Dialogue

Ex. 1. Read the dialogue and say who the people talking might be to each other.

1 –	Why don’t you begin by telling me something about yourself?
2 –	What do you want to know?
1 –	The usual – you know – something about your background and experience and anything personal.
2 –	Well, I was born in Iowa and went to school there. My father is a chemist, and my mother is a biologist.
1 –	Sounds as if you come from a professional family.
2 –	That’s right. One of my sisters is an ecologist and the other one teaches geography at a university.
1 –	And what made you decide to get into geology?
2 –	Oh, nothing in particular, I guess, I always liked collecting different stones and minerals and things like that.
1 –	Now what about your experience? How long have you been working in this field?
2 –	More than five years now.
1 –	You’ve got a degree in mineralogy, haven’t you?
2 –	Just a Masters degree. After I did my degree, I began to specialize in ecology, dealing with a whole series of environmental issues.
1 –	Sounds like an interesting field. By the way, could you explain me one thing? What’s the difference between an environmentalist, an ecologist and a conservationist?
2 –	Well, a conservationist is really someone who, in my mind, wants to keep things exactly as they are, and, as long as they can keep the world around them in the same familiar shape that they’ve always known it, then they’re happy. An environmentalist is someone who accepts that there’s going to have to be a change, but they want that change to be of such a kind that it doesn’t destroy the earth’s resources, or cause too much pollution, or anything else. An ecologist is likely to look a lot deeper than that, into the economic and political systems that govern our lives, and to understand that there are going to have to be profound political and economic changes if we’re going to preserve the environment. So it’s a sequence, if you like, or a hierarchy of depth, in terms of the extent to which one looks at the root causes of what’s going wrong. And think that the ecological movement, or the green movement, as I call it, is more radical, because it goes right to the root of what’s going wrong. You can actually be an environmentalist, and get away with thinking that the systems aren’t going to change much. It’s an illusion, but a lot of people do it.
1 –	Oh, thank you very much.

Ex. 2. Reproduce the dialogue: a) abridged; b) in the form of a monologue using the following verbs:

to wonder, to know, to ask, to be interested in, to confirm, to want to know, to explain, to compare, to respond.