Теxt № 2
Friendship, like love affairs, can run out of steam. As we grow up, sometimes we grow apart. Recently, a good friend and I parted company. There was no scandal, no crashing dishes, no dramatic pie-in-the-face. Just a gradual loss of mutual interests, complicated by geographical distance and the demands of our careers, our new lives we are leading require changes.
Women are more often prepared for the end of a love affair than that of a friendship. We have endless advice books on how to recover when your lover's left you, but little seems to be said about friends who break each other's hearts. Maybe it's because we never think of our relationships with other women as being passionate or deep. But a woman can be as emotionally dependent on a friend as she is on a lover, and when the relationship ends, it can leave both women hurt and angry, wondering what went wrong.
I've learned from experience that good friendships are based on a delicate balance. When friends are equal, professionally and personally, it's easier for them to support each other. It's taken me a long time to realize that not all my "friends" wish me well. Someone who wants what you have may not be able to cope with your good luck: if you find yourself apologizing for your hard-earned rise or getting your long-awaited promotion, it's a sure sign that the friendship is off balance. Real friends are secure and steady enough in their own lives to share each other's successes - not envy them.
If a good-looking boyfriend or a new friend appears, it can also be a test of your old friendship. It's not uncommon for friends to try unconsciously to destroy these new relationships if they feel threatened by them and ignored by you. But if that happens often, it may be time to reevaluate your friendship. A frank discussion can work wonders in this situation - in my case, I found out that my friend and I were not as close as we'd once been. My life had taken a different direction since we'd first met, and I'd expected her to follow with the same speed and enthusiasm. We finally agreed that we are not as alike as we had once thought, nor should we be. We decided that it was time to take a leave of absence from each other. Putting each other "on hold" for an indefinite period is hard, but sometimes it's the wisest thing to do. It never hurts to put some distance between friends if the relationship is strained, and it may even prevent a final break.
Sometimes, friendships can be renewed on their own; unlike love affairs, which demand a certain degree of commitment and effort to stay alive, a little healthy neglect
can be good for a friendship and it may even lead to restoring relations that might not have taken place without it. And if that happens, you'll likely find yourself in a more honest, and certainly more balanced, relationship.
A45. Why did the author and her friend part with each other?
Their lives became very different.
They had had a dramatic quarrel.
Their relations were complicated.
They had been demanded to do it.
A46. According to the text, the problem women often have is how to...
end their love affair.
face the end of their friendship .
get advice on friendship.
recover after the break with the lover.
A47. The author believes that real friends are those who ...
never ask you to apologize.
do not to envy you.
differ from you in their social position.
want the same things that you do.
A48. What can help if your friends try to spoil your new relations?
Discussing everything frankly with them.
Threatening them with a break.
Ignoring them.
Becoming closer with them.
A49. If two friends grow apart it's better for them.
to terminate their friendship.
to make efforts to keep their friendship alive.
to take a pause in their relations.
to change nothing in their lives.
A50. What should be done to renew your broken friendship?
You should forget about it for a while.
You should make some effort to restore it.
You should be more honest with your friend.
You should be more balanced in your relations.
Comment on the following poem:
TO A FALSE FRIEND
( By Th. Hood)
Our hands have met, but not our hearts,
Our hands will never meet again.
Friends, if we have ever been,
Friends, we cannot now remain;
I only know I loved you once,
I only know I loved in vain.
Our hands have met, but not our hearts,
Our hands will never meet again.
Points to ponder:
Making new friends can be exciting at 50 as it is at 20.
Making friends is not easy.
The only way to have friends is to be one.
Friendship works wonders.
Adult friendship is no more than a mutual fight from boredom.
Only childhood friends are true friends.
You can never have too many friends.
About the famous and half forgotten people
Alfred Nobel – a Man of Contrasts
Alfred Nobel, the great Swedish inventor and industrialist, was a man of many contrasts. He was the son of a bankrupt, but became a millionaire; a scientist with a love of literature, an industrialist who managed to remain an idealist. He made a fortune but lived a simple life, and although cheerful in company he was often sad in private.
A lover of mankind, he never had a wife or family to love him; a patriotic son of his native land, he died alone on foreign soil. He invented a new explosive, dynamite, to improve the peacetime industries of mining and road building, but saw it used as a weapon of war to kill and injure his fellow men.
During his useful life he often felt he was useless: “Alfred Nobel”, he once wrote of himself, “ought to have been put to death by a kind doctor as soon as, with a cry, he entered life”. World-famous for his works he was never personally well known, for throughout his life he avoided publicity. “I do not see”, he once said, “that I have deserved any fame and I have no taste for it”, but since his death his name has brought fame and glory to others.
He was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833 but moved to Russia with his parents in 1842, where his father, Immanuel, made a strong position for himself in the engineering industry. Immanuel Nobel invented the landmine and made a lot of money from government orders for it during the Crimean War, but went bankrupt soon after.
Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred rejoined them in 1863, beginning his own study of explosives in his father’s laboratory. He had never been to school or university but had studied privately and by the time he was twenty was a skillful chemist and excellent linguist, speaking Swedish, Russian, German, French and English.
Like his father, Alfred Nobel was imaginative and inventive, but he had better luck in business and showed more financial sense. He was quick to see industrial openings for his scientific inventions and built up over 80 companies in 20 different countries. Indeed his greatness lay in his outstanding ability to combine the qualities of an original scientist with those of a forward- looking industrialist.
But Nobel’s main concern was never with making money or even making scientific discoveries. Seldom happy, he was always searching for a meaning to life, and from his youth had taken a serious interest in literature and philosophy.
Perhaps because he could not find ordinary human love – he never married—he came to care deeply about the whole of mankind. He was always generous to the poor. “I’d rather take care of the stomachs of the living than the glory of the dead in the form of stone memorials”, he once said.
His greatest wish, however, was to see an end to the wars, and thus peace between nations, and he spent much time and money working for this cause until his death in Italy in 1896.
His famous will in which he left money to provide prizes for outstanding work in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature and Peace, is a memorial to his interests and ideals. And so, the man who felt he should have died at birth is remembered and respected long after his death.
Text The Nobel Prizes
Any of the prizes (five in number until 1969, when a sixth was added) that are awarded annually from a fund bequeathed for that purpose by the Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Bernhard Nobel. The Nobel Prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious awards given for intellectual achievement in the world. In the will he drafted in 1895, Nobel instructed that most of his fortune be set aside as a fund for the awarding of five annual prizes “to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” These prizes as established by his will are: the Nobel Prize for Physics, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine; the Nobel Prize for Literature; and the Nobel Prize for Peace. The first distribution of the prices took place on December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel’s death. An additional award, the Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968 by the Bank of Sweden and was first awarded in 1969.
After Nobel’s death, the Nobel Foundation was set up to carry out the provisions of his will and to administer his funds. In his will, he had stipulated that four different institutions—three Swedish and one Norwegian—should award the prizes. From Stockholm, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences confers the prizes for physics, chemistry, and economics, the Karolinska Institute confers the prize for physiology or medicine, and the Swedish Academy confers the prize for literature. The Norwegian Nobel Committee based in Oslo confers the prize for peace. The Nobel Foundation is the legal owner and functional administrator of the funds and serves as the joint administrative body of the prize-awarding institutions, but it is not concerned with the prize deliberations or decisions, which rest exclusively with the four institutions.