s interests, such as social welfare, public health, and family affairs…
Women’s vote seems also to bear little relation to their social position in other respects.
In France, to give one example, women have always enjoyed high status not only in the family
but also socially and culturally. The country has produced a number of eminent women in
literature and politics (incidentally, even two ministers of state in the Popular Front Government
in 1936, before Frenchwomen had the vote) and includes among its national heroes a woman
soldier (Joan of Arc). Frenchwomen, nevertheless, were not enfranchised until 1944.
Switzerland, one of the oldest democracies, did not give women the vote until 1971. This
is all the more curious because not only have Swiss women played considerable part in the
economy of their country but Switzerland was among the first to extend university education to
women on a basis of complete equality with men…
The proportion of women in institutions of higher education is still considerably lower
than that of men almost everywhere. (The term higher education includes teachers’ colleges,
technological institutes, and fine-art colleges, as well as colleges and universities) …There is a
tendency for women students to concentrate in large numbers on a limited number of subjects—
languages, literature, education, usually social sciences (the list differs somewhat from country
to country)—to the near exclusion of most others. This seems particularly true of the United
States, where as many as 40 percent of women students graduating in one year qualified in
education, another 24 percent in social sciences, including psychology, and 14 percent in
humanities, a substantial proportion of the latter probably also heading for the teaching
profession. This leaves very small numbers graduating in medicine, the natural sciences, the fine
arts, law, engineering, and agriculture…
The rationale for denying many a gifted girl equal access with men to university
education is usually the following: she is not likely to become the breadwinner of a family; her
future socio-economic status will most probably not depend on her professional occupation or
earning capacity; and her career will presumably be only of short duration, thus not warranting
the investment of time, money, and energy. Some of these assumptions have been disproved by
the facts. (450 words)
Sujet: Write a précis of the following text, in not more than 100 words

If man is responsible for the future of this planet, he must pay more attention to ecology
—the science of relations between organisms and the resources of their environment. Human
ecology involves finding out what resources are available in our environment and how to make
the best use of them. We have to think first of all of material resources—minerals, water-power,
soil, forests, agricultural production—but we must also think of non-material or enjoyment
resources of the habitat, such as natural beauty and solitude, interest and adventure, wild scenery
and wild life.
The two types of resource are interlinked. Thus in eastern Africa, the unique community
of splendid large mammals and birds is one of the world’s unique enjoyment resources. But it is
of immediate financial value, through tourism, to the local inhabitants. It is also of physiological
value. Large areas of the dry savannah lands of the region simply degenerate and lose their
productivity if cultivated or used for grazing cattle. If they are properly managed, their
communities of wild animals yield large amounts of “wild protein” for human food—more than
can be obtained from domestic stock; while wrong use, for instance by over-grazing, can convert
a glorious wildlife habitat into semi-desert in a dozen years, as I have seen with my own eyes in
Kenya.
I have also seen how, in the artificial conditions of today’s National Parks, protected
beasts like elephants and hippos can start destroying their natural habitat. Man is in a sense a
protected beast: and during much of his evolution he has been busily engaged in ruining his own
habitat. We have been doing so in Britain, for instance, by polluting our rivers. The Thames
was once a fine salmon river. Today, almost its only abundant animal is the little red worm
Tubifex, which specializes on survival in dirty oxygen-poor mud. A new ecological threat of
man against his own habitat has recently appeared, in the shape of pesticidal chemicals, both
insecticides and herbicides.
Scientific ecology gives the basis for good land use. I have already pointed out how
important a proper land-use policy is in underdeveloped countries like Africa. It is equally
important, though for other reasons, in overcrowded and highly developed countries like our
own. In Britain, for instance, we have an actual shortage of space, and there is constant pressure
on the land’s surface for a variety of different and even conflicting forms of use—for house-
building, for communication, for industry, for military purposes, and for enjoyment. Somehow
or other these different forms of land use must be amicably adjusted and coordinated, so that one
form of use is paramount in one area, another in another. Proper land-use is applied human
ecology.
 Epreuve d’anglais du 2ème semestre Durée : 3 heures
Read the text very carefully and then write a précis using 1/3 of its original length, providing it with a title
and indicating the number of words at the end; a margin of 10% is allowed:
Obviously, vaccination is good for the person receiving the vaccine, if he / she is thus prevented from
suffering from a nasty disease. More subtly, it can be good for an entire population since, if enough of its
members are vaccinated, even those who are not ill receive a measure of protection. That is because, with only a
few susceptible individuals, the transmission of the infection cannot be maintained and the disease spread. But in
the case of many vaccines, there are non-medical benefits, too, in the form of costs avoided and the generation of
income that would otherwise have been lost. These goods are economic.
Quantifying these more general benefits is hard. But a pair of researchers from Harvard University has
just tried. They have looked at two vaccination programs and attempted to calculate the wider benefits.
These two researchers believed that previous attempts to quantify the non-medical benefits of vaccination
had been too narrow. These had looked at such data as the cost of a program per life saved, but had failed to take
account of recent work on the effects of health on incomes. For their study, they identified how vaccination, in
particular, might increase wealth.
The first benefit was that healthy children are more likely to attend school and better able to learn. The
second was that healthy workers are more productive. Both of these seem fairly obvious. Two other benefits are
less so, however.
One is that good health promotes savings and investment. This is because healthy people both expect to
live longer (which gives them an incentive to save) and actually do live longer (which gives them more time to
save). The other is that good health promotes the so-called demographic transition from large to small families
that usually accompanies economic development. None of these factors, the researchers thought, had been
properly taken into account of in previous estimates of the cost-effectiveness of vaccination.
To demonstrate that at least one of their ideas was correct, they turned to the Philippines. Here, a study
called the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey has been going on since 1983. It follows the lives of
Filipino mothers and those of their children born in 1983 and 1984. Among the data collected were records of the
vaccinations these children received as infants and also their scores in language, maths and IQ tests at the age of
ten.
The researchers organized children whose social circumstances were similar into groups, depending on
whether or not the children had been vaccinated against a range of diseases including measles, polio and
tuberculosis. They then compared test scores between groups. They found a statistically significant difference in
the language IQ scores between otherwise comparable vaccinated and unvaccinated children. In both cases, those
of the unvaccinated were lower. Since it is known from other studies that these scores are good predictors of
adult income, the researchers concluded that childhood vaccination would have significant economic benefits.
In order to predict those benefits, they turned to a vaccination campaign that is just beginning. The
Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) is a collaboration of governments, international
organizations, vaccine-makers and charities. It is embarking on a 15-year program to vaccinate children in 75 of
the world’s poorest countries against a range of childhood diseases.
First, the researchers used data from previous vaccination programs to estimate both the reduction in
mortality and the improvement in the health of the living that might be expected to flow from the new GAVI
program. Then they combined these estimates with existing data about the economic effects of health
improvement in these programs in poor countries, in particular their effects on future income. Using standard
accounting methods (calculating the interest rate that would make the net present value of the flow of future
benefits equal to the initial costs) they calculate tat the new GAVI program can be expected to generate an
immediate rate of return of 12.4 percent, rising to 18 percent by the end of the program. And that does not
include any benefits that might come from the demographic transition. The dispassionate economic case for
vaccination, therefore, looks at least as strong as the compassionate medical one. If the figures produced by the
researchers are right, it truly is an investment for the future. The Economist, October 15, 2005 (726
words)