Listening for specific information

English first additional language

Grade 7

Module 10

Listening for specific information

The educator will read the passage below loudly. Listen very carefully while it is being read and then carry on with the instructions that follow.

“He’s so cool, man!”

He has been called one of the most eligible bachelors in South Africa, but he has also been slated as being a yuppie whose wealth has gone to his head. It doesn’t matter what your point of view is: Mark Shuttleworth is cool, man.

And what makes him extra cool? The fact that he is just like any one of us, and yet he has managed to realize a seemingly impossible dream.

Mark Shuttleworth was born in the Free State mining town of Welkom. He is the eldest of Rick and Ronelle Shuttleworth’s three sons. He is a self-confessed nerd (but girls, you will agree, quite a dishy one) who led an ordinary life as a schoolboy, and like many of us, enjoyed playing computer games on the family computer.

As head boy of Bishops in Cape Town, he showed outstanding leadership qualities and exceptional intellectual capacity. At school he excelled in mathematics and science and in his matric year he won a silver medal in the national maths Olympiad. He achieved six A’s in his final matric exam.

Despite these achievements, Mark was just an everyday young man who went on to study commerce at the University of Cape Town. This is where he discovered the wonders of the internet. He says that his career started “accidentally”. He had never really thought of following a career in the world of computers. Yet, in his final year at university, he established an internet consultancy named Thawte Consulting. His “office” was in the garage.

So there he was, a “nerd”, working as an internet consultant from the garage of his family home in suburban Durbanville. Who would ever have thought that soon he was to realize an amazing dream and in so doing, become one of the most famous people in South Africa?

Soon he began to concentrate on internet safety for companies who wanted to do e-trading. In a very short time it had become the largest company to offer “digital certificates” to certify the safety and confidentiality of a website.

The American giant VeriSign bought Thawte Consulting in 2000 for $575 million (about R4 600 million at that time). Mark immediately gave each of his 40 employees, even the gardener, R1 million for his/her contribution to his success.

Now if that isn’t cool, what is?

Activity 1

1. Answer the following questions. All the answers should be in full sentences, except the last one where you can just write down one word.
2. What is an eligible bachelor ?
3. What is a yuppie ?
4. Do you know where the word yuppie comes from? If you do, write down the answer and explain in your own words what it means. If you don’t know, find out and explain the words.
5. What does it mean if one says that someone’s wealth (or fame) goes to his/her head ?
6. The following three words are actually slang expressions. How would you explain their meaning to someone who doesn’t know what they mean?