Unit 3 Out of Step

Audiovisual Supplement

Cultural Information

Watch the movie clip and answer the following questions. 1. Where is the engine of the 911? In the back of the car. 2. What’s the secret of success of that factory? The product and their manufacturing process are one unit. Automation, technology and skilled human labor combine to build the Porsche 911. And the factory runs like a precision machine.

Audiovisual Supplement

Cultural Information

Audiovisual Supplement

Cultural Information

Narrator: A German factory builds one of the world’s most famous cars. The 911 is the icon of the sports car industry. It’s the shape, it’s the engine in the back, it’s the feel it gives you, it’s the emotion. The factory runs like a precision machine, building hundreds of engines a day. The product and our manufacturing process are one unit, and that’s our secret of success. Automation, technology and skilled human labor combine to build 16 versions of the Porsche 911, including the 911 GT3.

Audiovisual Supplement

Cultural Information

1. Car culture has been a major niche lifestyle in America. 2. In the 1950s, the post-war boom produced a generation of teenagers with enough income to buy their own cars. These cars became so much more than just modes of transportation. They were reflections of a lifestyle. The ability to tune and soup-up muscle cars gave average Joes the opportunity to show off their power, their speed and their style in a way that personified the car as character.

Audiovisual Supplement

Cultural Information

3. Like Granny in Jan and Dean’s 1964 song ―The Little Old Lady from Pasadena,‖ we can’t keep our foot off the accelerator.4. We are crazy about our cars — and always have been. ―The American,‖ William Faulkner lamented in 1948, ―really loves nothing but his automobile.‖ 5. We dream of cars as we dream of lovers. 6. Americans have always cherished personal freedom and mobility, rugged individualism and masculine force.

Text Analysis

Structural Analysis

―Out of Step‖ is an exposition that presents the absurdity of the Americans’ dependence on cars. The Americans, being so accustomed to using cars, have almost forgotten the existence of their legs. Wherever they go, they go in their cars. As a result, pedestrian facilities are neglected in city planning or rejected by the inhabitants.

Text Analysis

Structural Analysis

Paragraphs

Main idea The writer introduces his idea with an anecdote. In this part, the author presents the fact that the Americans are habituated to using cars for everything. In this part, the author shows that pedestrian facilities are neglected or discarded.

1-67-13

14-20

Detailed Reading

Out of Step Bill Bryson After living in England for 20 years, my wife and I 1 decided to move back to the United States. We wanted to live in a town small enough that we could walk to the business district, and settled on Hanover, N.H., a typical New England tow

n — pleasant, sedate and compact. It has a broad central green surrounded by the venerable buildings of Dartmouth College, an old-fashioned Main Street and leafy residential neighborhoods. It is, in short, an agreeable, easy place to go about 2 one’s business on foot, and yet as far as I can tell, virtually no one does.

Detailed Reading

3 Nearly every day, I walk to the post office or library or bookstore, and sometimes, if I am feeling particularly debonair, I stop at Rosey Jekes Café for a cappuccino. Occasionally, in the evenings, my wife and I stroll up to the Nugget Theatre for a movie or to Murphy’s on the Green for a beer, I wouldn’t dream of going to any of these places by car. People have gotten used to my eccentric behavior, but in the early days acquaintances would often pull up to the curb and ask if I wanted a ride. ―I’m going your way,‖ they would insist when I 4 politely declined. ―Really, it’s no bother.‖

Detailed Reading

―Honestly, I enjoy walking.‖ 5 6 ―Well, if you’re sure,‖ they would say and depart reluctantly, even guiltily, as if leaving the scene of an accident without giving their name. 7 In the United States we have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it doesn’t occur to us to unfurl our legs and see what those lower limbs can do. We have reached an age where college students expect to drive between classes, where parents will drive three blocks to pick up their children from a friend’s house, where the letter carrier takes his van up and down every driveway on a street.

Detailed Reading

8 We will go through the most extraordinary contortions to save ourselves from walking. Sometimes it’s almost ludicrous. The other day I was waiting to bring home one of my children from a piano lesson when a car stopped outside a post office, and a man about my age popped out and dashed inside. He was in the post office for about three or four minutes, and then came out, got in the car and drove exactly 16 feet (I had nothing better to do, so I paced it off) to the general store next door.

Detailed Reading

9

And the thing is, this man looked really fit. I’m sure he jogs extravagant distances and plays squash and does all kinds of healthful things, but I am just as sure that he drives to each of these undertakings. 10 An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door.

Detailed Reading

11

I asked her why she didn’t walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the treadmill. 12 She looked at me as if I were tragically simpleminded and said, ―But I have a program for the treadmill. It records my distance and speed and calorie burn rate, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.‖ I confess it had not occurred to me how 13 thoughtlessly deficient nature is

in this regard.

Detailed Reading

14 According to a concerned and faintly horrified 1997 editorial in the Boston Globe, the United States spent less than one percent of its transportation budget on facilities for pedestrians. Actually, I’m surprised it was that much. Go to almost any suburb developed in the last 30 years, and you will not find a sidewalk anywhere. Often you won’t find a single pedestrian crossing. 15 I had this brought home to me one summer when we were driving across Maine and stopped for coffee in one of those endless zones of shopping malls, motels, gas stations and fast-food places. I noticed there was a bookstore across the street, so I decided to skip coffee and head over.

Detailed Reading

16

Although the bookshop was no more than 70 or 80 feet away, I discovered that there was no way to cross on foot without dodging over six lanes of swiftly moving traffic. In the end, I had to get in our car and drive across. 17 At the time, it seemed ridiculous and exasperating, but afterward I realized that I was possibly the only person ever to have entertained the notion of negotiating that intersection on foot.