Summarize in one paragraph the essentials of the extract.
Confirm or refute:
1. ...tourism ... is a conventionalising, a codification, of adventure and exploration... 2. How can there be any adventure, any explora-tion, if you let... a travel bureau — arrange everything beforehand? 3. It isn't seeing new and beautiful things which matters, it's seeing them for yourself. 4. Three hundred miles on foot in three weeks give you infinitely more sense of travel, ... than thirty thousand miles of mechanical transport.
e) Tell the class your opinion about tourism. Do you agree with Aldington's "horror of tourism"? Dwell both on the advantages and drawbacks of organized travel.
2. a) The author of the article that follows seems to share Aldington's opinion at least in one point:
The Only Way to Travel is On Foot
The past ages of man have all been carefully labelled by anthro-pologists. Descriptions like «Paleolithic Man", "Neolithic Man", etc., neatly sum up whole periods. When the time comes for anthropolo-gists to turn their attention to the twentieth century, they will surely choose the label "Legless Man". Histories of the time will go some-thing like this: "In the twentieth century, people forgot how to use their legs. Men and women moved about in cars, buses and trains from a very early age. There were lifts and escalators in all large build-ings to prevent people from walking. This situation was forced upon earth-dwellers of that time because of their extraordinary way of life. In those days people thought nothing of travelling hundreds of miles each day. But the surprising thing is that they didn't use their legs even when they went on holiday. They built cable railways, ski-lifts and roads to the top of every huge mountain. All the beauty spots on earth were marred by the presence of large car parks."
The future history books might also record that we were deprived of the use of our eyes. In our hurry to get from one place to another, we failed to see anything on the way. Air travel gives you a bird's-eye views of the world — or even less if the wing of the aircraft hap-pens to get in your way. When you travel by car or train a blurred image of the countryside constantly smears the windows. Car driv-ers, in particular, are for ever obsessed with the urge to go on and on: they never want to stop. And as for sea travel, it hardly deserves mention. It is perfectly summed up in the words of the old song: "I joined the navy to see the world, and what did I see? I saw the sea." The typical twentieth-century traveller is the man who always says, "I've been there." You mention the remotest, most evocative place-names in the world like El Dorado, Kabul, Irkutsk and somebody is bound to say "I've been there" — meaning, "I drove through it at 100 miles an hour on the way to somewhere else."
When you travel at high speeds, the present means nothing: you live mainly in the future because you spend most of your time look-ing forward to arriving at some other place. But actual arrival, when it is achieved, is meaningless. You want to move on again. By travel-ling like this, you suspend all experience; the present ceases to be a reality; you might just as well be dead. The traveller on foot, on the
other hand, lives constantly in the present. For him travelling and arriving are one and the same thing: he arrives somewhere with ev-ery step he makes. He experiences the present moment with his eyes, his ears and the whole of his body. At the end of his journey he feels a delicious physical weariness. He knows that sound satisfying sleep will be his: the just reward of all true travellers.
(From: "For and Against" by L.G Alexander)
Select from the text the author's major arguments, so as to make a kind of outline of the article.
Find in the text statements with which you agree and support them by your own arguments. Find statements with which you disagree and explain why you do.