Англійська

Unit 1

2.

Mr. Peters'. Excuse me, are you Mr. Russell Brandon?

Mr. Brandon: Yes, I am.

Mr. Peters'. May I introduce myself? I’m a member of the organising committee. My name’s Jack Peters.

Mr. Brandon: Nice to meet you.

3.

Exercise 8.

In groups, introduce:

-your friend to your parents,

-your husband or wife to an old friend of yours,

-me to your sister,

-yourself to the teacher or professor.

Exercise 9.

Read and listen to the following dialogue and describe Betsy’s appearance:

A:Will you help me, my dear?

N:With pleasure.

A:You see, my cousin Betsy is coming today, but I can’t meet her at the station as I have a meeting after class.

N:But how can I recognise her?

A:It’s quite easy. She’s just like her mother.

N:That’s nice, but unfortunately I don’t know her mother.

A:Oh, really? That’s a pity. What shall I do then?

N:Well, try to describe her. What does she look like?

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Family Life

A : She’s sixteen, but I think she looks older, as she is rather tall for her age.

N : Hair?

A:Fair and plaited. She has a high forehead, large grey eyes, dark pencilled eyebrows and a straight nose.

N:I’m afraid that isn’t enough. There’ll be at least a dozen girls like that at the station.

A:You think so? - Oh, yes. She’s got a mole on her left cheek.

N: That will definitely help me. Go to your meeting and don’t worry. I’ll meet your cousin and see her home.

Exercise 10.

Describe a fellow-student or afriend, using the new words and expressions given below:

1.He/she is (rather) attractive, plain, good-looking, tall, short, thin, stout, near­ sighted, long-sighted, slim, has long legs, is broad-shouldered, dark-eyed, darkskinned.

2.His/her hair is fair, dark, auburn, grey, curly, straight, short, long, thin, thick, wavy.

3.He/she parts his/ her hair in the middle, on the right/left, wears his/her hair combed back, done in a knot, in plaits.

4.He/she has an oval/round/square-shaped face.

5.His/her eyes are dark, blue, hazel, grey, brown, greenish, light, close-set, deep-set.

6.His/her nose is straight, flat, (quite) small/large.

Exercise 11.

Work in pairs. Find out about your friend's family and then give a five minute talk about them

Exercise 12.

Give a short presentation about how yourfamily spend their spare time.

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Exercise 2.

Practise reading the text aloud.

Exercise 3.

Refer to the list of key words and expressions above and examine the examples of their use in the text.

Exercise 4.

Re-arrange the jumbled sentences toform a coherent text:

a)Many English houses do not have double glazing.

b)A few women have a live-in help, an au pair girl, who comesfrom abroad for six months to a year to learn English.

c)The front door of a typical English house opens into a hallway.

d)There is a back door which opens onto the garden or the passage running along the side of the house.

e)An English house usually has two floors and no cellar.

f)More and more people are putting central heating in to replace electric and gas fires.

g)There is a small garden at the front and a larger one at the backof the house where most people like to spend their spare time.

h)The bedrooms are usually upstairs.

i)Downstairs there are usually two medium-sized living rooms and a kitchen,

j)Many people do repairs on the house themselves.

k)Most British houses have three bedrooms, but sometimes four, five or (occasionally) even more.

Exercise 5.

Write a summary of the text in approximately 200 words.

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Unit 1

Exercise 6.

to the refrigerator and from the fridge to the ... cooker.

Of course, this is a temporary arrangement. But we were ... to find this flat at a time

Text 2. NICK’S FAMILY

Exercise 7.

Practise reading the following text aloud:

On quiet Saturday evenings Nick likes his family to gather in the living room. He is 48, a married man with two children and they are a happy family. Nick’s wife Natalia is three years younger than him. Nick teaches English at Lviv Polytechnic University and Natalia has a part-time job at a secondary school, teaching history. Their mothertongue is Ukrainian. They can also speak fluent Russian and a little Polish. Sometimes Nick speaks English to his children, who enjoy having small secrets from their mum, as she speaks only German. The children are good at languages. Bohdan, who is 22, is a student of the Faculty of International Relations at Ivan Franko University. His am­ bition is to becomean ambassador. He is smart and hard-working and his dreams may very well come true. Recently he applied for a scholarship at the University of Shef­

field. Studies abroad would greatly contribute to the success of his future career.

