1984. Адаптированная книга для чтения на английском языке. Уровень B1

You can all do it if you want toВ», she said. В«Anyone under forty-five can touch his toes. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much betterВ», she added as Winston touched his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.

ChapterВ  4

Winston sighed deeply and pulled the speakwrite towards him. He blew the dust from it, and put on his spectacles. Four small cylinders of paper had already fell out of the pneumatic tube on the right side of his desk. He unrolled them.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three holes. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, a large slit with a wire grating. This last was for waste paper. There were thousands or tens of thousands of similar slits in the building, not only in every room but also in every corridor. For some reason they were called memory holes. Warm air carried away the waste paper that you put in those holes to some place where it was burnt.

Winston examined the four pieces of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated Newspeak words.

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.12.83 reporting bb day order doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

Winston felt happy that he got the forth message; it was a responsible job, so he laid the fourth message aside.

The other three were easy tasks.

Winston dialled В«back numbersВ» on the telescreen and called for the Times, which appeared out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes. He had received messages about articles or news items which it thought necessary to change for one reason or another. The word that described the process was В«to rectifyВ».

For example, it appeared in the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother had said the previous day that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian army would shortly attack North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had attacked South India and left North Africa alone. It was necessary to rewrite a small PART of Big Brother's speech, as if he had predicted the thing that had actually happened.