15 Topic Five: Schooling

Dictation 10

My New School

My name is Mary Barker. This is my new school. I like it very much. We have fifteen classrooms and a hall. The rooms are big. Eight of them are upstairs. The hall and the restrooms are downstairs. Our school garden is very beautiful. We have a lot of flowers such as asters, daffodils, lilies, chrysanthemums and some trees in it. We like to sit on the green lawns under the oak trees when our classes are over. At twelve o'clock we always have lunch together; sometimes we have it in the school yard.

My classroom is near the gym. The desks there are arranged in a horseshoe, so we can discuss everything. We have a lot of cupboards with different stationery in our classroom. We have a big green three-part blackboard, an overhead projector, a video and tape recorders and a television. You can also notice potted plants on the windowsills. Our classroom is spacious, cosy and light. We enjoy studying there very much.

Dictation 11

My School

My school is famous for its high-quality education and strict discipline. It is very well-equipped as on the ground floor there is a gym, a canteen, a library and workshops. On the first floor there is a large assembly hall, a home economics room, a computer class and a language laboratory. On the second floor there are physics, chemistry and biology labs.

Classes begin at nine o'clock in the morning. Each of them lasts forty minutes. After three or four lessons there is a thirty minute break. During it pupils go to the canteen to have lunch. The classes are over at four o'clock in the afternoon and out-of-class activities begin. The social and cultural life in the school is well-organized. For example, there is an orchestra, a choir, an art studio and an International Friendship Club.

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According to the curriculum we study Russian, literature, mathematics, biology, geography, physics, chemistry, English, history, computer programming. We also have classes of music, physical education, arts and crafts.

My favourite subject is English. I like to learn irregular verbs, to act out dialogues and discuss something interesting. Sometimes we are asked to write compositions, to make a report or learn poems by heart.

On the contrary I am not very good at sciences. I always fail to memorize formulas and terms properly. What's more some of the teachers are not imaginative enough and the lessons are a little bit dull.

I like my class. Everybody is so friendly and easy to get along with. I am on good terms with my classmates and we often spend our free time together.

Dictation 12*

What Do We Know about esp?

How do we know what is going on in the world around us? We use our senses. Through them we can see, hear, feel, smell and taste.

But there are some scientists who suppose that man can get information without the use of the senses. They think that human mind has quite enough powers that have not yet been understood, and so it is possible to get information that has not passed through the senses.

The process is called "extrasensory perception", or ESP. "Extrasensory" means "beyond understanding". Many of the research workers who have studied it are psychologists, and their subject is called "parapsychology".

They believe that there are three kinds of extrasensory perception. An example of one is when somebody is able to read the thoughts in the mind of another person or it seems so. The second kind of ESP is illustrated by a following example: a woman living in the suburbs dreams that her daughter, who lives downtown, was hurt in a road accident. The next day she learns that a car really hit her daughter the night before.

The third type of ESP is when people seem to be able to look into the future and know what will happen and it is called clairvoyance. We

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know that occasionally this really can occur, but very often it is difficult to find evidence of such cases. A great many experiments have been made but the existence of ESP is still controversial.