His sister Zoriana, who is 17, thinks Bohdan is too serious. This year she is leaving school and is thinking of an artistic career as a fashion designer. She is quite pretty with long dark hair and blue eyes. She used to dream of becoming a top model, but growing older she has changed her mind and now she wants to study at the Art Academy. She always makes birthday presents

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Family Life

for her family herself and, in general, it’s their family tradition to exchange hand-made birthday presents, as well as to celebrate birthdays in their country cottage not far from Lviv. Hiking is something they all enjoy together. Sometimes they invite their friends to stay with them in their cottage.

At weekends the chidren enjoy going to parties, concerts or discos but their parents are happiest when they all get together in their living room.

Glossary

Exercise 8.

Divide the text into logical parts and suggest a subtitle for each of them.

Exercise 9.

Refer to the list of key words and expressions above and examine the examples of their use in the text.

Exercise 10.

Rearrange the following jumbled sentences to form a coherent text:

a)It has an oak table against one wall, an oak sideboard against another, and chairs to match - all clearly bought as a set.

b)Steve takes a great pride in it, as do most people in England who have their own garden.

c)Steve Barnes is a mechanic repairing bicycles.

d)Just a double bed and a child’s bed in the parents’ room and one large bed in the second room where the other two children sleep.

e)The two bedrooms are upstairs.

f)Two modem armchairs stand on either side of the open fireplace.

g)He lives with his family, his wife and three children,in Birmingham.

h)Then comes the-living-room, which is rather large.

i)The family owns an old house, which stands a little way back from the road and has a small garden.

j)The well-planned kitchen is also on the ground floor.

k)On entering the house, one can see the tiny hall and the neat front room which is small and rather overcrowded with furniture.

1)Nothing very special about them.

Exercise 11.

Write a summary o f the text in approximately 180 words.

Exercise 12.

Give an oral summary of the text.

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Family Life

Text 2. TALKING TO MY FATHER

Knowing that I was coming, he had left the door unlocked, so I was able tolwalk in and go straight through the house into the garden where I knew I would find him on such a fine, early October morning. He was standing on the lawn with his back to me looking up at the sky. Being rather deaf, he hadn’t heard me coming. I was impressed, as usual, by his extraordinarily upright figure. For a man of nearly 87 he was in excel­ lent health.

“Hello! Admiring your jungle? ”

He turned and laughed, and then shook his head.

“It’s such a mess - but what can I do? I suppose I ought to move to a smaller house.” “Nonsense! You’d hate it. Anyway, I like jungles.”

We walked down the garden together.

“Look at the chestnut tree. All the leaves will be falling soon. Then I’ll have to rake them up.”

“Do you remember?” I said. “It was that conker that Claire planted just after we came here. Just look how it’s grown! But then it was a long time ago - 1955!”

“ 1955. Coming here - to Stratford-upon-Avon - that was a good move, especially for you.”

“That’s when my theatre craze started. And it was a good move for you, too,” I re­ minded him.

“Yes. All those job interviews I went to - and all of them failures - until 1955. All because of the war.”

My father had been a pacifist during the war. At Cambridge, where he studied his­ tory, he had spent most of his time rowing and developing his political convictions which were mainly centred on a dislike of the Conservative government and an abso­ lute commitment to non-aggression. He had spent some months in Germany in the ‘30s and had gone rowing with some young German men. He often wonders what became of them. My father doesn’t like to make himself conspicuous and it must have been hard for him to bear the hatred and contempt of most people at that time and to face hostile interview panels w*ho would not employ him because he had no war record.

He had been librarian of the Stratford-upon-Avon Public Library, a job greatly infe­ rior to his abilities but one which in many ways suited his retiring nature.

“I remember going down to the library with you on a Friday evening,” I said. “I loved it then. It was before the improvements to the building. It was wonderfully dark and dusty with great, tall bookshelves and books with dark cloth covers.”

I have always enjoyed things that are old and faded and gently decaying, like the garden in autumn. On those evenings in the library in the late fifties I asked my father what I should read. He suggested Dickens’ “David Copperfield”. I took it off the shelf and settled down to read it. The first paragraph was difficult and I nearly put it back. Then I decided to ignore the problem and went on to the second paragraph. From that point the magic began to work and has never stopped.

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Unit 1

We walked up to the top of the garden where a huge and ancient pear tree stood, its branches arching to the ground.

“It still produces so much!” he said. “Your mother used to invite all her friends to take them away in baskets and buckets!”

My mother died of a rare and very swift disease four years ago. She never grew old, which maybfe was a blessing. My father received nearly a hundred letters of condo­ lence from her friends, none of whom ever come to visit him now.

