UNIVERSITETET
I OSLO
Institutt f or litteratur, områdestudier og europeiske språk
UTSATT SKOLEEKSAMEN
2010/VÅR/SPRING
3 sider/pages
ENG1111 – The English Language. Awareness and Writing Skills
4 timer/timar/hours
Tirsdag, 17. august 2010
The questions must be answered in English, and the answers must be given in complete
sentences.
Candidates must receive a pass mark on both questions.
Candidates may use 1 English-English dictionary.
Question 1 (50%)
1A
The following text contains 10 errors of grammar. Correct them and explain your
corrections with reference to rules of grammar and/or contextual clues.
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Volcanic Eruption in Iceland Triggers Fears for Glacier
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A volcano who has been dormant for almost 200 years has erupted in Iceland.
Authorities evacuated hundreds of people after a volcano erupted beside a glacier in
southern Iceland, Icelands Civil Protection Department said on Sunday, but it were no
immediate reports of damages or injuries.
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The eruption occurred beside the Eyjafjallajökull glacier, the fifth largest in Iceland.
Authorities initially said that the eruption was below the glacier, triggering fears that it
could led to flooding from glacier melt, but scientists conducting an aerial survey in
daylight located the eruption and said it did not occur below ice.
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"The eruption is a small one," said Agust Gunnar Gylfason, a risk analyst at the Civil
Protection Department. "An eruption in and close to this glacier can be dangerous due to
possibly flooding if the fissure forms under the glacier," he said. "That is why we initiated
our disaster response plan." The last time the volcano erupted was in the 1820s.
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Scientists can see lava flows in half-mile long fissure, and authorities watch for further
activity. Authorities evacuated some 450 people in the area 100 miles southeast of the
capital, Reykjavik, as a precaution, said Vidir Reynisson, the department manager for
the Icelandic Civil Protection Department. A state of emergency have been declared in
communitys near the 100 square mile glacier, and three Red Cross centres were set up
for evacuees in the village of Hella.
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1B
The examples below contain language choices that are awkward, unidiomatic, or
inappropriate. First, suggest ways of improving them; second, explain what you have
done and why.
a. Due to our being ill and in poor health, we were quickly rushed through the crowd full
of people to a waiting ambulance.
b. Other than your day job, most people think that the stock market is the place where
money can be made, although there are other instruments like commodities, but these
are also under a lot of selling pressure amid the economic slow-down.
Question 2 (50%)
Read the two texts below.
a. Identify the similarities and differences between the two texts as regards field,
tenor, mode, purpose and style, and describe how any differences in these areas
are reflected in lexical, grammatical, and syntactic choices. Provide examples
from both texts to support your claims. Your answer should be in the form of an
academic essay. Write at least 500 words.
b. Rewrite the highlighted part into an informal/colloquial style.
Text 1
A Landscape in February
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It’s a sunny day in February. It’s half past two and I’m sitting on a bench, in a small park
surrounded by a road in front of me and on my left side. It separates the park from the
town. Behind me there are three houses in the process of being built, and a hole with
space for another one. Finally, on my right hand, there is an uninhabited field, perhaps
waiting for its turn to be occupied by new buildings and families.
The sky is cloudless, with a light sky-blue colour and a blazing sun. The park is all
covered by an irregular layer of grass, touched by the breeze, except for a square of sand
in the middle. The grass spreads across the ground with green and light brown areas
because of the night frost. The trees are naked and some daisies have grown together,
announcing the coming spring.
In the square of sand there are some swings made of wood and tyres.
Twelve benches are scattered around the park, and there is some fungus there,
creating a cover of yellow, white and brown stains. The streetlights are turned off now,
waiting for the night, when they will open their eyes.
Small birds are singing loudly, but sometimes their song is lost between the sound
of the cars and the noise of the trowels.
If I look beyond the road, I can see some new houses and the workshops of the
town, an old town which was built on a little hill thousands of years ago. Beyond those
houses, there is the town centre with a half Gothic, half Romanesque cathedral on the
peak, demonstrating the power that had once made this town one of the most important
villages of the region.
Far away, weakly shaped, there are some mountains, hidden under the white
snow that will start to thaw in a few weeks, giving way to the new season.
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Text 2
Jean-Marie Le Yaouanc, Éric Saux and Christophe Claramunt
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The modelling of landscape environments is a cognitive activity that still requires
novel kinds of spatial representations. This paper introduces a structural categorisation of
a landscape view based on panoramic photographs that act as a substitute for a given
natural environment. Verbal descriptions of a landscape scene provide the modelling input
of our approach. The structurally-based representation identifies the spatial, relational and
semantic constructs that emerge from these descriptions. A landscape view is modelled
according to the structure of its language description. Concepts in the environment are
qualified according to an ontological classification, their proximity to the observer, and the
relations that qualify them. The resulting model is schematised by a music score-based
representation that constitutes a modelling support for the study of environmental
descriptions.
The research presented in this paper addresses the conceptualisation and the
formalisation of a panoramic natural landscape perceived by an observer, and its
materialisation by a verbal description. Our study considers a verbal description of an
environmental scene as the initial context of the modelling approach, whose objective is to
categorise the constructs and semantics exhibited. These environmental scenes consist
of 360o panoramas materialised by photograph montages presented to the observer with
a dynamic interface.
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