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S Unit 6: India Listening–writing: India’s missing girls (B2) a) Before listening, look up the meaning of these words: b) Listen to a radio documentary on foeticide in India and fill in the correct numbers. 1. India lost women every year or woman every hour due to dowry deaths between 2005–2012. 2. women were killed in dowry-related incidents from 2005 till 2012. 3. One dowry death is reported every minutes. 4. The country’s child gender ratio has fallen from : 1,000 to : 1,000. c) As a volunteer for a charity which tries to improve the situation of women in India you have been asked to write an article for a British magazine. In your article you should: discuss the issue of female foeticide and infanticide in India describe your charity’s work explain why people should donated to your charity Write around 250/400 words . Reading–speaking: Varanasi – the holy city of the dead (B2) a) Read the travel report about Varanasi and separate it into paragraphs. 1  18 3.6 foetus/foetuses dowry ultrasound technology foeticide infanticide 2  Tooting cars, scattered laneways, buffalo poo, squalid Arabic mansions, aggressive rhesus monkeys and flea-ridden street dogs – there isn’t much to see or do in Varanasi. But forty thousand foreign tourists visit the city of one million in Northern India each year. Why? They come for the dead. For locals, Varanasi is a holy place; many Hindus believe time itself started ticking in the ancient city’s Ganges stretch. They also believe Moksha takes place there – a transcendent state liberating their souls from the otherwise endless cycle of death and rebirth. People from all over India come here to die, so Varanasi is filled with terminally ill people and dozens of dead bodies are, in turn, publicly cremated there each day. People who can’t afford cremation are thrown into the Ganges after they die. So along with watching public cremations, there are opportunities to take a canoe ride and see, just like I did, fresh corpses with rotting, sickly-off white skin, protruding from the river’s chilly, silver-brown polluted surface. I came to Varanasi, a 12-hour train ride east of Delhi, to explore the frontiers of dark tourism – and I have to admit, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I was also drawn to the spectre of seeing my first ever human corpse. In Varanasi, I was searching for Australian tourists to ask them why they wanted to see the city’s death rituals, so I headed over to the city’s burning Ghats. Now for you to imagine what a Ghat looks like, all you need to do is think “India” – a Ghat is one of the nation’s most enduring images. “Ghat” just means a set of concrete or stone steps leading down to the river; where locals wash themselves and their clothes on the river banks. In Varanasi, Ghats are also the source of the city’s pervasive backyard BBQ smell: the place where human bodies openly burn on large piles of wood. “It’s brutal, isn’t it!”, said one young Aussie tourist. He’d been standing behind me, fixed in a concentrated stare at the spectacle before us: the corpse of an elderly man on a wooden stretcher alight with flame. “It’s no big deal really, is it?” he said. “I mean he’s an old man, he lived his life, it’s over now, he looked at peace before he was wrapped in that silk … I guess we are all headed that way.” (Luke Williams, news.com.au , 31 July 2016; adapted) 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 b) Summarise the travel report. 160 Semester self-checks Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigen um des Verlags öbv