CLASS #3 PAST SIMPLE TENSE

SIMPLE PAST TENSE
GRAMMAR

 
A VIDEO

A TEST

 READING

BONO, A SINGER, AN ACTIVIST, A LEADER

Do You like U2? If so, It's probably recognize Bono and his unmistakable sunglasses.  He is the lead singer and songwriter of U2, but there are other interesting facets in his life. 

Bono's birth name is Paul Hewson.  He lives in Dublin Ireland. Bono is his nickname and comes from his high school days.  His wife is Alison Stewart.  They have four children:  two girls,  Jordan and Memphis Eve,  and two boys.  Elijah and John Abraham.  He likes painting,  history and chess.  He is one of the best singers ever but he is also a screenwriter,  an orator and an activist.  

Bono is not only interested in music.  He also participates in social causes.  He cares about the poor,  so he has an anti-poverty organization in the U.S.  called ONE.  He also helps children with AIDS especially in Africa,  so he has another organization called DATA(Debt,  AIDS,  Trade Africa).  It focuses on poor countries'  debt cancelation,  AIDS treatment and development assistance.  

Bono has a complicated schedule,  but he always has time to help people around the world. So,  he continues recruiting new activists for his crusade against poverty and AIDs.

SPEAKING

CONVERSATION WITH A PARTNER

WILL: Hello, may speak to Jane?

Jane's Dad: Yes, hold on a moment. Jane!

Will: Jane, Hi! This is will. What a especial Monday! We don't have to go to school because it's the class party. We're getting ready!

Jane Yes! Usually at this time we are at school, but right now I am looking for my favorite CDs for the party. What's everyboy doing?

Will: Well, Carla is taking a quick shower and Angela is helping mom cook. 

Jane: Who is tidying up the living room?

Will: Let's see... Right now, I am talking to You and Tom... He is reading magazines. Come on! Tom! The party starts at 2:30!

Jane: Will,  have to hang up! Can You back later?

Will: Sure. No problem! Bye!

Jane: Ok. Bye!

  

PLAY OF THEATER
701
 
The story begins with Captain Robert Walton hanging out in St. Petersburg, Russia, probably near the end of the 18th century. He's waiting around for a ride to the port of Archangel, where he's going to hire some hardy Russians to go sailing off to the North Pole. Unfortunately, the boat gets stuck in impassible ice hundreds of miles from land. Boring! With nothing else to do, he writes letters to his sister back in England. His main complaint? He wants a male friend to keep him company. (What about that ship full of sailors? No, he means a worthy companion.)
Soon, Walton's despair is interrupted by the sight of —a man! On the ice! Riding a dog-sled! The man boards the ship, and it seems as if Walton's wish for a friend has come true. Except this new guy, Victor? Kind of nuts. Here's his story, as told to Walton:
Victor started out like any normal kid in Geneva, with his parents adopting a girl named Elizabeth for him to marry when he was older. You know, totally normal. At college, he decides to study natural philosophy (like a rudimentary physics) and chemistry, along with chemistry's evil twin, alchemy. In about two years, he figures out how to bring a body made of human corpse pieces to life. (We couldn't even manage to finish high school in two years.) Afterwards, he's horrified by his own creation (no…really?) and is sick for months while his friend Henry Clerval nurses him back to health.
Back in Geneva, Victor's younger brother, William, is murdered. The Frankenstein family servant, Justine, is accused of killing him. Victor magically intuits that his monster is the real killer, but thinking that no one would believe the "my monster did it" excuse, Victor is afraid to even propose his theory. Even when poor Justine is executed.
Victor, in grief, goes on a trip to the Swiss Alps for some much needed R&R. All too conveniently, he runs into the monster, who confesses to the crime and tells Victor this story (if you're keeping track, we're now in a story-within-a-story-within-a-story):
When Frankenstein fled, he found himself alone and hideous. No one accepted him (being a corpse-parts conglomeration can do that to you), except for one old blind man. He hoped that the blind man's family of cottagers would give him compassion, but even they drove him away. When he ran across William, he killed the boy out of revenge. In short, he's ticked off that his maker created him to be alone and miserable, and so would Frankenstein please make him a female companion?
After much persuading, Victor agrees. He drops off Henry in Scotland while he goes to an island in the Orkneys to work. But, just before he finishes, he destroys the second monster: he's afraid that the two will bring destruction to humanity rather than love each other harmlessly. The monster sees him do this and swears revenge … again. When Victor lands on a shore among Irish people, they accuse him of murdering Henry, who has been found dead. He's acquitted, but not before another long illness.
Victor returns to Geneva and prepares to marry Elizabeth, but he's a little worried: the monster has sworn to be with him on his wedding night. Eek! Victor thinks the monster is threatening him, but the night he and Elizabeth are married, the monster kills the bride instead. This causes Victor's father to pass away from grief (as he just lost a daughter-in-law and a daughter), so it's kind of a twofer for the monster.
Alone and bent on revenge, Victor chases the monster over all imaginable terrain until he is ragged and near death. (In fact, we can't really tell the two of them apart anymore except that the monster is taller and uglier.) And now we're back up the present: he finds Walton's ship, tells his story, and dies.
Story over? Not quite. Walton discovers the monster crying over Victor's dead body. We're not sure if he's crying because he's sad or because, as he says, he has nothing to live for anymore—but either way, he heads off into the Arctic to die. Alone. Yeah, it's not quite a Hollywood ending.


