Unit 6. Language practice, reading and translating

I. Review the passive voice

Main points: You use the passive voice to focus on the person or thing affected by an action. You form the passive by using a form of be and a past participle. Only verbs that have an object can have a passive form. With verbs that can have two objects? Either object can be the subject of the passive.

Compare Active and Passive Voice:

	Active	Passive
Present Simple Present Continuous Present Perfect	He translates He is translating He has translated	The text is translated The text is being translated The text has been translated
Past Simple Past Continuous Past Perfect	He translated He was translated He had translated	The text was translated The text was being translated The text had been translated
Future Simple	He will translated	The text will be translated
Modals (must, can, may, etc)	He must/can/may translate	The text must/can/may be translated
Infinitive (present) -ing form	to translate translating	to be translated being translated

A. Match the pairs.

1 Petrol prices… 2 This jacket … 3 Competition! 5000 prizes .. 4 Five people … 5 The telephone … 6 It appears the phone bill … 7 Further information … 8 Before the storm everyone … 9 Smoking … 10 The old town theatre …

A … to be won. B … has been increased. C … has been disconnected. D… will be sent to candidates. E …was made in Hong Kong. F … were killed in the rally. G … is not permitted anywhere on this station. H … hasn’t been paid. I … is currently being rebuilt J … was told to stay inside their homes

B. Now look at these sentences again. Underline the past participle and note the form of the verb be. How many refer to the past and how many to the future.

II. Read and translate the text. Write an essay on Ottoman Empire

In 1453 Constantinople fell to the troops of Mohammed II.  There followed a period of Ottoman expansion in which the tide of conquest moved south to the Persian Gulf, west across North Africa to the borders of what is now Morocco, northwest to the gates of Vienna, and north to embrace almost the entire coast of the Black Sea.  This tide reversed itself, however, the empire’s territory diminishing by fits and starts from 1699 on.  The decay of the Ottoman Empire was dramatic.  By 1800 it was a moribund entity, subject to centrifugal forces from within, and technologically backward as compared to the west.  Yet it was to endure - albeit in the guise of the “sick man of Europe”- until the end of the First World War.  Why was it still viable in 1800 and why did it endure for over one hundred years more?  One of the reasons that the Ottoman still stood at the end of the eighteenth century was simple a matter of inertia.  The empire at its height had been a huge entity and its dissolution was not something that might be expected to happen over night.  An author notes that the Ottomans lost land at a slow pace between 1699 and the 1770’s, and that most of its European lands were retained for another hundred years after that. The Ottoman administration of the early 18^th century, however rotten it may have been from within, could still field formidable armies.  The Russian move south was inexorable, but it suffered many defeats along the way.  Itzkowitz notes that Peter the Great suffered a defeat at the hands of the Turks at the Pruth River in 1711 and that Ottoman armies defeated both the Austrians and the Russians in the late 1730’s .