ZIDANE STRIKES BLOW FOR EQUALITY

ZIDANE STRIKES BLOW FOR EQUALITY
If the pen is mightier than the sword, what about the game of football? With two goals in Sunday
night's World Cup final, Zinedine Zidane probably did more to damage the anti-foreigner National
Front party than years of fine rhetoric from France's mainstream political forces. The thousands of
fans who partied through the heart of Paris in the early hours of Monday to celebrate France's
dramatic 3-0 victory over Brazil had few doubts who was the nation's savior. "Zidane for president,"
they chanted, while the banner "Thank-you Zizou" was flashed across the Arc de Triomphe, one of
the most resonant symbols of the French republic. Yet Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, was
one of the many players in the current French side who Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has
publicly written off for not having pure Gaul blood running through their veins. "France has won the
World Cup, Le Pen has lost," said Iticham Elmardhi, a young Frenchman of North African origin who
joined the impromptu World Cup street party in the heaving Champs Elysees.
The triumphant success of France's multi-cultural soccer team over the past month has lifted hopes
that the country as a whole can patch up its deep racial divides. "Le Pen can say what he likes but
no one is listening any more. This team has shown that all types of people can work together," said
Benoit Chiaramonti, a white French student proudly sporting a number 10 Zidane T-shirt. Le Pen's
National Front regularly polls 15 percent of the vote in elections on a platform of repatriating tens of
thousands of immigrants and giving preference in the workplace and social security to natural-born
French.
But while most politicians have scrambled over themselves to share the glory of the French soccer
team, the National Front has been uncharacteristically mute at a time of unprecedented national
pride. It is easy to see why. Besides Zidane, many of the other top team players are what Le Pen
would call foreigners. Lilian Thuram who scored both goals in France's semifinal win over Croatia is
a black Frenchman from Guadeloupe. Marcel Desailly, for many the player of the tournament, and
striker Thierry Henry are also both of Caribbean descent. Midfielder Youri Djorkaeff is the
descendant of Armenian refugees. "It is thanks to us foreigners that France won tonight. We're
going to need a bit more respect," said Evelyne Vergerolle, a middle-aged Frenchwoman of
Caribbean ancestry. In the southern port city of Marseille, where Zidane grew up and which suffers
possibly the worst race relations of all big French towns, tensions were shunted to the sidelines -- at
least for one night. "In all the time I've lived here I've never really established any contacts with my
north African neighbors," said one white local, Jean-Patrick. "But Zidane changed that tonight. For
the first time I shook my neighbor's hand. I don't even know his name." But not everyone was about
to get carried away by the wave of feel-good French unity. "They can't claim him as theirs now. You
must write that Zidane is an Algerian. He is the best player in the world and he is Algerian," insisted
19-year-old Mounir Lade as he strode through Paris clutching an Algerian flag.
Source : Reuters 14 July 1998

SKIMMING & SCANNING

•Skimming and scanning are two specific speed--reading techniques, which enable you to cover a vast amount of material very rapidly.

•These techniques are similar in process but different in purpose. Both require specific steps to be followed.

•NOTE ~ Quickly "looking over" an article is NOT skimming nor scanning enlightened



Skimming

›fast reading
›get the main idea NOT all the details.
›may leave out ½ to ¾ paragraph once you have the main idea of the paragraph
›comprehension will be lower, so try to comprehend as much as you can while reading at an average speed
›comprehend 50% of what you are reading
›be twice as fast
›usually done with material you know nothing about

›*NOTE ~ as speed increases, comprehension decreases

Scanning

›a reading technique used when you want to locate a single fact or specific bit of information without reading every word
fast way to find info
››often done with material that you know something about
must be accurate in terms of finding a specific detail

for example, you scan TV lisitings in the newspaper to find the time of a particular show