1.1. The Military
Rellenar huecos
Put each of the following words or phrases in its correct place in the passage below.
| aggressive | cyberattacks | forces | defense | conscription | hostilities |
| insurgency | intelligence | poll | recruits | protocol | spending |
| conscripted | enlistment | draft | scrapping | pool | diplomats |
 |
| Image by Karri Huhtanen in Flickr. CC. |
The word "military" has a different pronunciation in General American /ˈmɪlɪˌteri/ and General British English /ˈmɪlɪt(ə)ri/.
Where the syllable preceding the suffixes -ary, -ery, -ory, -berry, -mony or -ative is unstressed, American English pronounces the antepenultimate syllable with a full vowel sound while British English reduces the vowel to a schwa or even elides it completely.
Other words in this category include inventory, testimony, innovative, contrary, corollary, honorary,imaginary, sedentary, secretary, migratory, conservatory,laboratory, lavatory...
However, there are exceptions like contradictory, compulsory or satisfactory, in which both accents use schwa. In case of doubt, check a good online pronunciation dictionary.
Conocimiento previo
 |
| Image by Al Ravenna in Wikimedia. Public Domain. |
Carl August Sandburg was born in 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois to August and Clara Sandburg, immigrants from Sweden who met and married in the United States. One of seven children, he left school at the age of 13 to work and help support his family. He volunteered for military service during the Spanish-American War and afterward, qualified as a veteran for college admission despite his lack of a high school diploma. At Lombard College in Galesburg, Sandburg began to write poetry and prose, and his first booklets were published.
Sandburg left college without graduating and worked as a traveling salesman before becoming an organizer and orator for the Social Democratic Party of Wisconsin in 1907. At party headquarters, he met Lilian Steichen, younger sister of the painter and photographer Edward Steichen, who was already making a name for himself in New York and Paris.
Sandburg and Lilian Steichen were married in 1908, and moved to Chicago in 1912, where Sandburg went to work as a journalist, sometimes using a pseudonym and writing for business journals and socialist journals and newspapers. During nearly five decades as a newspaperman, he was a local news reporter, an investigative reporter, a war correspondent, a movie critic, and a nationally syndicated columnist.
Encouraged by his wife, Sandburg kept writing poetry, most of it free verse. His first serious recognition as a poet came in 1914 when several of his poems were published. Sandburg’s first book, Chicago Poems, was published in 1916, and his last collection of poems, Honey and Salt, appeared in 1963, when he was 85.
Sandburg was a popular performer, playing the guitar and singing American folk music, and reading his poetry and prose. In 1926 he published the two-volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, and continued researching and writing Lincoln’s life. The four-volume Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, published in 1939, won the Pulitzer Prize in history. Sandburg’s Complete Poems (1950) received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
He also published stories and poems for children, an anthology of American folk music, an autobiography of his early years, and a novel, Remembrance Rock (1948). He collaborated with Edward Steichen, his brother-in-law, on the text for the landmark photographic exhibition and book, The Family of Man (1955).
Sandburg lived the last 22 years of his life at Connemara, a 245-acre farm in Flat Rock, North Carolina where he died in 1967 at the age of 89.
Adapted from: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/carl-sandburg-education-carl-sandburg-timeline/2320/
The Grass is a poem from Cornhuskers (1918)
|
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now?
I am the grass. Let me work. |
|
