Prime Time 7, Coursebook plus Semester Self-checks

Goals • Learn more about India’s history and culture. • Talk about Hinduism in comparison to other world religions. • Discuss Mahatma Gandhi’s life and legacy. • Discuss films and write a film review. • Make your texts read better in terms of coherence and cohesion. Quotations a) Read the four quotations by people who travelled to India in different centuries. b) The aspects in the green boxes summarise what each traveller found most fascinating about the country. Match the boxes with the appropriate quotes. change and contradictions people knowledge sensual experience 3  Word bank India Hinduism  • Muslims  • East India Trading Company  • British legacy  • raw materials  • The British Raj  • viceroy  • outbreaks of violence  • partition  • withdrawal of the British  • anniversary of independence  • Hindu caste system  • the untouchables  • nonviolent resistance  • civil disobedience  • the “Salt March”  • maharaja  • Bollywood  • sari  • spinning wheel  • population density W 81 1. “In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing.” (Apollonius Tyaneus, Greek traveller, 1 st century) 2. “India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.” (William James Durant, philosopher and historian, 1885–1981) 3. “When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colours, smells, tastes and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.” (Keith Bellows, vice president of the National Geographic Society, * 1953) 4. “With one foot grounded in time-honoured traditions and the other fervently striding into the entrepreneurial e-age, India embraces diversity passionately as few other countries on earth could.” (Lonely Planet Guide, 2001) Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv