If you are invited to an English home, at five o’clock in the morning you get a cup of tea.
When you are disturbed in your sweetest sleep you must not say: “Madam, I believe you are a cruel person who deserves to be shot”. On the contrary, you have to declare with your best five o’clock smile” “Thank you so much. I do adore a cup of early morning tea , especially early in the morning.” If they leave you alone with the liquid, you may pour it down the washbasin.
Then you have tea for breakfast, then you have tea at eleven o’clock in the morning, then after lunch; then you have tea for tea; then after supper; and again at eleven o’clock at night.
You must not refuse any additional cups of tea under the following circumstances: if it is hot; if it is cold; if you are tired; if anybody thinks that you might be tired; if you are nervous; if you are gay; before you go out; if you are out; if you have just returned home; if you feel like it; if you do not feel like it; if you have had no tea for some time; if you have just had a cup.
(After G. Mikes)
A List of Do’s and Don’t s
Sit facing the table, don’t sit sideways. Keep your feet under the table, don’t stretch them all the way.
After stirring your tea remove the spoon and place it on the saucer.
Don’t use the spoon for what can be eaten with a fork.
When eating stewed fruit use your spoon to put the stones on your saucer.
Don’t put your knife into your mouth.
Vegetables, potatoes, macaroni are placed on your fork with the help of your knife.
Cut your meat into small pieces that can be chewed with ease. Cut off one piece at a time.
If your food is too hot don’t blow on it as though you were trying to start a campfire on a damp night.
Your spoon, knife and fork are meant to eat with, they are not drumsticks and should not be banged against your plate.
Try to make as little noise as possible when eating.
Don’t sip your soup as though you wanted the whole house to hear.
Don’t shovel food into your mouth. Take small pieces.
Don’t talk with your mouth full. First chew and then swallow.
Don’t put your elbows on the table while eating.
Don’t pick your teeth in company after the meal even if tooth-picks are provided for the purpose.
And, finally, don’t forget to say “thank you” for every favor or kindness.
Read the situations below and decide if an apology is necessary. If so, who should apology?
You arrive ten minutes late for your class.
You lose a friend’s book.
You’ve arranged to meet a friend but you have to cancel.
You break a friend’s cup or vase.
The sales clerk gives you the wrong change.
You have to leave your class early.
Your father forgot your birthday.
You arrive ten minutes late for a social arrangement with friends.
Discuss the following ideas:
1. What values are the most important to you and your family? Why?
2. What values are the most important to you as you make daily discussions?
3. What values are the most important to you at this time in your life? Why?
Comment these proverbs:
Like mother, like daughter.
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
Live and let live.
Once bitten, twice shy.
Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.
Danger foreseen is half avoided.
As a man sows so shall he reap.
Every man has a fool in his sleeve..
Experience is the mother of wisdom.
When a thing is done advice comes too late.
What is done cannot be undone.
Many men, many minds.
Love is blind.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
Thanksgiving Day
Thanksgiving Day is celebrated only in the United States on the last Thursday in November. The day’s most important event is the traditional midday meal. Favorite thanksgiving food is turkey, pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes and other home-cooked specialties.
Thanksgiving was first celebrated in 1621 by English settlers of the Plymouth colony. The Plymouth colony was founded in 1620 by English settlers who have come to be called Pilgrims. They left their native England and sailed to America on the “Mayflower”. After a two-month voyage they landed at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. During their first winter over half of the settlers died of hunger or from epidemics. But when April came the survivors began their planting, struggling with the rocky soil as they had struggled with the bitter climate. The settlers were taught how to grow maize and other crops by the Native Americans. They had planted corn the Indians showed them how to plant maize and they got a rich harvest in autumn. When they harvested those crops that autumn they knew they had enough to live on through the second winter, and so William Bradford, the Governor of Massachusetts, decided to have a feast of thanksgiving with Native Americans. The colonists decided to make a holiday dinner, their leaders proclaimed “the day of Thanksgiving onto the Lord” for the rich harvest. A national Thanksgiving came only after the foundation of the USA. But it didn’t become an official holiday until 1863 when President Lincoln made his “Thanksgiving Proclamation”.
The people spend Thanksgiving Day with their families. Ever since the Pilgrims gave thanks for their survival in the new land in 1621 Americans have flocked to their churches to add their own prayers for their country and then gone home for the traditional feast.
When is Thanksgiving Day celebrated? 2. What is the most important event of the day? 3. What is the traditional thanksgiving food? 4. When was Thanksgiving Day first celebrated? 5. Who were the Pilgrims? 6. What is the name of the most famous ship in American history? 7. Why did the Pilgrims decide to celebrate their first harvest? 8. When did it become an official holiday?
Put the verbs in brackets into the appropriate form.
Harry and Sheila, a husband and wife are talking.
H: Shall I make the children something to eat?
S: I wouldn’t bother. You know how much they eat when they visit their grandparents.
H: That’s true. If they (eat) all afternoon, they (not want) anything when they get home.
S: Are we going to pick them up soon?
H: No, my parents are bringing them over. We agreed that if I (take) them there, they (bring) them back.
S: Oh good. Well, if we (not collect) them I (go back) upstairs and do a bit more work. I’ve nearly finished that report now. If I (do) another half hour’s work, I (finish) it by the time the children get home.
H: Why do you always have to bring work home with you? If you (not agree) to take on that new job, you (have) much more free time now.
S: Yes, and if I (not take on) that job, we (not have) much money now.
H: That’s true, but I don’t like you working so much.
S: Well, never mind. We’ve got a week’s holiday soon. Just think! In two weeks’ time, we (lie) on a warm sunny beach – that’s if I (can get) the time off work of course.
H: What do you mean, “if”?
S: Well, everything’s very busy at the moment. And if we (get) any more orders, I just (not see) how I can leave the office.
H: What? But that’s ridiculous!
About Friends and Friendship
Text 1
As far as I’m concerned, the first semester away at college is possibly the single worst time to make friends. You’ll make them, but you’ll probably get it all wrong, through no fault of your own, for these are desperate hours.
Here’s desperation; standing in a stadium-like cafeteria, I became convinced that a thousand students busy demolishing the contents of their trays were indifferent to me, and studying me with ill-disguised disdain at the same time. Sitting alone at the table, I see the girl I’d met that morning. I was thrilled to see her. The need for a friend had become violent. Back at the dorm, I told her more about my family peculiarities. All the right sympathetic looks crossed her faсe at all the right moments. I realized that I found a soul mate. But what seemed like two minds mixing and matching on a cosmic plane was actually two lonely freshmen under the influence of unprecedented amounts of caffeine and emotional upheaval. This wasn’t a meeting of souls. This was a talking jag of monumental proportions.
By February, my first friend and I passed each other in the hall with lame, bored smiles, and now I can’t remember her name for the life of me. But that doesn’t make me sad in the least.
Loneliness and the erosion of high school friendships through change and distance leave yawning gaps that beg to be filled. Yet, I never made a real friend by directly applying for the position of candidate or soul mate. I made my best friendships by accident, with instant intimacy marking none of them – it wasn’t mutual loneliness that drew us together.
I met my best friend Jean in a film class when she said Alfred Hitchcock was overrated. I disagreed and we argued out of the building and into a lifelong friendship where we argue still. We became friends without meaning to, and took our intimacy step by step. Deliberate choice, not desperate need, moved us closer. Our friendship is so much apart of us now that it seems unavoidable that we should have become friends. But there was nothing inevitable about it. It’s easy to imagine Jean saying to me in that classroom, “Hitchcock’s hack, you’re a fool, and that’s all I have to say.” But that was not at all she had to say. That is why we’re friends today. We always have more to say.
Friendship’s value wasn’t always clear to me. In the back of my mind, I believed that platonic friendships were a way of marking time until I struck the pay dirt of serious romance. I’d managed to digest many romantic notions by my first year of college, and chief among them was the idea that I’d meet the perfect lover who would be everything to me and make me complete.
Women are friends, I once would have said, when they totally love and support and trust each other, and bare to each other the secrets of their souls, and run to help each other, and tell harsh truths to each other when harsh truths must be told.
I once would have said that a friend is a friend all the way, but now I believe that’s a narrow point of view. For the friendships I have and the friendships I see serve many different functions and, meet different needs and range from those as all – the- way as the friendship of the soul sisters mentioned above to that of the most nonchalant and casual playmates.
Consider these varieties of friendship:
Convenience friends. These are women with whom, if our paths weren’t crossing all the time, we’d have no particular reason to be friends: a next-door neighbor, the mother of one of our children’s closest friends and so on.
