3. Discuss the following questions with your group mates.

A. What factors are most important when choosing a boyfriend/ girlfriend? Put these factors in order of importance, starting with the most important. Comment on your choices.

• physical attraction ( pleasant appearance, nice manners, etc.)

• financial independence (‘loads of money’)

• same tastes (in music, literature, films, etc.)

• clothes

• sense of humour

• same social class

• same interests

• same religion

• other?

B. Decide which of the following are serious obstacles to a relationship in this country:

• different religions

• the girl can’t cook

• the boy isn’t generous

• different political opinions

• the girl is taller than a boy

• big difference in age

• the boy is a chauvinist

• the girl is a feminist

• different races

• the girl is rich, the boy is poor

• different nationalities

 Reading comprehension

1. Read the texts below to learn about the way people in Britain date and get married. Find similarities and differences in your own culture.

* * *

Many single people in the US have trouble finding a marriage partner. In the past, sometimes friends would help by becoming matchmakers. They would introduce a man to a woman, and sometimes the man and woman would fall in love and get married.

But today, many people pay companies called dating services to help them find a partner. And even if the dating service does not always find them someone to marry, it at least finds them someone to date.

Getting married has changed in some ways. In the past, the man proposed to the woman. But now the woman asks the man to marry her. After the couple decides to marry, the man gives the woman a ring. She wears it on her left hand to show that they are engaged. Sometimes the man and woman elope. When they run away and get married privately, their parents are often disappointed because they wanted their children to have a big wedding.

When they are married, both newlyweds often work because they need two paychecks to pay their bills. But sometimes they still have money problems. And sometimes the parents find that they just aren’t compatible. So, for many people, marriage ends in divorce. Yes, some people stay together long enough to celebrate their fiftieth or seventy-fifth wedding ceremony.

* * *

Young people in Britain may have several girlfriends or boyfriends from their teens onwards. They go to the cinema, go dancing, play sports or eat out together and do not necessarily intend to get married. However, each year about 350,000 British couples become husband and wife. Marriage is legal from the age of sixteen but most people wait until their mid to late twenties. Of those who get married, about seventy per cent prefer a traditional church wedding to a registry office wedding. However, by the age of forty, one woman in twenty and one man in eleven will still be single.

One in four children is born outside of marriage but these are not all in single-parent families; sixty per cent of unmarried parents have stable relationships. Thirty-seven per cent of marriages end in divorce and cost the country more than 1.4 billion pounds a year. Although over thirty per cent of women depend financially on their husbands, women ask for seventy per cent of all divorces. Three out of ten divorced women married as teenagers.

Marriage does not seem to be more popular now than could be imagined thirty years ago. Is it since research has shown that married people generally live longer than the single?

 Reading comprehension