An Integrated English Course An Integrated English Course Book 2Book 2

Unit Fourteen

Learning ObjectivesLearning Objectives

By the end of this unit, you are supposed to

understand the main idea, structure of the text and the author’s writing style

master the key language points and grammatical structures in the text

consider how America came to be symbolized by the jeans.

Teaching ProcedureTeaching Procedure

Pre-reading QuestionsText I. The Jeaning of America ● Passage● Structure analysis● Main idea of the passage● Language points ● sentence studies ● vocabulary studies

Text II. Happy Birthday to You

Pre-readingPre-reading

1. Based on the title, guess what the text is about.

Judging from the title, the text should be about how an American symbol, namely the jeans, came into being.

2. Do you like blue jeans? Why/Why not?Yes, I do. Blue jeans are a manly and legitimate

passion for equality. They draw no distinctions and recognize no classes, so they are favored by all walks of life. Besides their proletarian look, are adaptable to “any sort of idiosyncratic use” and suitable for various decorations and ornaments.

Or: No, I don’t, because I am a girl.

3. What do you know about its origins?Levis Strauss invented his blue jeans largely by chance.

He brought some canvas which he hoped to sell for tenting in the west, but it was the wrong kind. After learning that the Western miners needed tough and sturdy pants in their work, he had the canvas tailored into a pair of stiff but rugged pants, which was an immediate success.

The word “jeans” derives from Genes, the French word for Genoa, where a similar tough cotton cloth was produced; Levis

Strauss had this cloth dyed indigo (blue), hence “blue jeans”.

At first , blue jeans were popular among the working people in the West. They came to the East during the dude ranch craze in the 1930 when those vacationing Easterners brought them back and spread the word about the wonderful pants. Blue jeans gained more popularity in the Second World War when they became an essential commodity and were only used by those in military service.

4. List as many other American icons as you can apart from Levis’s jeans?

American dollar. Coca cola and Pepsi . Apple pie.Las Vegas.Rock n’roll.The Blues.Hollywood. Jazz.The Country Fair.

Disneyland

Harley-Davidson motorcycles

McDonald's and other fast food places

Text I. The Jeaning of Text I. The Jeaning of America America

Today, there are tough double-kneed jeans for kids, acid-washed jeans for teens, designer jeans for the fashion set, and boot-cut jeans for outdoor workers. But all began in 1850 when Levis Strauss, a German immigrant who had gone West to seek his fortune, sewed up some sturdy canvas pants for a miner. Carin Quinn, who received her master’ degree from California State University in Los Angeles, first published “The Jeaning of America --- and the World” in American Heritage.

The story of Levis Strauss’s career, and the parallel career of his proletarian pants, is part true grit, part luck, and part legend. The bottom line, Quinn reports, is 83 million pairs of Levis riveted blue jeans sold every year.

This is a story of a sturdy American symbol which has now spread throughout most of the world. The symbol is not the dollar. It is not even Coca-Cola. It is a simple pair of pants called blue jeans, and what the pants symbolize is what Alexis de Tocqueville called “ a manly and legitimate passion for equality…” Blue jeans are favored equally by bureaucrats and cowboys, bankers and deadbeats, fashion designers and beer drinkers. They draw no distinctions and recognize no classes: they are merely American. Yet they are sought after almost everywhere in the world --- including Russia, where authorities recently broke up a teenaged gang that was selling them on the black market for two hundred dollars a pair. They have been around for a long time. And it seems likely that they will outlive even the necktie.

This ubiquitous American symbol was the invention of a Bavarian-born Jew. His name was Levis Strauss. He was born in Bad Ocheim, Geermany, in 1829, and during the European political turmoil of 1848

decided to take his chances in New York, to which his two brothers already had emigrated. Upon arrival, Levis soon found that his two brothers had exaggerated their tales of an easy life in the land of the main chance. They were landowners, they had told him; instead, he found them pushing needles, thread, pots, pans, ribbons, yarn, scissors, and buttons to housewives. For two years he was a lowly peddler, hauling some 180 pounds of sundries door to door to eke out a marginal living. When a married sister in San Francisco offered to pay his way West in 1850, he jumped at the opportunity, taking with him bolts of canvas he hoped to sell for tenting.

It was the wrong kind of canvas for that purpose, but while talking with a miner down from the mother lode, he learned that pants --- sturdy pants that would stand up to the rigors of the digging --- were almost impossible to find. Opportunity beckoned. On the spot, Strauss measured that man’s girth and inseam with a piece of string and, for six dollars in gold dust, had the canvas tailored into a pair of stiff but rugged pants. The miner was delighted with the result. Word got around about “those pants of Levis’s”, and Strauss was in business. The company has been in business ever since.

