Vocabulary activator

Exercise 14. Write a paragraph on one of the following topics:

• continue this paragraph: “Suddenly the door opened and the strangest-looking man I have ever seen came into the room. …”

• a description of the people in the waiting room of a marriage guidance bureau.

Ketly is a beautiful young Haitian woman who is working as a bilingual secretary. She is about 5’4” tall. She has smooth, light skin. Her face is oval, and she has big black eyes dominating a small nose and charming little mouth. Her curly dark hair is arranged in an attractive, tidy style.

use adjectives use various constructions

For effective verbal description of people’s appearance it’s preferable to get acquainted with descriptions you come across in your life. Court/crime reports, celebrity and gossip pages of magazines, and the “personal” columns where people are seeking partners are good places to start. So are the extracts from the books you read. Some of the descriptions are rather neutral, in others the authors use poetic language that makes them individual, interesting and sometimes ironic.

Read the following extracts and think over possible variants of translation.

A man on the left has got very pale skin. He also has broad shoulders, with a small scar at the top of his left arm. The other man has dark skin. He also has a beard and moustache and a quite a hairy chest and a tattoo.

John McCarthy’s appearance, when he finally strode into the office, struck me as extraordinary. He is about average height, five feet nine inches. His build is average, with a little age trying to collect itself around his middle. But his hair encircles his head and his face with a great cloud of silver needles. Amid this prickly gray mist eyes are two dark rocks.

There’s nothing very remarkable about Chris’s appearance. He’s of average height and medium build, and he’s got curly, mousy hair and a fair complexion. And he’s quite short-sighted like me, he wears glasses. The clothes he likes are mostly casual: jeans or shorts and a tee-shirt. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a suit!

I could see Kate reflected in the kitchen window. A petite, very little blonde girl. She did look fantastic – tired, but fantastic. Her dark hair was glossy and tied back in a chignon, and she was wearing an expensive fawn suit.

Sitting with his back to me was a very tall man, who resembled a normal man who’d been put on a rack and stretched out. His black spiky hair stuck up straight from his head, and I couldn’t see his face.

He was tall and had extremely curly brown hair sticking out in every direction. He wasn’t skinny and elegant like Addison, but well built and solid. Round dark eyes peered out of what were obviously bottle-thick glasses. I thought longingly for a moment of Addison’s long lashes and dark pools, then snapped myself back to the present.

The child was fairly eating me up with her cold, steady eyes, and no expression to her face whatever. She did not move and seemed, inwardly, quiet; an unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer in appearance. She had magnificent blonde hair, in profusion. One of those picture children often reproduced in advertising leaflets.

Mr Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of his hair on top of his head and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always looked tired and sleepy. But he must have been younger than I thought, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married.

She was little – way under five feet – and wrinkled, and everything about her seemed the same colour – her skin, her lips, her dress – everything just a slightly different shade of the same brown-grey, except her hair, which was absolutely white, and her tiny eyes, which glinted like metal.

He clicked his mouse on a corner icon and suddenly a face filled half a screen. A big flat, potato-like face. With a moustache.

“This is Claudia”, he said.

Papa-daddy is about a million years old and’s got his long long beard.

Find the descriptions of the kind in the books you are reading now (both in English and Russian) and offer them to your fellow students for translation.

Exercise 15. Complete the gaps in these police posters.

missing Jake Brown age__ , height__ ________ -faced, __________ hair, __________ skin special features: _____________

Missing Alicia Connor ___ complexion, ____ haired, ___. Height _______, ______ build.

wanted for murder Nicolas Erden age__, height __ _______-looking _________ eyes, _________ nose, ____ with _____

Wanted for Robbery Don “Shorty” Field _________ height ___________ with ______ and ______ _________ built

LOST Diana Cont Age ______ Height ____ _______ hair with _______ Special features:____ ___________

SPEAKING

There has been a particularly brutal murder in your town. Last night the police put out a picture of a man they would like to question. You have just been in town shopping and you are sure you saw the man. You decide to go in to your nearest police station.

Work in pairs with one student as policeman. Use the phrase in the list. You will find help with vocabulary to describe the man below.

Facial features

Eyes: blue, brown, green, dark, grey, hazel, large, bulging, close-set, wide-set

Complexion: light, fair, pale, tanned, dark, swarthy

Nose: long, narrow, flat, wide, hooked, straight, aquiline, Roman, snub, bulbous

Eyebrows: thick, thin, bushy, arched

Glasses: heavy frames, metal frames, large round

Moustache: bushy, thin, small

Ears: large, small, pointed, sticking-out, pierced

Mouth: tight-lipped, large lips, wide, full lips

Hair: short, curly, wavy, long, straight, straggly, parting, kinky, parting, receding,

medium-length, dirty, styled, blond, brown, black, grey, auburn, ginger

Other features: beard, sideburns, freckles, mole, scar, unshaven

VARIATION

When you have described the wanted man above choose a famous person to describe. Can the others guess who you are describing?

READING FOR COMPREHENSION

Read the text and answer the questions that follow