Circumstances

CIRCUMSTANCES and RECOUNT TEXT

Basic Competence

3.3 menerapkan fungsi sosial, struktur teks, dan unsur kebahasaan teks interaksi transaksional
lisan dan tulis yang melibatkan tindakan memberi dan meminta informasi terkait keterangan
(circumstance), sesuai dengan konteks penggunaannya. (Perhatikan unsur kebahasaan klausa
finite atau klausa non–finite)

4.3 menyusun teks interaksi transaksional lisan dan tulis yang melibatkan tindakan memberi
dan meminta informasi terkait keterangan (circumstance), dengan memperhatikan fungsi
sosial, struktur teks, dan unsur kebahasaan yang benar dan sesuai konteks

Learning purpose

In this chapter, you will learn about Circumstances and review on Recount. Surely, you will
have to know the proper grammatical structure used to write meaningful sentences on your
Recount text.  Practicing writing sentences with Circumstances is needed to enhance your
understanding on their social function and structure.

Learning process

  GENERAL INSTRUCTION : You must ensure that you understand the material step by
step. At the end, there will be an evaluation to test your level of understanding on the
material. When your level is above the passing score, you may continue to the next
material. Before you ask for the evaluation, please ensure yourself that you have already
mastered the whole material in this chapter.

  BEFORE LEARNING

Choose the correct answer!

1. The committee will select the candidates … (a. quietly,  b. similarly) to what they had
last year.
2. (a. For Mr. Ali,  b. Thanks to Mr. Ali) … we are able to finish the proposal on time.
3. (a. On behalf of,  b. In default of ) … the state regulation the top manager agrees to
having a subject training students to be an entrepreneur.
4. The assessment will be done on paper … (a. as well as,   b. in the form of) on
computer

How are your answers? Can you explain your choice for each number?

WHILST LEARNING

You may be confused about the grammatical term for the answers of those four numbers
above! Therefore it is necessary for you to open this link:
And learn about it.

Having learnt what circumstances are, now try doing these exercises!

 Choose the correct circumstance for each sentence below!

In my opinion,   similarly,   instead of internet,   for her,   for the purpose of their social
activity,   To my mind,   at all events,   for 36 seconds,   outside China,    for a such a long
time,   in spite of a little money,   with her book,   in the new hair style,   at this time
tomorrow,   in the form of a debate,   about her failure

1. My husband designed the gazebo … to the one in Japan.

2. He looks fashionable….
3. Never think that I speak…, even I don’t know her.
4. This amazing old woman has been 100, but she is able to run 100 meters…
5. She ran away from his crazy husband….
6. No one will be interested….
7. … joining internship program gives a lot of experiences.
8. The Chinese products are sold out fast…
9. His lecture is often delivered…
10. I like getting knowledge from books….
11. She doesn’t want to think … anymore as she wants to step forward.
12. … students’ low interest on reading correlates to their parents’ literacy.
13. As she is always …, she never feels annoyed at waiting….
14. The manager will be convenient….
15. Those teenagers are here….

 Rewrite the sentences into the one with proper circumstance! You should consult a
dictionary to have the proper phrase or you may use the phrases on the table you have
learnt.

e.g. – Since she was intimidated to gain the fame, she reported fake news.

Owing to the instant fame, she reported fake news.

They need more examples to make your explanation clearer.

Please, make your explanation clearer with some more examples.

1. We are teaching these children how to manage the task in order that they care about
their environment.
2. Although those dancers are deaf, they are able to perform their dance well.
3. The most remote village we ever visited was about 30 kilometers from the main route.
4. Her charming bodyguard always accompanies her wherever she goes.
5. Her expertise is public speaking, so she will become the representative of our
company in that forum.
6. The manager’s idea is always out of the box, so the customers are never bored to our
services.
7. Please, make a backup copy for each file to anticipate the broken computer or hacked
system.
 8. Desy’s opinion is correct. We had better let everyone show their creativity.
9. Here is the sharpest knife. You can use it to have the thin meat slices.
10. It is hard to make both sides reconcile after the contestation as far as one of them
doesn’t want to admit his being lost.
11. There is another alternative for dieting. That is having physical exercise.
12. This is Friday. The technicians will be checking all of the computers.
13. How he solved the problems is the same as what his father did.
14. He got these trophies when he was at senior high school.
15. Some experts say that the elderly should balance their need of water in their body.

In this second activity, you are to review the Recount text on historical events.