702


Our intrepid narrator, a former schoolteacher famously "called" Ishmael—is that actually his name?— signs up as sailor on a whaling voyage to cure a bout of depression/being a misanthropic dirtbag. On his way to find a ship in Nantucket, he meets Queequeg, a heavily tattooed South Sea Island harpooneer just returned from his latest whaling trip. Ishmael and Queequeg become best buds and roommates almost immediately. Together, they sign up for a voyage on the Pequod, which is just about to start on a three-year expedition to hunt sperm whales.

On board the Pequod, Ishmael meets the mates—honest Starbuck, jolly Stubb, and fierce Flask—and the other harpooneers, Tashtego and Daggoo. The ship’s commander, Captain Ahab, remains secluded in his cabin and never shows himself to the crew. Uh, that's ominous. Oh well. The mates organize the beginning of the voyage as though there were no captain.

Just when Ishmael’s curiosity about Ahab has reached a fever pitch, Ahab starts appearing on deck—and we find out that he’s missing one leg. When Starbuck asks if it was Moby Dick, the famous White Whale, that took off his leg, Ahab admits that it was and forces the entire crew to swear that they will help him hunt Moby Dick to the ends of the earth and take revenge for his injury. They all swear.

After this strange incident, things settle into a routine on board the good ship Pequod. While they’re always on the lookout for Moby Dick, the crew has a job to do: hunting sperm whales, butchering them, and harvesting the sperm oil that they store in huge barrels in the hold.

Ishmael takes advantage of this lull in plot advancement to give the reader lots (lots) of contemporary background information about whale biology, the whaling industry, and sea voyages. The Pequod encounters other ships, which tell them the latest news about the White Whale. Oh yeah, and everyone discovers that Ahab has secretly smuggled an extra boat crew on board (led by a mysterious, demonic harpooneer named Fedallah) to help Ahab do battle with Moby Dick once they do find him.

Over the course of more than a year, the ship travels across the Atlantic, around the southern tip of Africa, through the Indian Ocean, among the islands of southeast Asia, into the Sea of Japan, and finally to the equator in the Pacific Ocean: Moby Dick’s home turf.

Despite first mate Starbuck’s misgivings and a variety of bad omens (all the navigational instruments break, a typhoon tries to push the ship backwards, and the Pequod encounters other ships that have lost crewmembers to Moby Dick’s wrath), Ahab insists on continuing to pursue his single-minded revenge quest. In a parody of the Christian ceremony of baptism, he goes so far as to dip his specially forged harpoon in human blood—just so that he’ll have the perfect weapon with which to kill Moby Dick.

Finally, just when we think the novel’s going to end without ever seeing this famous White Whale, Ahab sights him and the chase is on. For three days, Ahab pursues Moby Dick, sending whaling boat after whaling boat after him—only to see each one wrecked by the indomitable whale. Finally, at the end of the third day, the White Whale attacks the ship itself, and the Pequod goes down with all hands.

Even while his ship is sinking, Ahab, in his whaling boat, throws his harpoon at Moby Dick one last time. He misses, catching himself around the neck with the rope and causing his own drowning/strangling death.

The only survivor of the destruction is Ishmael, who lives to tell the tale because he’s clinging to the coffin built for his pal Queequeg when the harpooneer seemed likely to die of a fever.

VOCABULARY