ЕГЭ – диалог (интервью) 64 с вопросами и выбором ответов

1. While living in the Agricultural College, the narrator
1) started to understand classical music.
2) took to biology.
3) decided to follow in his father’s footsteps.

2. The narrator spent most of his school years
1) in a boarding school.
2) in a state school.
3) in a private school.

3. The narrator’s favourite sport at school was
1) cricket.
2) football.
3) gymnastics.

4. The narrator thinks that rote learning
1) can be useful in most cases.
2) is absolutely useless.
3) is really harmful.

5. The narrator nearly failed the physics exam at the end of the first year because
1) he had no time for preparation.
2) he didn’t like physics.
3) he had too much freedom.

6. The narrator eventually made considerable progress in physics because
1) he had a lot of luck.
2) he had nearly failed his first year.
3) he had some knowledge in electronics.

7. In the physics and chemistry practical classes the narrator
1) was always honest.
2) mostly cheated.
3) usually did the experiments straight.

1 – 1
2 – 2
3 – 3
4 – 1
5 – 3
6 – 3
7 – 2

I was born in Brisbane. I was brought up for the first seven or eight years in Gatton Agricultural College, which was a good place to be brought up in. My father was an agronomist and at that time he was running a fairly small research lab on the grounds of the Agricultural College. I can remember lots of glasshouses, and pots with plants in them being given different fertiliser treatments. At nighttime my father would be there pounding away at a calculating machine. It quite put me off biology. On the other hand, he had a hobby, which was audio amplifiers. So I can also remember huge electronic amplifiers, loud speakers and very loud classical music, which was rather louder than I could put up with. In any event, it did give me something of a feel for classical music.
I went to various state schools until the year before what was called the ‘scholarship year’ in Queensland. My father got a job in Ceylon, so I was sent off to a boarding school and enjoyed myself very much. Particularly, having realised that I was not terribly keen on the politically correct sports of cricket and football, I joined a mob of kids who took to gymnastics. We became quite good at it and became quite respectable in the eyes of the school, so life improved greatly after that.
The most important thing about the school was our maths teacher. He was a superb teacher and seemed to know the right balance between learning by rote and the understanding of something. To be honest, I don’t go along with the current philosophy that you have to understand something before you can learn it. I think, in most things in life, it is exactly the opposite. Particularly multiplication tables and things like that. If you don’t ‘learn to rote learn‘, you are missing a lot in life. That is my philosophy and I’m sticking to it! Anyway, it was his teaching that carried me through at least the first couple of years of university mathematics.
I went to university and majored in physics. I nearly failed the first year. I was living in St John’s College, and it was a great change from the constraints of a boarding school to the lack of constraints in a university college. I had a very good time. I can remember, in the middle of the physics exam at the end of the first year, suddenly realising that I could probably fail this subject, because I hadn’t done any work in it. But I just made it by the skin of my teeth.
I enjoyed university life, but I can’t really remember any of the lecturers or even the subjects much. I can remember that one of my pieces of luck was that my father had introduced me at an early age to a book called the Radio Amateurs Handbook. That was a superb book for teaching you the practicalities of electronics. In those days, if you didn’t know any electronics, you didn’t get very far in physics. Just the reading of that book when I had been a young teenager made a tremendous differ-ence as to what I could get away with in the university. Indeed, I got a high distinction in physics in my second year. That little incident where I nearly failed the first year was also fortunate because it gave me such a fright that I worked like stink for the rest of the two years. So things worked out all right in the end.
The other story I remember from my university days had to do with the very first chemistry practical class that I ever had. We were told by the tutors to be terribly honest about writing up what happened. The very first experiment was to produce aspirin. Mine turned out to be pink, and so they failed me on that day. I learnt then and there that, in order to get on in this world of the university chemistry school and, indeed, the physics school, you made sure that you got the right results in the physics and chemistry practical classes. I did, mostly by rigging the results. That sounds dreadful but, if you rig results, you really have to learn and know more about the subject than if you did the experiments straight. Because you have to learn to look at an experiment from all sorts of different directions. It was all very good training.