“You know,” he said, proudly. “I have boxes and boxes of stewed pears in my freezer which should last the winter!”

For a man who never cooked anything while his wife was alive, he has now found that he can stew fruit and make soup for himself. He copes quite well on his own, having someone who comes once a week to clean the house and another woman who irons his shirts.

I looked at the fence at the bottom of the garden and the houses beyond.

“Do you remember the fields that were there when we first came?” I asked him. “Yes. And that huge elm in the middle of the field just behind here.”

“We used to play there when they’d cut the com. I remember taking Jess there one day to teach her the story of “Twelfth Night” because we were all going to the theatre to see it that evening. I made her climb the tree and sit on a branch while I told her. I was afraid she’d be bored and run away.”

He laughed. “What a bully you were!” he said.

We walked back towards the house as the clouds were beginning to gather.

“I’ve been thinking, you know, about the car,” he said, sighing. “Last year, you re­ member, I drove down to the Forest of Dean. I stayed in a lovely guest house and walked for miles in the forest. But I don’t think I could do it again. I really must start thinking about giving up the car. It will be very hard but I ought to do it.”

“Yes, it will be hard. But don’t worry - I’ll take you somewhere next spring. We’ll make some plans.” I tried to get him to think of other things instead of the diminishing horizons of old age. “But tell me - how’s the writing going?”

In the last few years he has been writing short essays on the development of his ideas about politics, history, and music. He’s struggling to write now about his beliefs. Having no religious faith he is bravely trying to define his deeper purposes. Occasion­ ally in these essays he makes brief references to my mother and us, his three daugh­ ters. But like many Englishmen he prefers to be silent about the things that are clearly most important to him.

“Ah yes, I thought - perhaps something on philosophy next. I need to talk to Matteo” Matteo is my son who is a philosophy student. “I want him to advise me on books. I know very little about contemporary philosophical ideas. It might be good to get into that. You know, I tried going to an evening class last week. The subject was Darwin and the debate about science and religion. But nobody else turned up. I can’t imagine why.”

We had reached the house. While my father went in, I turned to look back at the garden and to remember the day in 1955 when we arrived and I saw it for the first

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Family Life

time, so much bigger than the old garden, such a perfect place to play, to sit out under the trees with a book, to have tea under the pear tree and later to watch my son crawl­ ing on the lawn as a baby, to hold family reunions, to see the crocuses coming out even on the day my mother died and to walk in now with my father, remembering and cele­ brating.

Text 3. NINETIES WOMEN

Jill gave a sigh of relief as she waved to the child at the window and then turned away. Other mothers she knew were tormented by guilt when they left their children at school or play group for the first time. “When I got home after leaving her there,” one of them had said to her, “and saw her toys scattered on the floor and her unmade bed, I felt utterly criminal!”

Jill didn’t feel guilty at all. She hadn’t felt so free since she left university several years ago now. She and Brian had met in their first year at London University and everything had fallen quite naturally into place. It had been natural to join the univer­ sity drama society, to take a student production to the Edinburgh Festival, to hitchhike round Scotland when the show was over and to move in together at the beginning of the next academic year. When they had got their degrees Brian had done an Arts Ad­ ministration course and Jill had found a small part in a West End production. After that Brian’s career had flourished while Jill’s had been stillborn, as is the way of these things in the precarious world of the theatre. It had seemed a good time to have children and two little girls had arrived in rapid succession.

“But now,” said Jill to her friend, Kay, as they sat in Kay’s kitchen on the first, bright day of Jill’s new life, “things are going to change. What now?”

“The theatre again?” Kay saw Jill’s frown and tried again. “Teaching? Managing Director of Marks and Spencer? Check-out girl in Sainsbury’s? Prime Minister? What is a highly intelligent young mother of two not capable of, especially when she is am­ bitious, imaginative and has the potential to spend a very large salary?”

Jill glowed as she felt her horizons expand.

“Yes, now I’ve ofteji thought I’d rather like to go into politics. My acting experi­ ence could be very useful.”

“Do they allow breast-feeding in the House of Commons?” asked Kay. “You did say you’d like two more children.”

“I could bring in a bill during the first session.”

“Your children would be drawing their pensions before it got through. What about teaching?”

“Must I?” Jill looked agonised.

“Oh, no. It would be dreadful, wouldn’t it? Just think - all those kids leaving school every year and you never leaving at all! Like being in purgatory - never daring to hope that you’d be let out.”

The horror of it silenced them for a moment until they managed to put it behind them.

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