In the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific some villagers practice a unique form of cutting trees down. If a tree is too large to be cut with an ax, the natives cut it down by shouting at it. Men with special powers get on the tree just in the early morning hours and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. After thirty days of doing this, the tree dies and falls over. The villagers' theory is that the screaming kills the spirit of the tree and, according to them, it always works.

«Ah, those poor naïve innocents!», some people in our Western societies may think. «Screaming at trees, indeed! How primitive! Don't they realise that trees can't hear us?» Our first reaction is to think that we do not do things like this any longer because we have a scientific, logical mind and we use highly sophisticated machines.

But, however scientific, logical and technologically prepared we may be, haven't you ever seen anyone screaming at things at the top of their lungs? For instance, I shout at the taxis and the buses and the telephone. People have told me that they have seen me yelling at the sky at times. The man next door yells at his car a lot. Last summer I heard him yell at his video VCR when it stopped working and he usually yells at his TV set while watching football matches. But, what's worst, I also shout at my wife, often just because I am in a bad mood, and my neighbour yells at his children when they are playing on the street. In the end, we realise that machines and relatives get most of the yelling we, urban educated people, do.

And we may ask ourselves: «Does this shouting help at all?» If machines and things cannot hear us and just sit there, is our yelling more logical than the Solomon way of cutting trees down? The Solomon Islanders, however, may have a point that we should keep in mind before shouting at the people we love most: Shouting at living things may kill the spirit in them.

PART ONE: READING COMPREHENSION

1. Answer the following questions without copying from the text.

1. What is the «unique» Solomon way of cutting trees down?

2. Who is in charge of cutting trees down in the Solomon islands?

3. How do the Solomon villagers explain the fact that the tree falls over?

4. Why don't we use such primitive methods for cutting trees down in the Western world? Mention two reasons given in the text.

5. What things does the writer's neighbour yell at?

6. Which of the following sentences (a, b or c) best summarizes the writer’s ideas? (Write the sentence you choose.)
a) The writer thinks that in the Western societies we should scream at people in order to get things done.
b) The writer thinks that people in the Western world and people in the Solomon Islands do not behave differently after all.
c) The writer thinks that the Solomon islanders are naïve and stupid because they think that yelling kills trees.

  PART TWO: WRITING
Choose ONE. Write about either 1 or 2.

Option A: Last week you had an argument with your best friend and shouted at him even if you were wrong. Now he does not want to talk to you any longer and so you have decided to write a letter of apology to him saying why you are very sorry. Write down that letter. Don’t use your real name.

Option B: A representative of the Solomon tribe who had never left his island before has spent a week in Barcelona. Today she/he is talking about all the things in our society which seem illogical and strange to him/her. Write down his/her talk.

3. Vocabulary

Explain next words in English, write the phonetics and also an example: naïve, to realise, to scream, lung, to yell.