When Strauss ran out of canvas, he wrote his two brothers to send more. He received instead a tough, brown cotton cloth made in Nimes, France --- called serge de Nimes and swiftly shortened to “denim” ( the word “jeans” derives from Genes, the French worked for Genoa, where a similar cloth was produced). Almost from the first , Strauss had his cloth dyed the distinctive indigo that gave blue jeans their name. But it was not until the 1870s that he added the copper rivets which have long since become a company trademark. The rivets were the idea of a Virginia City, Nevada, tailor, Jacob W.Davis, who added them to pacify a mean-tempered miner called Aslkali Ike. Alkali, the story goes, complained that the pockets of his jeans always tore when he stuffed them with ore samples and demanded that Davis do something about it. As a kind of joke, Davis took the pants to a blacksmith and had the pockets riveted; once again, the idea worked so well that word got around. In 1873 Strauss appropriated and patented the gimmick --- and hired Davis as a regional manager.

By this time, Strauss had taken both his brothers-in-law into the company and was ready for his third San Francisco store. Over the ensuing years the company prospered locally, and by the time of this death in 1902, Strauss had become a man of prominence in California. For three decades thereafter the business remained profitable though small. With sales largely confined to the working people of the West --- cowboys, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and the like. Levis’s jeans were first introduced to the East, apparently, during the dude ranch craze of the 1930, when vacationing Easterners returned and spread word about the wonderful pants with rivets. Another boost came in World War II, when blue jeans were declared an essential commodity and were sold only to people engaged in defense work. Form a company with fifteen salespeople, two plants and almost no business east of Mississippi in 1946, the organization grew in thirty years to include a sales force of more than twenty-two thousand, with fifty plants and offices in thirty-five countries. Each year, more tahtn 250,000,000 items of Levis’s clothing are sold--- including more than 83,000,000 pairs of riveted blue jeans. They have become, through marketing, word of mouth, and demonstrable reliability, the common pants of America. They can be purchased pre-washed, pre-faded, and pre-syncratic use; women slit them at the inseams and convert them into long skirts, men chop them off above the knees and turn them into something to be worn while challenging the surf. Decorations and ornamentations abound.

The pants have become a tradition, and along the way have acquired a history of their own – so much so that the company has opened a museum in San Francisco. There was , for example, the turn-of-the-century trainman who replaced a faulty coupling with a pair of jeans; the Wyoming man who used his jeans as a towrope to haul his car out of a ditch; the Californian who found several pairs in the abandoned mine, wore them, then discovered they were sixty-thee years old and still as good as new and turned at hem over to the Smithsonian as a tribute to their roughness. And then there is the particularly terrifying story of the careless construction worker who dangled fifty-two stories above the street until rescued, his sole support the Levis belt loop through which his rope was hooked.

1,115words

Structural analysisStructural analysisThe text can be divided into Five

parts.Part One: (Paragraph 1) The present status of the blue jeans in

America and in the world. The author mentions three points about the blue jeans.

a) The pants, more suitable than dollar and Coca –Cola, have become an American symbol. b) They stand for “ a manly and legitimate passion for equality”. C) They have gained worldwide popularity.

Part Two: (Paragraphs 2-3) The introduction of Levis Strauss,

the inventor of the blue jeans.

These two paragraphs introduce Levis Strauss and his early experience in New York as an immigrant.

Part Three: (Paragraphs.4-5): The detailed description of how Strauss made his first blue jeans.

Part four: (Paragraph 6):The growing business and

popularity of the blue jeans.

Part Five: (Paragraph 7): The peculiar merits of the blue

jeans.

Main Idea of the passage

The text tells of how Levis Strauss, the inventor of the blue jeans, made his first blue jeans, and won the popularity for the blue jeans, i.e.., how the blue jeans became an American symbol.

Language pointsLanguage points

Symbolize verb 1)  express indirectly by an image, form, or model;

be a symbol; e.g. "What does the Statue of Liberty symbolize? 2)  represent or identify by using a symbol; use

symbols;

e.g."The poet symbolizes love in this poem"; "These painters believed that artists should symbolize”. 

Draw a distinction to indicate the difference between e.g. Many societies draw a distinction between the

status of an unmarried woman and a married one. Can you draw a distinction between a gerund and a

present participle? Favor like better than others e.g. Fortune favors the brave. do somebody a favor : to help e.g. She’s always doing favors for us. We’d better

buy her a gift.

Seek after To try to get e.g. We are earnestly seeking after the

truth. break up To stop from continuing. E.g. The police were instructed to break up

the demonstration against the government. Emigrate verb. leave one's country of residence for a new one e.g. "Many people had to emigrate during the Nazi

period" 

exaggerate verb. 1. to magnify beyond the limits of truth to exaggerate the difficulties of a situation. 2. to increase or enlarge abnormally Those shoes exaggerate the size of my feet. eke out To cause (a small supply) to last longer by adding something else. e.g. It was difficult but he managed to eke out his money until the

end of the month. She eked out her small income by cleaning other people’s

houses. Stand up to to last well under certain hard conditions e.g. The material can stand up to high temperature.

Text II. Happy Birthday to YouText II. Happy Birthday to You

Douglas K. StevensonDouglas K. StevensonThe main problem in discussing American popular culture is also one of its main characteristics: it won’t stay American. Regardless of what it is, whether films, food and fashion, music, casual sports or slang, it’s soon at home elsewhere in the world. There are several theories why American popular culture has had this appeal, especially since the 1920s. One theory is that it has been “advertised” and marketed through American films, popular music, and more recently, television programs are so popular in themselves. They are, after all, in competition with those produced by other countries.