Convenience friends are convenient indeed. They will lend us their cups and silverware for a party. They’ll drive our kids to soccer when we’re sick. They’ll take us to pick up our car when we need a lift to the garage. They’ll even take our cats when we go on a vacation. As we will for them.
But we don’t, with convenience friends, ever come too close or tell too much; we maintain our public face and emotional distance.
Special- interest friends. These friendships aren’t intimate, and they needn’t involve kids or silverware or cats. Their value lies in some interest jointly shared. And so we may have an office friend or a yoga friend or a tennis friend or a friend from the Women’s Democratic Club.
My playmate is a shopping friend, a woman of marvelous taste, a woman who knows exactly where to buy what, and furthermore is a woman who always knows beyond a doubt what one ought to be buying.
Historical friends. We all have a friend who has known us since childhood. The years have gone by and we’ve gone separate ways and we’ve little in common now, but we’re still an intimate part of each other’s past.
Crossroads friends. Like historical friends, our crossroads friends are important for what was – for the friendship we shared at a crucial, now past, time of life. A time, perhaps, when we roomed in college together; or worked as eager young singles.
Crossroads friends forge powerful links, links strong enough to endure with much more contact than once-a-year letters at Christmas. And out of respect for those crossroads years, for those dramas and dreams we once shared, we will always be friends.
Men who are friends – I must mention man—woman friendships too. For these friendships can be just as close and as dear as those that we form with women.
6. There are medium friends, and pretty good friends, and very good friends indeed, and these friendships are defined by their level of intimacy. And what we’ll reveal at each of these levels of intimacy is calibrated with care.
Comment the following:
There is one more type of friends –a fair-weather friend. Have you ever met such kind of friends?
What does it mean in Russian? To live in each other’s pocket, to pocket an insult .
Can we associate these expressions with a real friendship? If not, why?
The best of friends, I still believe, totally love and support and trust each other, and bare to each other the secrets of their souls, and run – no question asked – to help each other, and tell harsh truths to each other when they must be told.
But we needn’t agree about everything to tolerate each other’s point of view. To accept without judgment. To give and to take without ever keeping score. And to be there, as I am for them and as they are for me, to comfort our sorrows, to celebrate our joys.
Answer the questions:
How and by what criteria do men (women) choose friends?
What types of friendships do you know?
How do the issues of power and competition effect friendships?
Can frequent disagreement and arguments result in the break of friendship?
Has your friendship ever been affected by financial problems?
Do you think that men and women can be friends?
Can people of different age be friends?
What do you look for in a friend?
Do you think it’s necessary for friends to be on a par financially, professionally, personally and otherwise?
Could you live without friends?
Is it wise to keep making new friends?
Comment on the following quotations:
1. Little friends may prove great friends. (Aesop)
2. Never trust a friend who deserts you in a pinch. (Aesop)
3. Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read .(F.Bacon).
4. You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by fis friends. (J.Conrad)
5. When Zeno was asked what a friend was, he replied, “Another I”. (Diogenes)
6. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud…(R.W.Emerson)
7. The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself. (J.B.P.Moliere)
8. A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on a friendship. (J.D.Rockfeller)
9. A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities. (W.Shakespeare)
10. Inferirity is what you enjoy in your friends. (Ph.D.S. Chesterfield)
11. Associate with men of good quality, if you esteem uoyr own reputation, for it is better to be alone than in bad company. (G.Washington)
Use the following proverbs in situations of your own. Give suitable Russian equivalents if possible.
1. Among friends all things are common.
2. A friend to all is a friend to none.
3. A friend in need is a friend indeed.
4. A man is known by the company he keeps.
5. Friendship cannot stand always on one side.
6. A broken friendship may be soldered, but will never be sound.
Solve the problems:
Your best friend and you had a major quarrel. You apologized, but he still won’t talk to you. What can you do?
Your friend has a really serious problem, and he made you promise not to tell anyone about it. But you feel that you won’t be able to help him without breaking the promise. How will you do it?
You have a friend who has just become very famous. In what way will it tell on your relations?
You used to have a lot of friends before you got married. Your wife (husband) objects to some of your old relationships which are very dear to you. What would you do?
5.You introduced your boyfriend to your group mate and he took fancy to her. Would you break your relationship with your group mate?