Read this short history of the rise of the state in Indonesia carefully while noting the
important events in time sequence.

THE RISE OF THE STATE

The first eight centuries of the Current Era provide only fragmentary evidence about the
nature of Indonesian societies. What is clear is that this was the time that the first states—as
opposed to societies or communities—started to emerge in the archipelago, and that trade was
a driving force in this development.

It is impossible to say with any certainty just when Indonesians first became involved in trade
with peoples outside their local regions, whether in other parts of the archipelago or beyond.
Certainly we have no extant records from Indonesia itself which would help resolve this
problem. Evidence from the countries with which Indonesia traded, however, especially
China, suggests that perhaps as far back as 500 BCE at least some of the ports on Java’s north
coast were routinely trading with mainland Southeast Asia, south China and the east coast of
the Indian peninsula. This trade involved the export of Javanese products such as rice, but
also the spices and sandalwoods of eastern Indonesia, which suggests that there were both
intra-regional and international trading linkages in operation in which the Javanese ports
participated.

By the first century BCE, clear evidence exists of the extent of the region’s participation in
international trade. The emperors of Rome began to receive cloves from the Maluku region of
eastern Indonesia, sandalwood sent west from Indian ports and timber that might have
originated in Nusa Tenggara Timor (Lesser Sunda Islands). In his Natural History, the
Roman historian Pliny the Elder suggests that Indonesian outrigger-equipped boats might
have been trading with the east coast of Africa by the first century CE. This suggestion is
strengthened by the fact that the island of Madagascar, off the African east coast, was settled
at least as early as 700 CE by peoples speaking a language which originated in southwest
Kalimantan. By the first century CE Java was also tied-in to the trade route that linked China
to the Roman empire in the Mediterranean, a truly international network.

Starting in about the fourth century CE, the region’s international trade began to experience a
modest, but in historical terms important, expansion. In part this expansion was directed
westward across the Bay of Bengal, as the ports on the east coast of the Indian peninsula
sought to make up for the loss of trade from the Roman empire, now in decline, by trading
with southeast and east Asia. And in part the expansion was northward, to southern China,
where the breakdown of the Western Chin empire in the fourth century meant that the
southern Chinese states no longer had access to the Central Asian trade routes, along which
they had previously secured access to western commodities and to Buddhist holy sites and
teachers in India. The only way to restore access to these goods and locations was via the sea
route south around the southeastern extremity of the Asian mainland and then north and west
to India.

While this sea passage had been known to traders for centuries, it had a reputation for being
very dangerous: ships that ventured this way ran the risk of attack by pirates. So long as the
potential for trade along the route was not particularly great, nobody was going to make much
of an effort to bring it under control. By the early fifth century, though, a growing volume of
trade between China and Japan on the one hand, south and west Asia and Europe on the
other, was passing through the Straits of Melaka. The Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian (Fa
Hsien) passed along this route in 414 on his return to China after spending some years in
India studying Buddhism and collecting Buddhist texts. A number of small states grew up in
the region, seeking to participate in the seaborne trade by offering services ranging from
supplying ships with food and water to protection from raids by pirates—though often they
were the pirates themselves.

Many of the goods that moved along this trade route were those that had earlier travelled
overland—with one very important difference. Along the overland route, the Chinese had
previously imported a variety of goods from western Asia, goods generically referred to as
‘Persian’. These included fumigants, perfumed woods, and gums and A Short History of
Indonesia resins. Chinese trade records of the time show that these products continued to be
received, via southeast Asia. However, careful analysis of these records, and of remnants of
the goods themselves, shows clearly that many of the original Persian items had been
replaced by goods from the Indonesian archipelago. Just when this substitution began is not
known, but it seems to have become well established by about the seventh century.

By this time the Indonesian ports were experiencing their first international trade boom,
boosted not only by the expanding trade with China but also by increasing Arab demand for
Indonesian products, especially spices from the Maluku islands such as cloves, nutmeg and
mace, and increasing Indonesian demand for exports from south Asia, such as cotton cloth.

Until quite recently it was generally believed that Indonesian participation in the commercial
shipping now passing through the archipelago was limited: that the main carriers of cargoes
were foreign ships, crewed by foreigners, primarily Indians or perhaps Arabs. More recent
research has established that this picture was inaccurate, and that Indonesians were active
both as builders of substantial ships, and as their crews, in the early years of the Current Era.
One Chinese document, for instance, dated to the third century CE, says of boats from the
region that ‘the large ones are more than fifty meters in length and stand out from the water
four to five meters… They carry from six to seven hundred persons, with 10,000 bushels of
cargo [c. 6000 tons deadweight]’.