Another theory is that because America is “a nation of nations”, its popular art and culture find it easier to “return home”, to appeal to the traditions and tastes of other countries. This fails to clarify why schoolchildren in Italy wear clothing saying “baseball” and “football”, why cowboy boots are on Japanese feet, or Afros on Swedish head.

Still another theory, probably the most common one, is that American popular culture is internationally associated with something called “the spirit of America”. This spirit is variously described as being young and free, optimistic and confident, informal and disrespectful. The final theory is less complex: American popular culture is popular because a lot of people in the world like it.

Regardless of why its spreads, American popular culture is usually quite rapidly adopted and then adapted in many other countries. As a result, its American origins and roots are often quickly forgotten. “Happy Birthday to You”, for instance, is such an everyday song that its source, its American copyright, so to speak, is not remembered. Black leather jackets worn in American movies by James Dean and Marlon Brando, too, could be found, a generation later, on all those young men who wanted to make this macho-look their own. Potato chips are sold as “crisps”, and “real American hotdogs”, also called “wienies”, appear in Vienna.

Two areas where this continuing process is most clearly seen are clothing and music. Some people can still remember a time when T-shirts, sweat shirts, and jogging clothes, the light windbreaker, and tennis shoes, denim or “Levi” jackets, shirts, and plain old blue jeans were not common daily wear everywhere. Baseball caps, truckers’ hats and vests, quilted hunting jackets, football jerseys, “the college look”, and the classic Humphrey Bogart style have all become familiar. Only twenty years ago, it was possible to spot an American in Paris by his or her clothes. No longer: those bright colors, plaid and checkered jackets and trousers, hats and socks which were once made fun of in cartoons are back again in Paris as the latest fashion. America in origin, informal clothing has become the world’s first truly universal style.

The Situation with American popular music is more complex because in the beginning, when it was clearly American, it was often strongly resisted. Jazz, as is well known, was once though to be a great danger to youth and their morals, and was actually outlawed in several countries. Today, while still showing its rather American roots, it has become so well established that it’s almost a member of the middle-aged , middle-class set. Swing, rock’n’ roll and all its variations, rhythm & blues, soul, and most recently, country and western music, all have more or less similar histories. They were first resisted --- often in America as well --- as being “low-class”, musical trash, and as “ a danger to our nation’s youth”. The BBC, for example banned rock ‘n’ roll until 1962, forcing the pirate radio stations to smuggle in Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, the Big Bopper and all their shocking American friends. And then the music became accepted, local varieties based on the American originals took hold, and the new genre or style was established. The music is translated, often extended and developed, and then commonly exported back to the US.

Sometimes it is difficult even for an American to distinguish between the original and the gifted imitation, to tell whether that man or woman singing the blues was born in Birmingham, Alabama, or Birmingham, England. But as in the case of the opera singer who has learned to sing in Italian, the game is given away when the singer speaks. However, no one finds it difficult to understand what “American” music is like. Whether Dixieland and Boogie-Woogie, the Big Band Sound, the protest-song tradition of Woody and Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Bluegrass, and Disco beat, or the rhymed poetics of New world, the typed of music that most people also listen to outside the United States. Why this is true is also not really known, but there is no doubt that it is.

Main idea of Text 2Main idea of Text 2 This text tells of how the American pop culture has its

appeal in the world. By providing detailed examples like clothing and music, the author holds that the truth of the American pop culture's popularity is not really known.

According to the author, There are three theories about the popularity of American pop culture in the world, which are explained in the first three paragraphs respectively: first, “it has been ‘advertised’ and marketed through American films, popular music, and more recently, television”; second, “America is a ‘ nation of nations’, its popular art and culture find it easier to ‘return home’, to appeal to the traditions and tastes of other countries”; and third, “American popular culture is internationally associated with something called ‘the spirit of America’”.

Topics for discussion:Topics for discussion:Why, according to the author, does the American pop culture have its appeal in the world?

According to the author, There are three theories about the popularity of American pop culture in the world, which are explained in the first three paragraphs respectively: first, “it has been ‘advertised’ and marketed through American films, popular music, and more recently, television”; second, “America is a ‘ nation of nations’, its popular art and culture find it easier to ‘return home’, to appeal to the traditions and tastes of other countries”; and third, “American popular culture is internationally associated with something called ‘the spirit of America’”.

Give examples of your own to explain the spirit of America.

Open to discussion.

How, in your opinion, is American popular culture adapted in China?

Open to discussion.

Words and Expressions for Text Itough a. not easily brokenAcid n. 酸designer a. created by or as if by a famous designerDesigner jeans jeans that are named after their

designersBoot-cut jeans

Back to the text

Back to the text

Notes for Text IIJames Dean ： James Dean was an American movie star who had

one of the most spectacular brief careers of any screen star. In just more than a year, and in only three films, Dean became a widely admired screen personality, a personification of the restless American youth of the mid-1950s, and an embodiment of the title of one of his film Rebel Without a cause. En route to compete in a race in Salinas, James Dean was killed in a high way accident on September 30,1955.

Marlon Brando:

Back to the text