Entertainment
1. Ответьте на вопросы:
How do you like to spend your free time?
Do you have many interesting places for visiting?
Why do people need a hobby?
What is your favourite hobby?
What are the most popular hobbies among your friends?
2. Прочитайте и переведите текст:
I like to spend my free time in different ways. I am fond of visiting interesting places, cinemas and reading books. Of course, I have a hobby.
Do you know what a hobby is? Where does the word come from? Many of us have pets - dogs and cats. They are like members of our family. In England many years ago farmers displayed the same love for horses. Robbin, Dobbin and Hobbin were the names which farmers gave to their horses most often. The name Hobbin was changed into Hobby and became the word used for toy horses. And only many years later the word "hobby" began to be used in its modern meaning - "something", what you do in your spare time Hobbies differ like tastes. Hobbies are divided into four large classes. They are doing things, making things, collecting things and learning things.
The most popular hobby of all groups is doing something. It includes everything from gardening to travelling and from chess to volleyball.
Gardening is one of the oldest of man's hobbies. It is a well-known fact that the English are very popular of gardening and growing flowers, especially roses.
Both grown-ups and children are fond of playing computer games. It's new, but a popular hobby.
Making things includes drawing, painting, making sculpture and designing costumes. Some are interested in music. They collect records and tape recordings, others write music or play musical instruments.
Almost everyone collects something at some period of his life: stamps, coins, match-boxes, books, records, postcards, toys and watches. And very often some collections are housed in museums and galleries. I realize that collecting things as a hobby depends on one's age and income.
There are different clubs of collectors, where people can show us their collection and tell us why it is special. At other times they have a swap-shop, and people exchange duplicates, or swap something they don't want for something new. That can be fun because most people like bargaining. Some of our keenest collectors are going to tell you about their hobbies.
No matter what kind of hobby a person has, he always has an opportunity of learning from it and that becomes the most exciting aspect of a hobby. Hobbies help you to choose your future profession very often. If you've chosen a hobby according to your character and taste you are lucky because your life becomes more interesting.
Now a few words about my hobbies, I think I belong to that group of people who like doing things. As a typical teenager, I spend hours exploring the Internet and play computer games.
My hobby is also collecting stamps and coins. Collecting stamps is great. I think they're the best things to collect. There are so many different ones from every country. Collectors usually have a theme: stamps from one country, stamps about space, animals, famous people, etc. You could think of lots more. My theme is flowers. I found out about rare plants, flowers of different places in the world from my collection.
Collecting could cost you a lot of money, if you bought very old stamps. However, collecting modern stamps isn't too expensive. Anyway, the club helps. I don't buy many stamps. I get mine by swapping with friends. It's good fun. My stamps look nice and a good album is beautiful.
I have got a lot of coins. One of them is rare, and worth a lot of money. I found my rarest coin, a 1932 Florrin, in some change. It's not the oldest one I have, that's a penny from 1797.1 collect coins because I like the history they record. It's exciting to think how old they are. I am starting to collect coins from different countries. I swap with my friends, sell some and buy some. I like learning about them in my catalogue. It's a very interesting hobby.
There are all sorts of things that you can collect. You must be interested in one of them.
And finally, I would like to say that as soon as I finish school and enter a university, I hope to spend more time on all of my hobbies.
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ART
1. Ответьте на вопросы:
What is art?
What kind of art do you prefer?
Do you often go to the museum?
Who is your favourite artist?
When did human begin to create artworks?
2. Прочитайте и переведите текст:
Art is a diverse range of human activities and the products of those activities; this article focuses primarily on the visual arts, which includes the creation of images or objects in fields including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and other visual media. Architecture is often included as one of the visual arts; however, like the decorative arts, it involves the creation of objects where the practical considerations of use are essential in a way that they are usually not for a painting, for example. Music, theatre, film, dance, and other performing arts, as well as literature, and other media such as interactive media are included in a broader definition of art or the arts. Until the 17th century, art referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences, but in modern usage the fine arts, where aesthetic considerations are paramount, are distinguished from acquired skills in general, and the decorative or applied arts.
Clockwise from upper left: a self-portrait from Vincent van Gogh, an African Chokwe statue, detail from the Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli and a Japanese Shisa lion
Art has been characterized in terms of mimesis, expression, communication of emotion, or other values. During the Romantic period, art came to be seen as a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science. Though the definition of what constitutes art is disputed and has changed over time, general descriptions mention an idea of human agency and creation through imaginative or technical skill. The nature of art, and related concepts such as creativity and interpretation, are explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.
By a broad definition of art, artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind: from early pre-historic art to contemporary art; however, some theories restrict the concept to modern Western societies. The first and broadest sense of art is the one that has remained closest to the older Latin meaning, which roughly translates to "skill" or "craft." A few examples where this meaning proves very broad include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, and military arts. However, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology.