Not just trade goods passed along these trade routes: information and ideas came too. Of
particular importance were religious ideas and philosophies, and their allied cultural
attributes. This was the time that states influenced by the Hindu and Buddhist cultures of
India were beginning to appear in Southeast Asia, both on the mainland and in the
archipelago. Buddhist texts dated to the fifth century CE and clearly inspired by Indian
thinking have been found in west Kalimantan and Brunei, and in west Java. Chinese records
of this time, such as the reports of travelers who had visited the region, and of embassies
from the region which had visited China, noted that many local rulers seemed to have been
influenced by Indian religious cultures. By the seventh century these ideas were well
established in the western and central parts of the archipelago.

The question of just how Hindu and Buddhist culture first came to the archipelago has
attracted the attention of scholars for well over a century. At first the general feeling was that
Indians must have colonized at least some of the Indonesian islands and in this way
transplanted their cultural ideas. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the
continued absence of any persuasive evidence to support this theory led to its rejection by
most scholars.

The locus of explanatory emphasis then shifted to trade: it came to be argued that as
Indonesia was drawn further and further into trading relationships with India, so Indian
traders came to the archipelago, settled, and in so doing transmitted Indian cultural ideas to
local peoples. Indian traders did indeed settle in the archipelago, often in specific sections of
port cities set aside for them—but as traders did not carry much status in Indian society, and
were unlikely to have had the education necessary to acquire the sophisticated religious,
scientific and literary ideas that were ultimately to be adopted by Indonesians, this view also
lost favour with scholars.

The Indians who would have had access to this level of education were the priests or
Brahmins, the caste at the top of the status hierarchy. Thus the view was formed that
Brahmins might have come to Indonesia, perhaps at the invitation of local rulers, to teach
about their culture. The religious and scientific knowledge of these scholar-priests would
have been very useful in consolidating these local states and raising both their status and that
of their rulers, who might first have heard about Indian culture, in rudimentary form, from the
traders.

In the absence of specific evidence, however, the other way of looking at this question is to
suggest that it might not have been a case of Indians, of one caste or another, bringing
elements of their culture A Short History of Indonesia to Indonesia, but of Indonesians, who
certainly had the technology and the skills to sail across the Bay of Bengal, going to India and
selectively adopting Indian ideas.

Whichever explanation is preferred, it is likely that a key element of the transmission of

Indian-derived ideas to Southeast Asia came from the region itself, and not from India.

The first quasi- or proto-states in Indonesia—‘state’ here meaning a political institution

standing above local communities, with a ruler owed allegiance by its members, with a
coherent set of laws—probably emerged in Java around the fourth or fifth centuries of the
Current Era. We know of a state called Tarumanegara, ruled at one time by a king called
Purnavarman, which was located in present-day west Java in that period. Its centre or capital
might have been located around Tanjung Priok, today the port of Jakarta, or at a site
reasonably close by. Its rulers were Hindus, though apparently people of fairly eclectic
beliefs. Contemporaneous Sanskrit language inscriptions found in Kalimantan also refer to a
state called Kutei on the Mahakam river.

By the seventh century, according to Chinese sources, there were two states in particular in
the archipelago that were dominant: Ho-ling in Java and Srivijaya in Sumatera.
(Source : A Short History of Indonesia by Colin Brown, 2003)

VOCABULARY PRACTICE

Find 10 verbs, 10 adjectives, 10 nouns and 10 adverbs from the article. Change each of them
into another part of speech.

e.g.     certainty (n) – certain (adj.)

suggest (v) – suggestion (n)

historical (adj.) – history (n)

truly (adv.) – true (adj.)

ACTIVITY THREE

To get more understanding on a Recount text, practice writing it. Therefore, use your notes
on the article above to summarize it.

Closing

TO REVIEW ALL MATERIALS,

1. mention the examples of circumstance and put them in sentences

2. mention the social function and generic structure of Recount text

CHECK WHETHER YOU HAVE UNDERSTOOD THE MATERIALS!

SELF-REFLECTION ON THE MASTERY OF MATERIALS

No Questions Yes No
1. Can you recognize types of circumstance?
2. Can you apply circumstances in sentences?
3. Can you recognize a Recount text?
4. Can you write a recount text?