Сборник адаптированных текстов по английскому языку Lesson 1 We learn English

Tasmania, the island south of Australia, is small. It is the same size as England. It is also very different from the other states. There are no deserts in Tasmania. It often rains, both in winter and summer. Only a half of million people live in Tasmania, and a large part of the island is still covered with wild, beautiful wild forests. These forests are full if wonderful flowers and interesting animals.

Sydney is the best known place in New South Wales. In fact, it’s the best known place in Australia. But New South Wales has more than cities. There are, for example, the Blue Mountains. They are covered with forests of blue coloured eucalyptus trees. The air above the forest contains millions of microscopic drops of eucalyptus oil. When the sun shines, the air of the Blue Mountains is a real, beautiful blue.

Less then a hundred years ago, these were nothing expert sheep in Canberra. But then Australians decided to build a capital city. The Work began in 1913. Now, Canberra is an international city, full of diplomats and government offices. It’s a beautiful place, with parks, lakes, big open streets and fine buildings.

Australia is sometimes called “the lucky country”. One reason is the wonderful riches under the earth: gold, silver, iron, coal and many precious metals. The Bass Strait, of the coast of Victoria, has been one of the country’s biggest oil fields for many years.

South Australia is the driest of all the states, but it does have Murray River. The river brings greenness and life to the southeast corner. In the early of Australian history, the Murray River was South Australia’s main road. Before real roads and railways came, the river carried people and goods from the east up into the country. Some towns on the Murray still keep the old river boats, and visitors can ride on them.

There are two kinds of gold in Western Australia. First, there’s real kind – the kind that comes out of the ground. Gold was found in Kalogeria in 1893, and the “Golden Mile” was for a time the most expensive piece of land in the world. Kalogeria still exports some gold, but the new gold of Western Australia is wheat. Big farms grow millions of tons of wheat every year, and wheat has become Australia’s second biggest export.

Australia is the only country in the world that is also a continent. It is the sixth large country and the smallest continent. Australia lies between the South Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. It is situated about 11 000 km southwest of North America and about 8 200 km southeast of Mainland Asia. The name of the country comes from Latin word «australis» which mean southern. The country’s official name is Commonwealth of Australia.

The Commonwealth of Australia is a federation of states. Australia has six states – New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia. Each state has its government. Australia has two territories – the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. The capital of the country is Canberra.

Australia is a constitutional monarchy like Great Britain. The nation is administered under written constitution. The British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, is also queen of Australia and country’s head of state. But the queen has little power in the Australian government. She serves mainly as a symbol of long historical tie between Great Britain and Australia. Australia is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations which is an association formed by Britain and some of its former colonies.

Australia is one of the world’s developed countries. Australia has modern factories, highly productive mines and farms, and busy cities. It is the world’s leading producer of wool and bauxite (the ore from which aluminum is made). It also produces and exports large amounts of other minerals and farm goods. Income from the export enables Australians to have high standard of living. The most important trading partners of Australia are Japan and the United States.

Kazakhstan is the country where many nations live in peace.

You can find different kinds of treasures: rare beautiful animals, plants, minerals - on the endless space of our country.

There are a lot of cities in Kazakhstan which are as beautiful as the best cities of Europe and Asia such as Astana, Almaty, Pavlodar and others.

Before going to school, children attend kindergartens until they are six or seven. Compulsory education begins in our country at the age of seven, when children go to primary school.

Examinations are taken at the end of the 9-th and the 11-th forms.

There are also specialized art, music, ballet and sport schools for gifted children and special schools for handicapped children.

At last in the forties of the XII century Kazakh lands were included in the Gold Horde.

The restoration of the farms economy and the reconstruction of the cities began in the XII-XIV centuries.

The preconditions for the formation of Kazakh nationality out of different Turkic tribes had appeared by the XV century.

At the end of the XV century Kazakh Khanate was formed. It consisted of three juzes - the Older, the Middle and the Younger.

