COMPREHENSION

1.The speaker is an emigrant from India.
2.His theory is that the resentments the mohajirs engender is connected to their conquest of the force of gravity: people’s hostility is caused by the fact that they have “flown” to move from one place to another and flying is an act that all men dream. Therefore, it is a sort of envy.
3.He compares gravity to belonging, indeed both phenomena exist but aren’t understood.
4.He thinks that roots are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. They are just a way to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces.
5.The writer uses two verbs to indicate the ways of looking for freedom: to fly and to flee.
6.He supposes that a company might come up with an anti-gravity pill.
7.The consequences are that the world’s airlines would go broke overnight.
8.It would be necessary to devise a special water-proof flying garments and some kind of directional booster-engine, perhaps in back-pack form.
9.The pill would make migrants of us all: thanks to the pill everyone will be able to fly and have no more roots.
10.The best thing about migrant people is their hopefulness while the worst is that their memories are meaning-drained.

ANALYSIS

2. He is an emigrant from India but at the same time he is a newcomer in England, where he lives, and in Pakistan, where his family has moved.
3. The metaphor is about birds and the act of flying.
4. Gravity is what keeps men stuck on the ground while the sense of belonging is what keeps a man attached to his own birthplace.
5. He plays with the words “fly” and “flee” since they both are ways of seeking freedom.
6. He describes a world where people don’t want to have roots, where everyone is free to fly and therefore, to escape thanks to anti-gravity pills. This type of description is absurd and idealistic.
7.I believe that the narrator is in favour of migration, indeed he describes migrants people as people full of hope
8. In my opinion to become a responsible tourist you should respect the place you visit, starting from not polluting the areas you explore. To the same purpose it might be convenient to inform yourself about local culture in order to behave properly. Moreover it might be appropriate to learn a few words of the language to communicate in case of need.
9. Chatwin’s thesis about traveling is very positive. Traveling is at the base of our life, “all our activities are linked to the idea of journeys”. Our mind is designed to travel and is always “giving us orders for the road”, that explains our continue agitation. At first men cope with this thanks to drugs in order to have imaginary journeys. However, Chatwin believes that actual journeys are more powerful than faked ones, indeed they are more effective and instructive.

OVERVIEW

1.
Customs duties
Raw materials
Smuggling
Bribery
Satire
Coffeehouse
Common sense
Morals
Vice
Virtue

2.
Stable, traditionalism, elegant, witty, materialistic, responsive, hierarchy, heredity, privileged, pessimism, optimistic

3.

Whigs:
formed in 1660-1685
descendants of Parliamentarians
supported by the wealthy and commercial classes
fought for commercial developments
became the Liberal Party in the 1860s

Tories:
emerged in 1679-80
descendants of the Royalists
supported by the Church of England
fought for the divine right of the king
became the Conservative Party in 1832

4.
Prime minister: Firstly all ministers were equal but gradually a minister began to lead the others, he is known as the prime minister
The Cabinet: The Cabinet his the meeting of ministers without the king

5.
1.F, 2. T, 3. T, 4. F, 5.T, 6. F, 7.T

6.

1. materialist society
2. hierarchical, hereditary and privileged
3. the local landowners
4. bribery
5. individualism