Upper-intermediat 5tudenf Book

Trevor No, I don't think acting is a glamorous life,
particularly, weil l guess in any way. In theatre it's
you now, you don't really earn that much money
and you work hard. Yeah, and film and television
work is, you know, can be a lot of fun, you can get
to work with some famous people sometimes or
some very truented people that you admire and
that's a thrilling thing and you get to shoot guns
or, you know, go on car chases and all those things
are really fun, but most of the time, the 90% of
the day, even when you're doing exciting things,
you're just sitting and waiting around, you're
ruways waiting around, they're always fixing lights,
setting up new camera positions, trying to figure
out who's going where when and it takes ... To
film a proper feature film takes months and maybe
in all that time only two or three of those days all
told is actually you doing anything. So yeah, I
think a lot of people get into extra work and stuff
because they think this will be really glamorous,
but you end up reading a book for about 9 hours
a day. And J've never been on a red carpet so I
suppose I can't judge. That looks glamorous.
4.26 Interviewer Have you ever acted?
Ben I was in a music video o nce, but that's about as
far as I've gone. But I mean, I'm a musician so I
kind of appear on stage quite a lot.
Interviewer How did it make you feel?
Ben I suppose nervous at first but then you settle in
and within a couple of minutes and before you
know it you lose any kind of awareness of kind of
any external factors or anything like that. And
you're not aware of anything else outside of this
kind of bubble that you've kind of managed to
transport yourself into.
Interviewer Have you ever acted?
Louise I was in the Royal Shakespeare Company up
in my area and did a few plays and a few musicals
and I'm a specialist make-up artist, so J kind of
work with actors, doing all their make-up,
zombies and that.
Interviewer What do you like about it?
Louise The buzz of it, being able to be someone else
in front of people - just being someone else is good.
Interviewer Have you ever acted? .
Mike Yes, I have. I'm studying acting now. I'm a
student studying theatre and music. Er, I've been in
a few things, when I was Little, when I was a little
boy and I was, I've been in a few shows around
London, things like that. But I plan to go further.
Interviewer How does it make you feel?
Mike I love it. I think it's really great. Because you
don't have to be yourself for once. You're onstage
and you can just be whoever your character is
meant to be. And you can just sort of get taken
away into this other world and you can get really
into it.
Interviewer Have you ever acted?
Cherry I'm in like a drama youth group so a couple
of plays I've been in, things like Bugsy Malone and
the Wizard of Oz. A modernized one and stuff.
Interviewer How does it make you feel?
Cherry Yeah, it is nerve-wracking just as you're
about to go on, but apart from tbat, once you're
on it's fine.
Interviewer Have you ever acted?
Ray Possibly not since I was at school.
Interviewer How did it make you feel?
Ray Very nervous beforehand, very apprehensive
beforehand and then quite excited when it all
went well, yes.
5.2 I think it is very interesting that human
beings are the only animals whkh listen to music for
pleasure. A lot of research has been done to find out
why we listen to music, and there seem to be three
main reasons. Firstly, we listen to music to make us
remember important moments in the past, for
example when we met someone for the first time.
Think of Humphrey Bogart in the film Casablanca
saying 'Darling, they're playing our song'. When we
hear a certain piece of music, we remember hearing
it for the first time in some very special
circumstances. Obviously, this music varies from
person to person.
Secondly, we listen to music to help us to change
activities. If we want to go from one activity to
another, we often use music to help us to make the
change. For example, we might playa certain kind
of music to prepare us to go out in the evening, or
we might p lay another kind of music to relax us
when we get home from work. That's mainly why
people listen to music in cars, and they often listen
to one kind of music when they're going to work
and another kind when they're coming horne. The
same is true of people on buses and trains with their
iPods. The third reason why we listen to music is to
intensify the emotion that we're feeling. For
example, if we're feeling sad, sometimes we want to
get even sadder, so we play sad music. Or we're
feeling angry and we want to intensify the anger then
we play angry music. Or when we're planning a
romantic dinner, we lay the table, we light candles,
and then we think what music would make this even
more romantic?
5.3 Let's take three important human
emotions: happiness, sadness, and ange r. When
people are happy they speak faster, and their voice is
higher. When they are sad they speak more slowly
and their voice is lower, and when people are angry
they raise their voices or shout. Babies can tell
whether their mother is happy or not simply by the
sound of her voice, not by her words. What music
does is it copies this, and it produces the same
emotions. So faster, higher-pitched music will sound
happy. Slow music with lots of falling pitches will
sound sad. Loud music with irregular rhythms will
sound angry. It doesn't matter how good or bad the
music is, if it has these characteristics it will make
you experience this emotion.
Let me give you some examples. For happy, for
example, the first movement of Beethoven's Seventh
Symphony. For angry, say Mars, from the Plallets by
Holst. And for sad, something like Albinoni's Adagio
for strings.
