Comprehension

1. Scan the text for answers to the following questions.

1. Give the definition of a terrorist group. What do modern states and terrorist organizations have in common?

2. What distinguishes terrorism from other kinds of violence? Is there any difference between the terrorism of states and terrorism of terrorist groups?

3. Which of the events mentioned in the third paragraph of the text can be classified as terrorist acts? Why?

4. Determine the main idea of the fourth paragraph. What syntactical stylistic devices does the author use to enhance the emotional impact of the lines on the reader?

5. What are distinctive features of terrorism?

6. Why is it so difficult to distinguish between legitimate warfare and terrorism? Illustrate your answer by examples.

7. Is there any link between terror and governments? Give examples of terrorist governments and governments guilty of terrorism against their own peoples.

8. Look again at the three definitions of terrorism given before the text. Do they encompass all forms, all modifications of terrorism? Does any of them allow drawing a clear borderline between terrorism and legitimate military actions?

2. Identify the sentences which are generalizations and translate them into Russian.

Vocabulary exercises

1. Translate the following sentences from English into Russian. Pay particular attention to the underlined words and word combinations.

1. Terrorist groups—national and transnational political organizations violently contesting the authority or policies of states—often use the threat of indiscriminate attacks on civilians as a means of imposing pain or causing trouble for political authorities and thereby compelling political change.

2. The difference between states and terrorist groups is not in their use of violence or the threat of it, nor is it that one or the other may violate the distinction between military and civilian targets.

3. Terrorism is not the simple, sharp-ended, bad-guv phenomenon we all love to condemn.

4. If the concept is not to vanish into all-embracing fudge, two distinctions can be drawn, though habitually they are not.

5. Even in the distinction between guerrilla warfare and terrorism, there are grey areas.

6. The fact is that a good cause may use terrorism just as a bad one may.

But the men who shot up a white church congregation or planted a bomb outside a cinema were terrorists in the purest sense of the word.

8. Nor does the terrorists' ultimate success or failure alter the truth.

9. In the cold war, international terrorists were used to wage war by proxy: the East German regime provided safe houses for Baaders and Meinhofs;

10. the modern era's most notorious terrorist, the-gun-for-hire Carlos the Jackal

made his career in this world of state-sponsored terrorism.

11. The brasshat regimes of the day faced left-wing, sometimes terrorist movements.

12. The Allied bombing of Germany was aimed at civilians in the hope of shattering morale: in short, terror.

13. Medieval armies, having taken a besieged town, would slaughter some or all of the citizens to encourage other towns to surrender faster.

14. The second thing one can learn from the wide definition of terrorism is that the

phenomenon is neither uniquely wicked, nor—still less—uniquely deadly.