26. Professional career

Choosing a career is not easy for most people, yet it is one of the most important decisions you will make in your life. Find the right career, and you will be happy and successful. Find the wrong career, and you may be unhappy and unsuccessful. First, start with yourself. Make a list of inventory of your interests, your talents, and abilities, take a realistic view of your strengths and weaknesses. In particular, you can answer to important questions. First: what sort of life do you want to lead? For example, do you want to live in the country or in the town? Is leisure time of great importance to you? Is the size of your salary important? Do you want to put down roots or travel widely? Second: what sort of work do you want to do? For example, do you like working alone or with others? Does teaching people appeal to you? Do you want to be an organizer of other people's activities? Do you want to develop new ideas and initiate changes.

I would like to tell you a few words about my choice of the profession. After finishing school I have made up my mind to be a secretary. There is a widespread misconception that secretarial work requires the services of tall well-proportioned women with blond hair and blue eyes. However, this is not at all the case; well-established companies, including foreign firms, are interested in high quality of professionalism from their employees. That is why it is very important to be good educated and to be the best at your occupation. So I got a specialized secondary education: I finished the College of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And nowadays I work at the main foreign-policy authority of Russia – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I find my job challenging and interesting. Every day I deal with people a lot. Among my responsibilities are meeting and conversing with visitors, answering the phone, making international calls, sending faxes and e-mail messages and writting and registering diplomatic correspondence. It is also very important to me to be well-organazed, communicative, punctual, energetic, polite and diplomatic with people, trustworthy and possess initiative. My job also involves a lot of travel and service trips. That is why it is very important to have fluent knowledge of one or more foreign languages and to have higher education. I always aim to improve my skills and put them into my work. I would like to participate in peak level negotiations, to handle protocol arrangements, write up reports and other documents and proofread various materials. That is why my decision was to choose the International Institute for Humanities and Linguistics as my higher education. Nowadays we always need specialists in foreign languages.

I hope that I will acquire good knowledge here and I will be able to apply my skills in practise.

26. Reading preferences part 2

A book is a one of the greatest wonders in the world. It gives us a unique chance to link up with authors who lived hundreds and thousands years ago. Thanks to books, we can talk to people who lived in different ages and countries. Through reading books we hear their voices, thoughts and feelings. Books are the surest way to bring nations together. They give us an insight not only into the past, but also into the future. A book is faithful and undemanding friend: it can be put aside and taken up again at any moment. I think that good literature always expresses the author's position. And no real art can be achieved without the truth of life.

Books can fit almost every need, temper, or interest. Books can be read when you are in the mood; they don't have to be taken in periodic doses. Books are more personal and more impersonal than professors. Books have an inner confidence which individuals seldom show; they rarely have to be on the defensive. Books can afford to be bold, and courageous, and explanatory; they don't have to be so careful of boards of trustees, colleagues, and community opinion. Books are infinitely diverse; they run the gamut (охватывать весь диапазон, всю гамму чувств) of human activity. Books can express every point of view; if you want a different point of view, you can read a different book. Reading is probably the most important skill you will need for success in your studies. You will have to read lengthy assignments in different subjects with varying degrees of detail and difficulty. If you read inaccurately, you will fail to understand some of the information and ideas you read. If you read slowly, you will have to spend too much time reading your assignments so that your other work may suffer. Poor reading may be a problem for you, but it is not a hopeless one. Like other skills your ability to read English rapidly and accurately will depend upon a careful instruction and purposeful practice. You must continue to practise on your own to improve your reading skill. Reading speed is determined in part by how many words you can see at a single glance. Here is a comparison of three different readers and how many stops their eyes make.

Slow Reader: Being able to read by phrases instead of by single words results from practice.

Average Reader: Being able to read by phrases instead of by single words results from practice.

Fast Reader: Being able to read by phrases instead of by single words results from practice. Notice that the slow reader's eyes must stop fourteen times, focusing on each word alone before they move on to the next. The eyes of the average reader stop six or seven times because they are able to see about two words at a single glance. The eyes of the fast reader stop only three times. They focus at the center of a phrase and see three or four words, then move rapidly to the next phrase. This ability to see words on either side of the point at which your eyes focus is called peripheral vision. As a foreign student of English, you may feel, that it is impossible to recognize so many words at a single glance. It is difficult for many native speakers, but it can be done - and must be done if you are to read as rapidly as you should. You can increase your peripheral vision by eye exercises.

Books and articles differ in difficulty. Rate of reading depends on the difficulty of the material and on the purpose of reading. We can distinguish:

- reading to get information, usually necessarily careful, slow and repeated;

-exploratory reading, as in skimming through a book in order to get a general view of it;

-revision reading, as in reading rapidly through a book with which you are already familiar, in order to confirm knowledge;

-reading in order to search for specific information or to answer specific questions;

-critical reading, as in reading a book for review;

-reading for enjoyment, as a novel.

A good reader will change his rate of reading according to his purpose.

The death, of the book has been predicted for centuries. Cinema, radio and television have all been presented as the murderers of our most treasured cultural icon. The Internet is the latest suspect to hold the smoking gun.

Some books are being replaced by electronic media. Who wants to use a twenty-volume encyclopedia when information can be taken instantly from a CD-ROM? Why should a lawyer spend time and a client’s money searching through massive tomes, when the necessary information can be found in seconds from a database? But no one will lie in bed reading a novel from a CD-ROM.

So reading - and the books, magazines and newspapers that we read - still have a part to play. They will continue to instruct, amuse and influence for decades and centuries to come.