Dictation Listen to the passage. For questions 21—25, fill in the blanks with the exact words or phrases you hear. Within the n

Dictation
Listen to the passage. For questions 21—25, fill in the blanks with the exact words or phrases you hear.
Within the national group, our prejudices tend to be very mixed and, because they operate mainly on an unconscious level, not easily recognizable. We can be natives of great cities and still find a town dialect less pleasant than a country one. And yet, hearing prettiness and quaintness in a Dorset or Devon twang, we can also despise it, because we associate it with rural stupidity or backwardness. The ugly tones of Manchester or Birmingham will, because of their great civic associations, be at the same time somehow admirable. The whole business of ugliness and beauty works strangely. A BBC announcer says "pay day" : a Cockney says "pie die". The former is thought to be beautiful, the latter ugly, and yet the announcer can use the Cockney sounds in a statement like "Eat that pie and you will die" without anybody’s face turning sour. In fact, terms like "ugly" and "beautiful" cannot really apply to languages at all. Poets can make beautiful patterns out of words, but there are no standards we can use to formulate aesthetic judgments on the words themselves. We all have our pet hates and loves among words, but these always have to be referred to associations. We have to watch associations carefully, remembering that language is a public, not a private, medium , and that questions of word-hatred and word-love had best be tackled very coldly and rationally.