Miser, miserable, scrupulous, noble, brave, courageous, intrigued, modest, exacting, persevering, resourceful, inventive, boastful, haughty, fun-loving; witty, smart, curious.

1. Peter the Great :

2. Catherine II:

3. Vitus Bering:

4. Thomas Jefferson:

5. Mikhail Kutuzov:

6. Lord De La Ware:

7. Captain John Smith:

8. Emel’yan Pugachev:

9. Napoleon Bonaparte:

10. Gregory Shelikhov:

Reading and Titling

Exercise № 33. Read texts and pay attention to titles of each paragraph. Then give titles to the rest of the paragraphs.

Text A: Reading for meaning.

Conflict or War

Soon England and its colonies found themselves in conflict. The mother country was imposing new and new heavy taxes, in part to defray the cost of fighting the Seven Years' War, and expected Americans to lodge British soldiers in their homes. The colonists resented the taxes and resisted the quartering of soldiers. Insisting that they could be taxed only by their own colonial assemblies, the colonists rallied behind the slogan "no taxation without representation."

… … … …

All the taxes, except one on tea, were removed, but in 1773 a group of patriots responded by staging the Boston Tea Party. Disguised as Indians, they boarded British merchant ships and dumped 342 crates of tea into the Boston harbor. That provoked a crackdown by the British Parliament, including the closure of the Boston harbor to shipping. Colonial leaders convened the First Continental Congress in 1774 to discuss the colonies' opposition to the British rule. A war broke out on April 19, 1775, when British soldiers confronted colonial rebels in Lexington, Massachusetts. On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted a Declaration of Independence.

… … … …

At first the Revolutionary War went badly for the Americans. With few provisions and little training, American troops generally fought well, but were outnumbered and overpowered by the British. The turning point in the war came in 1777 when American soldiers defeated the British Army at Saratoga, New York. France had secretly been aiding the Americans, but was reluctant to ally itself openly until they had proved themselves in battle. Following the Americans' victory at Saratoga, France and America signed treaties of alliance, and France provided the Americans with troops and warships.

New Power Appeared

The last major battle of the American Revolution took place at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. A combined force of American and French troops surrounded the British and forced them to surrender. Fighting continued in some areas for other two years, and the war officially ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, by which England recognized American independence.

Exercise № 34. Match these expressions with their meanings and use them all to make sentences, which summarize the article below.

1. To take the pulse of a) cruel and violent act

2. The aftermath b) to be the best example of something

3. An atrocity c) a violent attack

4. To boil down to d) to measure / to gauge

5. An assault E) without required resources

6. To embody f) the effects and results of something

7. Ill-equipped g) very basic

8. To give rise to h) very basic

9. Root and branch I) obviously without shame

10. Blatantly j) to be the main reason for something

Developing Your Reading Skills

Exercise № 35. Vocabulary practice. Read and make root forms of the following words:

1. Presumptuous – presumption – presume - ……

2. Preposterous – ……

3. Deflate – …..

Exercise № 36. Reading comprehension.

There was no better place to take the pulse of British and American sentiment than Yorktown, the place of the final battle that swept the region, the pan-American secular nationalism of which the President George Washington was the champion, and the British ‘political mercantilism’ that finished with the British Empire failure and decline. It is hard to imagine today how presumptuous the United States seemed in 1776. A group of 13 small colonies joined together to wage a war against the most powerful nation in the world, and they had organized their government around democratic principles that seemed preposterous in a world accustomed to aristocracy.

The Boston Tea Party became the most significant and starting point in the war for independence. When British ships delivered three large cargoes of tea to the port of Boston in a hope to make profitable business and sell tea with the tax to the British Crown, some radical Bostonians sneaked at the ships and loosened all the tea into the water. And they made a very strong tea for Britain that immediately ordered to blockade the American frontiers. And Americans held the weapons to fight the mother country back.

Against all odds the Americans won this Revolutionary War. At the final battle, Yorktown, the British were deflated but retained a sense of humor. They were marching to the surrender field with a regimental band playing a popular ditty, “The World Turned Upside Down.” The song envisioned a multitude of fantastic events, none more fantastic than the revolution itself.

The American Revolution was remarkable because the colonies defeated their “mother country,” and American politicians created a government without a formal aristocracy. It was, however, a revolution that had only just begun with the signing of the Treaty of Paris that ended the war in 1783. Americans declared that “all men are created equal,” but they didn’t have worked out the implications of that radical idea. They freed the slaves in the North, but in the South the institution was too deeply rooted to be abolished so easily. Women also were disadvantaged, they had no rights to vote or own property. Indians, as well, were not given equal rights with white settlers. Additionally, the first American constitution created a loose confederation of states rather than a powerful central government.

Brainstorming

1. What’s your opinion why the British colonies waged the war against Britain?

2. What kind of compromise might be a solution in a conflict between Britain and American colonies?

3. What were the major problems of the young American Confederation soon after the American Revolution?