In the XVII-XIX centuries Kazakh juzes gradually became a part of the Russian Empire.

In the XIX century Kazakh people led by great Kazakh khans and batyrs (Abylai Kabanbai, Abulkhair and others) won the victory over the Djungar khanate.

After the October Revolution in 1917 Kazakhstan was called Kaz. ASSR, and in 1936 entered the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as Kaz. SSR.

Houses are buildings. Schools and clubs are buildings, too. A shop is a building or a part of a building.

When there are many houses and other buildings together, they make a town. A city is a very big town.

When there are few houses and other buildings together, they make a village.

Cities, towns and villages have names.

Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Minsk, London, Cambridge, Oxford, etc. are the names of cities.

Cities, towns and villages have streets between their build­ings, that is, the buildings are on each side of a street. On each side of the street, in front of the buildings there is a pavement. Between the pavements there is the road. People walk on the pavements, buses and cars drive on the roads.

We can get from one place to another by different means of communication. We can go by train, by airplane (or plane), by ship, by bus, by car, etc.

How can we get from Moscow to Vladivostok? We can get there either by train or by airplane. If we go by train it takes us about seven days. If we go by airplane it takes us about 12 hours only.

How can we get to the nearest town? We can get there either by bus or by train.

How can we get from one village to another? We usually use a bicycle, a motor-cycle or a bus to get from one village to an­other.

MY TRIP TO GRANDPARENTS

I live in the village Olkhovka with my parents. My grand-parents live in another place far from here.

Last summer I went to the town Usolye where my grand­parents live. It is a very nice place. The town stands on the big river Kama. I could go there either by train or by ship. I like to go by ship. So I had to get to the river first by train and then the ship took me down the river to the town. It took me three days to get there. The weather was fine all the time. It was so pleasant to go by ship.
Lesson 19 Mass Media
MASS MEDIA

Mass media (that is the press, the radio and television) play an important role in the life of society. They inform, educate and entertain people. They also influence the way people look at the events and sometimes make them change their views.

Millions of people watch TV and read newspapers in their spare time. People listen to the radio while driving a car. On the radio one can hear music, plays, news and various discussions of current events. Lots of radio or TV games and films attract large audience.

Newspapers give more detailed reviews of political life, culture and sports. Basically they are read by the people who are subscribers and those who are interested in politics.

There is a lot of advertising in mass media. Many TV channels, radio stations and newspapers are owned by different corporations. The owners can advertise what­ever they choose.

But we cannot say that mass media do not try to raise the cultural level of people or to develop their tastes. Mass media bring to millions of homes not only entertainment and news but also cultural and educational programs.

There are a great number of TV channels, cable TV, sat­ellite TV and lots of radio stations and newspapers now.
Lesson 20 My future profession

I want to be programmer.

I want to become a computer programmer. I am interested in computers. It is a whole new world. Many people continue careers of their parents or grand parents but it is not the case with me. Want mother is a teacher and my father is a doctor. But I don’t want to be neither a teacher nor a doctor. My hobby is computer games and computer programming. I have a computer at home and can spend hours working at it. It is much easier to do things on computer, for example to write a composition. You can change the text as many times as you want and you don’t need to rewrite everything if you changed something.

I think that the profession of programmer can give many opportunities. Computers are the most rapidly changing sphere of modern technology. We are living in the age of information. And I think that the future is just filled with computers. Today, in England people can work, go shopping or even go on dates sitting at their computers. At present computers are commonly used in our life. Most firms cannot exist without them. They make work easier for people because they have gigantic memories and work at enormous speeds. It is not difficult to work with a computer and everybody can do it. If you want to have a good job now you should be able to work with a word processor and computer programs.

MARIA CURIE
Maria Curie was born in 1867. Her father was a teacher of science and mathematic.
a school in the town, and from him little Maria Sklodovskaya —which was her Polish name — learnt her first in science. Maria wanted to study at the Sorbonne in Parts, arid after many years of waiting, she finally left her native land for Paris in 1891.

