COMPREHENSION page 177

1. The speaker is an Indian emigrant living in England.

2. He has a theory that the resentments migrants engender have something to do with their conquest of the force of gravity.

3. He compares gravity to belonging: it is a metaphor to explain the phenomenon of migration.

4. He thinks roots are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

5. The two ways of looking for freedom are to fly and to flee

6. He supposes ICI or Ciba-Geigy or Pfizer or Roche or NASA would create an anti-gravity pill.

7. Airlines would go broke overnight. Pill-poppers would sank into the clouds, and when the effects wore off, they would land in a different place of the earth.

8. It would be necessary to manufacture pills of different strengths for different length of journeys and some kind of directional booster-engine in back-pack form.

9. Gravity stands for roots, so without gravity we would be all migrants.

10. The best thing about migrant people is their hopefulness, while the worst one is the emptiness of one’s luggage, because they leave behind memories of each land.

ANALYSIS page 178

2. The speaker is an emigrant from India and a newcomer in England and Pakistan, where his family moved.

3. The whole text is built on the metaphor of gravity to explain the phenomenon of migration. Also roots are symbolic and connected to gravity, because they don’t allow people to move.

4. As gravity keeps our feet on the earth, belonging is a sort of magnetism between people and their motherland.

5. The speaker plays with scientific words like “pills”, ”gravity”, ”planetary rotation” to analyse and explain abstract and imaginary concepts.

6. Jonathan Swift describes the Man-Mountain as an emigrant, a foreigner. What seems to be important is not where he comes from, but his odd appearance and his things, for this reason the whole text is descriptive.

Salman Rushdie writes about the condition of emptiness, where memories and history are left behind, and this could be a similarity with Jonathan Swift’s text.

7. I think the speaker has not a positive view about migration, he closed his text with a melancholic tone a reference to loss and memory

8. We have mainly to get information about the country we would visit, his traditions, his culture and costumes, his habits, his laws. Then we must be able to be understood by the majority speaking the right language.

9. Bruce Chatwin’s text is about travelling. His thesis tells all human activities are linked to the idea of journeys and this is the reason why human beings are so restless. History teaches that travel is not only a real journey, indeed at an early stage men managed to experience journeys exploiting the brain’s chemistry reaction. They used hallucinatory mushrooms, hashish, wine to fly off on an illusory journey or imaginary ascent, and sometimes settlers associated them with God. But real journeys are more productive and effective than fakes one. The speaker clearly supports them.

He tells us who we should follow, making reference to Li Po, taking him as an example of a man who has not a stable “home” and when asked him the reason of such a life he was not able to answer. Travelling is something people have inside them from the birth.

OVERVIEW page 179

Ex 1 Custom duties; raw materials; smuggling; bribery; satire; houses; realism; morals; depravity

Ex 2 Stable; tradition; elegant; witty; materialist; responsible; hierarchy; privileged; individualist; pessimism; optimistic

Ex 3 The Whigs were formed in 1680 - descendants of Parliamentarians - supported by the wealthy and commercial classes fought for industrial and commercial development - became the Liberal Party

The Tories emerged in 1679-80 - descendants of the Royalists - supported by the Church of England and the landowners fought for the divine right of the monarch - became the Conservative Party

Ex 4 The first Prime Minister was the Whig Sir Robert Walpole, the figure is elected within the party. He appoint the ministers, who form the Cabinet.

Ex 5 F - T - T - F - T - F - T

Ex 6 Material; hierarchical; local landowners; bribe; individualistic seizing opportunities