Chomsky`s activism has its roots in his childhood

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AN 11 Premier semestre
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Noam Chomsky, the radical’s radical, agrees to see me at his office in Boston.
Emma Brockes
1) Fill in the blanks : Remplissez les blancs à l’aide de l’un des termes suivants. Un
terme peut servir une ou plusieurs fois. Il peut aussi ne pas servir.
AGAINST, AS, AT , ENOUGH, FOR, FROM, LIKE, ONLY, OVER, ROUND, THAT, TO,
UP, WHAT
The greatest intellectual?
He works here …1….a professor of linguistics. He says “the best scientists aren’t the ones
who know the most data, they are the ones who know what they are looking …2... . Being
smart is using your intelligence to decide …3…’s right.” I ask him if he has a photographic
memory and Chomsky smiles. “It’s the other way…4…. I can’t remember names, can’t
remember faces.” He says he …5.. goes online if he is “hunting for documents, or historical
data.
Chomsky’s activism has its roots in his childhood. He grew …6.. in the depression of the
1930s, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, Russian immigrants .…7..
Philadelphia. He describes the family as “working class Jews”, most of whom were
unemployed, although his parents, both teachers, were lucky …8…. to work.
The house in Philadelphia was crowded, full of aunts and uncles, many of them seamstresses
who weathered the depression thanks to the help of the International Ladies Garment Union*.
Chomsky’s was four years old when he witnessed, …9…. a passing trolley car, strikers
outside a textile plant being beaten by the police. At 10 he wrote his first political pamphlet,
…10… the rise of fascism in Spain.
*The International Ladies Garment Union: Le syndicat de la confection
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PTO →
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The greatest intellectual?
Chomsky,76, has been voted the world’s top intellectual by Prospect magazine, but he has no
interest in that.
Chomsky had a choice of role models*. There was his mother’s family in New York, who
crowded into a big government apartment and got by solely on the wages of a disabled uncle,
who on the basis of his disability was awarded a small news-stand by the state. Chomsky’s
radicalism grew out of the time he spent, from the age of 12, commuting to New York at
weekends to help on the news-stand.
“It became a kind of salon” he says. My uncle had no formal education but he was an
extremely intelligent man - he’d been through all the leftwing groups; he was also very much
involved in psychoanalysis. There were a lot of German emigres in New York at the time and
in the evening they would hang around the news-stand and talk. My uncle finally ended up
being a pretty wealthy psychoanalyst on Riverside Drive.” He bursts out laughing.
The Guardian
Monday October 31, 2005
*Role models : exemple/ personne à imiter, modèle à suivre, idéal à imiter