In Paris Maria began a course of hard study and simple liv­ing. She determined to work for two Master's degrees — one in physics, the other in mathematics. So she had to work twice as hard as any other student. Yet she did not have enough mon­ey to live on, and soon her strength was weakened, because she had no proper food and warmth. She lived in a small room in the poorest part of Paris. Night after night, after her hard day's work at the University, she would climb to her poorly furnished room and work at her books for hours. Her meals were poor, sometimes no more than a few cherries, which she ate as she studied. Though she was often weak and ill under this hard life, she worked in this way for four years. Nothing could turn her from the way she had chosen.

Among the many scientists Maria met and worked with in Paris was one — Pierre Curie. Pierre Curie, born in 1859 in Paris, was the son of a doctor, and from his childhood he was interested in science.

At sixteen he was a Bachelor of Science, and he took his Master's degree in physics when he was eighteen. When he met Maria Sklodovskaya he was thirty-five years old and was already famous in Europe for his discoveries in magnetism. But in spite of the honor he had brought to France by his discoveries, the French Government could only give him a very small salary, and the University of Paris refused him a laboratory of his own for his research work.

Pierre Curie and Maria Sklodovskaya loved science more than anything else. Very soon they became the closest friends. They always worked together and discussed the many problems of their work. After a little more than a year they fell in love with each other, and in 1895 Maria Sklodovskaya became Madame Curie.

By this time Maria Curie had got her Master's degree in physics and mathematics, and was busy with research on steel. She now wanted to get a Doctor's degree.

For some time Pierre and Maria Curie were interested in the work of a French scientist named Becquerel. There is met­al called uranium which, as Becquerel discovered, emits rays very much like X-rays. These rays But Maria Curie had to make the best of it. Soon she discovered that the mysterious rays of uranium were much more peculiar than she believed. They were like no other known rays.

Maria Curie began to examine every known chemical body. After repeating her experiments time after time she found that mineral called pitchblende emitted much more powerful rays than any she had found.

As Maria Curie had examined every known chemical ele­ment and none of them had emitted such powerful rays as pitch­blende, she could only decide that this mineral must contain some new element. Here was a mystery. Scientists had said that every element was already known to them. But all Maria Curie's experiments proved one thing. Pitchblende must contain some new and unknown element. There was no other explana­tion for the powerful rays which it emitted. Scientists call the property of giving out such rays 'radio-activity', and Madame Curie decided to call the new element 'radium', because it was more strongly radio-active than any known metal.

Madame Curie-Sklodovskaya died in 1934. She was the lead­ing woman scientist, the greatest woman of her time and was the first person who received the Nobel Prize twice.

Read the text and write out the sentences you think the most important.

The spaceship flew at the speed of 300 miles a minute. That's six times faster than man ever traveled before. His flight lasted 108 minutes, but a circuit round the Earth took 89 minutes.

It was a brilliant achievement on the part of our sci­entists and technologists, and on the part of Yuri Gagarin who risked his life to achieve a victory for his country and mankind.

This is what Yuri Gagarin said at his press conference: "On my flight the 'day' side of the Earth was clearly seen: the con­tinents, islands, seas, and big rivers. Flying over the land I could clearly see the big squares of fields, and it was possible to distinguish which was meadow and which was forest. I could not see as well as from an airplane, but very, very well though

I saw for the first time with my own eyes the Earth's spher­ical shape I must say that the view of the horizon is very beau­tiful.

Objects swam in the cabin. During the irt of weightlessness, I ate and drank, and everything was the same as on the Earth. My handwriting did not change, though my hand was weightless but I had to hold my notebook or it would have floated away

The passage back from weightlessness to the force of gravi­ty happened smoothly Arms and legs feel the same as during weightlessness, but now they have weight

I ceased to be suspended over the chair, and then I sat in it.

When I returned to the Earth I was full of joy.