4. Answer the following questions.

1. What is the climate of the country?

2. Describe the country’s terrain.

3. What are the most important natural resources?

4. What are the water resources of the country?

5. Is American flora and fauna rich in its variety?

5. Practice the pronunciation of the geographical proper names.

The United States of America, North/South/Central America, Canada, Mexico, District of Columbia, the Pacific coast, the Caribbean coast, the West Coast, Atlantic seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico, Aleutian Islands, the Cordillera Mountains, the Rocky Mountains (the Rockies), the Sierra Nevada, Mount McKinley, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Rio Grande, the Great Lakes, Great Plains, Hawaii, Alaska, Indiana, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, California, Arizona, Florida.

6. Read Text 3c and translate it. Text 3c. History

The history of this land is long. In prehistoric times hunters crossed from Siberia to Alaska by land. Gradually they moved southwards and settled all over North and South America. Each tribe developed its own language and customs. Since there were so many of them, there were no such great states as the Incan or the Aztec one in South and Central America.

People travelled across the Atlantic Ocean since the earliest times, the Vikings being among the most famous of these early discoverers, but Europeans truly discovered the Americas for themselves with Christopher Columbus.

I n 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean. Instead of reaching India as he had expected he landed on an island off a continent unknown to Europeans. Thinking that he was in India, Columbus called the people he met there Indians.

Other explorers arrived from Europe. Spanish troops conquered vast parts of Central and South America which are now called Latin America. The French founded settlements in the north. In 1620 the first English party left England for America. They were Puritans, religious people, driven out of the official Church.

The newcomers settled at Plymouth Bay. Some of them died of Cold and hunger during the first winter in America. The Indians showed the white settlers how to fish and plant crops. Some settlers traded with the local population and some regarded them as enemies.

Early capitalist relations predominated in the social system of colonial America. The development of trade, industry and agriculture in the colonies constantly conflicted with the economic policy of Britain. The whole of the preceding social-economic history of the colonies prepared the way for the War of Independence. The development of capitalism in the colonies and the formation of a North-American nation started to run counter to the policy of the metropolis, which viewed the colonies as a source of raw materials and a market for England and England alone.

After the Seven Years' War (1756−1763) the British Government increased its pressure on the colonies and put all possible obstacles in the way of their independent industrial development and trade. It prohibited expansion to the west of the Allegheny Mountains (1763). It imposed new taxes and duties which affected the interests of the colonists, thus making them pay for the Seven Years' War. The beginning of separate uprisals and revolts which later grew into a war, can be traced back as far as 1767. Merchants, ship-owners, lawyers and others revolted in Philadelphia in 1774 and decided to stop trade with Britain and boycott the British goods. There was also the rebellion of working people against the growing power of wealth. The war-cry of the revolution became ‘No Taxation Without Representation’.

A prologue to the War of Independence in the North America was the ‘Boston tea-party’ (1773), as it was called.

The British Government's decision to grant the East India Company the right of tax-free export of tea to the colonies, thus undermining their economy, caused indignation among the colonists, and especially the merchants involved in the sale of smuggled tea. In December, 1773, a group of members of an organization called the ‘Sons of Liberty’ boarded the British ships lying at anchor in the port of Boston and dumped the whole cargo of tea into the harbour. Soon after that the port was closed, all kinds of public gatherings were prohibited, and British soldiers were billeted in the city. All these measures further sharpened the conflict between the metropolis and the colonies.

The machinery of colonial power was shaken, a people's militia was formed, skirmishes with British troops stated. The War of Independence of the American colonies began with a victorious battle of colonists against British troops in April, 1775, at Concord and at Lensington not far from Boston.

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress declared the united colonies to be independent of Great Britain. The new state was called the United States of America and July 4 became its national holiday. The Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence proclaiming the equality of all people, their right to ‘life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness’. Thomas Jefferson, a follower of the British philosophers and the French enlighteners and a representative of the revolutionary-democratic wing of the ‘patriots’ (as supporters of the revolution called themselves) was the author of the Declaration.

The battle of Saratoga (1777), when the Americans forced a large British army to capitulate, was a turning-point in the long, hard War of Independence. The Americans were supported by France, Britain's hereditary enemy.

In 1783 thirteen North American colonies gained independence from Britain. They formed the United States of America. In 1789 George Washington was elected the first president of the USA. New states joined the Union and the country grew westwards. Gold and silver were discovered on the Pacific coast, and thousands of people rushed there across the continent. New towns sprang up and quickly grew.

Slave-owning which had been decreasing, received a strong impulse at the beginning of the 19th century. The invention of the cotton-gin made cotton yarn much cheaper. All the while the demand for cotton had been increasing rapidly both in Britain, and among the textile mills of North America. ‘King Cotton’ began to squeeze out other crops formerly grown on the plantations of the South. The demand for slaves increased and slavery gained stability. In spite of the ruthless inflow of slaves, their labour productivity was not high as the soil was becoming exhausted by irrational methods of cultivation. Planters began to seek new lands.

The development of the Northern states took a different road. Industry was rapidly developing, but communications were progressing even faster. The building of railroads and their implementation had immense significance for the American economy.

Thus, the rapidly developing bourgeois society of the North of the USA differed sharply from the social system of the South, which was based on slavery, and which hindered the economic, political, social and cultural development of the whole country. ‘The inevitable conflict’ (as it was called) of the two systems might break out at any time.

I n the political struggle of this period, the forces of the enemies of slavery were united in the Republican Party. It was founded in 1854, led by the industrial bourgeoisie of the North and supported by the workers and farmers. Its rival, the Democratic Party, which bore this name from 1828, stood for slavery. In 1860 the republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who came from the lower classes, became the president of the USA. His election signified the end of domination of the government by the Southerners and was interpreted as a signal for a long-plotted rebellion. At the beginning of 1861, the southern states left the Union, founded a Confederation and started military action. That was how the four-year war between the South and the North began; the war which became the second American Revolution.

The bourgeois-democratic revolution, the first stage of which was the Civil War, swept away the obstacles to capitalist development and did away with slavery. It spread the American way of agricultural development all over the country, strengthened and completed the sway of the bourgeoisie and consolidated the American nation both territorially and ethnically. It gave an impulse to the labour movement. However not all the tasks of the revolution were accomplished and first of all it concerned the Negro problem.

The two-party system gained strength in political life, and the two rival bourgeois parties, the Democratic and the Republican, came to power in turn.

American industry developed very rapidly after the Civil War. Whole families of immigrants poured into United States from all the countries of Europe and there was work on land for all who were willing to work hard. The population increased rapidly. The industrial revolution was coming to an end. The railroad network was growing fast actively promoted the development of the western part of the country − its settlement, its agriculture, its industry, trade and towns. The districts along the Pacific were developed first, then the prairies and the mountainous country. New states gradually came into being on these lands. In 1867 the USA bought Alaska and the Aleutian Islands from tsarist Russia.

The First World War enriched the USA. Fortunes were made by supplying armaments to the belligerent. Europe's former debtor became its creditor and the mightiest power of the capitalist world.

For a long time the USA continued the politics of nun-involvement in European issues, at the same time maintaining its participation in the political life of South and Central America. After the Civil War the most traumatic experience in the nation's history was the Great Depression of the 1930s. The situation got better under the leadership of President Roosevelt when the USA got involved in the Second World War.

The United States of America has developed in a most complicated and contradictory way in the two hundred years of its existence as a nation. These distant colonies, which once supplied industrially developed Britain with agricultural and raw materials, have become the capitalist world's richest and strongest industrial power.