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Read the article and do the following exercises.

Teenagers, You’re History

Victoria Coren

I

n last week’s news, the latest clampdown from our government of prefects: there’s going to be no smoking in bus shelters. Meanwhile, a shock announcement from the BBC: after 42 years, Top of the Pops is being axed.

I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but is there a secret plan to cancel teenagers? It sounds like their whole existence is being whittled away. When I was14, all I did was smoke in the bus shelter and watch Top of the Pops.

Wait a minute. No, it wasn’t. I watched University Challenge and drank Nesquik. My friend Jesse and I weren’t cool enough for the bus shelter; we smoked on the doorstep of the old people’s home on Finchley Road. It seemed like the best place to gossip about our families. If we had actually walked through the door of the old people’s home, we’d have fitted right in.

But, for other teenagers, it was festering shelters and TOTP all the way. The cornerstones of youthful identity are being stolen! Stolen by the government and the BBC, from citizens who can’t yet vote or buy a TV licence. How cavalierly the twin pillars of the establishment dismiss the cultural rights of those who have no power to protest. It is a travesty—and probably the beginning of a top-secret plot to undo the noble work of the Sixties, eradicate Teen Age, and return to a world where people jumped straight from childhood to pensionerdom with barely a break for a potted meat sandwich and a paddle at Morecambe Sands.

If the kids don’t fight back, they will soon find nothing left of their lifestyles at all. Adolescence is being stamped out. Mark my words, by the next election we will see the following draconian measures enshrined in law...

1. __________

Bedroom walls will feature only charming watercolour prints or photographs of the family. Blu-Tack will be upgraded, in the eyes of the law, to a Class B substance. It will then become an offence to advertise one’s taste in music by any outward method; anybody caught wearing a T-shirt with a slogan will be arrested immediately.

2. __________

The sexual middle ground will be eliminated. Petting, snogging and the giving or receiving of love bites will carry an immediate ASBO liability. There is no in-between. Boys will effect a seamless transition from thinking: ‘Urgh, yuk, girls’ to ordering Viagra on the internet. Meanwhile, pretending to have lost your virginity with someone you met on holiday will carry a minimum sentence of two years.

3. __________

Phone conversations will be restricted to 10 minutes maximum, and banned between the hours of 11pm and 6am. (Text messages will be intercepted by MI5 and examined to make sure they contain no new slang abbreviations of jargon which the Prime Minister couldn’t understand.) Sleep will be closely monitored and alarms sounded nationwide at 9am to make sure that nobody misses the best part of the day.

4. __________

If you stop eating meat, you stop for life. Experimental phases will not be tolerated. The same applies to being briefly socialist, bisexual or goth. Regulation will be strictest in circumstances where the defendant has shown brief interest in an expensive gadget until a week after his parents have finally bought the goddamn thing.

5. __________

All written poetry must rhyme and be very jolly. Anyone caught crafting lines of bleak enjambement on the topics of depression, unrequited love or the sight of a dead sparrow in the gutter will be jailed at once. Community service may apply in the case of half-rhymes (e.g. ‘misery’ / ‘you did to me’). Conversely, prison sentences will be extended if the words are set to music for the guitar.

6. __________

Internet use will be confined to serious research. There will be no setting up of home pages, posting on blogs or socialising in web-based environments. In a change to existing ‘grooming’ laws, the burden of guilt will be placed on the victim, who (finding herself alone in a car park with a large, bearded truck driver) has only got herself to blame for wittering on about Big Brother to ‘KrazyKool, 16’ anyway.

Further tweaks will see it become illegal to ride undersized BMX bikes or wear oversized trousers. To mix alcohol with fizzy or fruit-based drinks, to lock the bathroom door, to take Ali G at face value, to want to be a model, to turn a pudding-bowl haircut into a mohican by misuse of school soap, to get ‘stressed’ or to play computer games while your mother is talking to you.

Come to think of it, the world will be vastly improved. Let’s hope they push it through quickly.

1. Match the headings (a-f) to the paragraphs (1-6).

a. No ‘My Space’

b. No Being Veggie ‘Apart From Bacon’

c. No Dry Humping

d. No Free Verse

e. No Posters

f. No Strange Hours

2. Match the words (1-9) to their definitions (a-i).

1. ‘Grooming’ laws

2. Ali G

3. ASBO liability

4. Blu-Tack

5. Class B substance

6. Enjambement

7. MI5

8. Top of the Pops

9. University Challenge

a. A British quiz tournament between two teams of four members, each representing a single university, which has aired since 1962.

b. A satirical fictional character which plays on the stereotype of a white suburban male who revels in American gangsta rap and British Jamaican culture.

c. A versatile, reusable, putty-like pressure-sensitive adhesive, commonly used to attach papers to walls or other surfaces.

d. A weekly British music chart television programme featuring performances from that week’s best-selling popular music artists.

e. An illegal drug carrying a less severe punishment than other more serious and dangerous ones.

f. Anti-social behaviour legal responsibility.

g. The breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses.

h. The ruling against befriending children in internet chat-rooms, often pretending to be of the same age, or with similar interests.

i. The UK’s counter-intelligence and security agency.

3. Match the sentence halves.

1. Coren accuses the government of not...

2. Coren compares the people governing Britain to...

3. The British authorities would like to see...

4. The British system is supported by...

5. The teenage Coren and her friend were not...

6. The tone of Coren’s article is...

a. ...jocular and light-hearted.

b. ...older pupils controlling younger ones in a school.

c. ...parliament and the mass media.

d. ...taking into account the underdogs’ feelings.

e. ...the end of teen attitudes and lifestyle.

f. ...very different from chatty senior citizens.

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