Of course the people who exploit this most are
the people who write fi Lm soundtracks. They can
take a scene which visually has no emotion and they
can make the scene either scary o r calm or happy
just by the music they write to go with it. Think of
the music in the shower scene in Hitchcock's fiJm
Psycho. All you can see is a woman having a shower,
but the music makes it absolutely terrifying.
5.10 And finall y on News Today the amazing.
story of a teenager who woke up this morning and
discovered that she wasn't in bed - she was lying on
top of a 40-metre-high crane!
In the early hours of this morning a man on his way
to work was passing a building site in Dulwich,
south-east London when he spotted the IS-year-old
girl lying on the arm of the crane. He immediately
called the police on his mobile phone. The police
and fire brigade arrived on the scene at 1.30 and at
first they were worried that the girl might be
intending to commit suicide by throwing herself off
the crane. But when a fireman climbed up the crane,
he could see that the girl was asleep.
The fireman realized that it could be very
dangerous if the girl woke up suddenly. So he crawled
along the 21-metre arm of the crane and carefully
wrapped the girl in a safety harness before waking her
up gently. The girl had a mobile phone with her and
the fireman was able to call her parents, who came
to the building site straight away. Finally, the girl was
brought down from the crane on a ladder. The whole
rescue operation had taken two and a half hours.
Her parents were waiting for her on the ground and
obviously they were very relieved to see her safe and
well The question everyone wanted to know was
'why did the girl go to sleep on the top of a crane?'
Well, the answer is that she had been sleepwalking!
She had walked out of her house during the night
without her parents noticing and sleepwalked to the
building site. There was a security guard but he
didn't see her climbing the crane because he was
watching TV. The girl's parents told the police that
this wasn't the first time that she had sleepwalked
but that she had never left the house before.
5.11 Presenter Now I imagine some o f you are
finding this story a bit diffi cult to believe, so I've
invited into the studio Professor Miller, who is an
expert in sleepwalking. Professor Miller, does this
story surprise you?
Professor Not at all. I have treated people who have
driven cars, ridden horses and I had one man who
even tried to fl y a hel icopter while he was asleep.
Presenter But how did this girl manage to climb a
40-metre crane?
Professor It would have been no problem for her.
She would climb the crane just as easily as if she
were awake.
Presenter And would her eyes have been open?
Professor Yes, sleepwalkers usually have their eyes
open. That's why sometimes it's difficult to know
if someone is sleepwalking or not.
Presenter Is sleepwalking very common?
Professor Yes. Research shows that about 18% of
the population have a tendency to sleepwalk. In
fact, it's much more common in children than in
teenagers or adults. And curiously it's more
common among boys than girls. Adults who
sleepwalk are normally people who used to
sleepwalk when they were children. Adult
sleepwalking often happens after a stressful event,
for example, after a road accident.
Presenter People always say that you should never
wake a sleepwalker up when they're walking. Is
that true?
Professor No, it isn't. People used to think that it
was dangerous to wake lip a sleepwalker. But in
fact this isn't the case. You can wake a sleepwalker
up without any problem, although if you do, it is
quite common for the sleepwalker to be confused,
so he or she probably won't Jmow where they are
for a few moments.
Presenter So if we see someone sleepwalking,
should we wake them up?
Professor Yes, you should remember that another of
the myths about sleepwalkers is that they cannot
inj ure themselves while they are sleepwalking. But
this isn't true. If a sleepwalker is walking around
the house. they can trip or fall over a chair o r even
fall down stairs. The other day there was a case of
a nine-year-old girl who opened her bedroom
window while sleepwalking and fell ten metres to
the ground. Luckily, she wasn't seriously injured
So you see it is definitely safer to wake a
sleepwalker up.
Presenter How long does sleepwalking last?
Professor It can be very brief, for example, a few
minutes. The most typical cases are people getting
up and getting dressed, or people going to the
bathroom. But it can occasionally last much
longer, maybe half an hour or even more.
Presenter And what happens when sleepwalkers
wake up? Do they remember the things they did
while they were sleepwalking?
Professor No, a sleepwalker usually doesn't
remember anything afterwards. So, for example,
the girl who climbed up the crane will probably
have no memory of the incident.
Presenter So, is a sleepwalker responsible for his or
her actions?
Professor A very good question, actually. A few
years ago a man from Canada got up in the
middle of the night and drove 20 kilometres from
his home to the house where his parents-in-law
lived and. for no apparent reason, he killed his
mother-in-law. The man was charged with murder
but he was found not gU ilty because he had been
asleep at the time he committed the crime.
5.15 The best thing about my job is that I get to
go to the best restaurants in England and sometimes
abroad, and r don't get a bill at the end of the
evening. I get the chance to eat the most wonderful,
exquisite food in restaurants that I wouldn't
normally be able to afford and 1 can order the most