3. Things/items around the house - Talking about things that are located in your house or apartment. Choose the best answer:

1. A sliding door that lets air in, but keeps bugs out: A ___________ door.

a) net b) screen

2. A couch that also functions as a bed: A ________ bed.

a) sofa b) king-size

3. This prevents the bathroom from getting wet when you take a shower: A shower ________.

a) cap b)curtain

4. A closet which is big enough for you to walk inside to get clothes, etc.: A ________ closet.

a) walkable b)walk-in

5. A flight of stairs leading to the second floor: A ________.

a) staircase b) stairs

6. An appliance that cools your house in the summer: An air ________ .

a)cooler b)conditioner

7. You use this to open a door: A door ________.

a) knob or handle b) hand or handle

8. You hang this on a wall to know what time it is: A ________.

a) clock b)watch

9. We don't have a TV ___________, so we put our TV on top of a milk crate. ( = plastic containers used to transport milk)

a) shelf b)stand

10. Most people keep their books on a bookshelf, also known as a ________.

a) book-closet b) bookcase

11. Take those clothes out of the laundry basket and put them in the ___________ machine.

a) washing b)washer

12. After you finish washing them, put them in the ________.

a)drying machine b)dryer

13. Peter put the cutlery ( = knives, forks, etc.) in the wrong ________.

a)drawer b) closet

14. Most people use an ironing ________ to iron their clothes.

a) border b) board

15. Clothes ________ are used to hang clothes.

a) hangers b)hangars

16. We need to get a new ________ for our table.

a) top-cloth b) tablecloth

17. A chair that folds is called a ________ chair.

a) fold b)folding

18. A ________ is a chair without arm or back rests.

a) stand b)stool

19. Let's eat in the kitchen today. I don't feel like setting the ___________ table.

a)dining room b) bedroom

20. We didn't have any more room in the basement, so we stored some of our things in the ________.

a) roof b)attic

4. Answer the questions:

• In your country do most people live in houses or flats? Do they own or rent their property?

• Do you have similar expressions to these in your language?

There's no place like home. Home is where the heart is.

Accommodation by Vivien

I live in Budapest, in a flat in the cen­tre of town, on the third floor of a building. It's a typical Hungarian building with a courtyard and a big stairwell. There's no lift, unfortunately, which means I have to stagger up three flights of stairs every day, a couple of times a day. It's quite a small flat - I don't remember how many square metres it is but it's pretty small.

There's a living room, where we sleep, which I share with my flat­mate, who is a Hungarian student. It's her flat, so that's quite good. I pay her rent, but fortunately I don't have to pay any of the electricity or gas bills, although I pay the phone bill because I'm always calling Eng­land, which makes it very expensive. So, in the main room there's a huge old brick stove, which keeps us good and warm and is very efficient, and as the flat's quite small it's not ex­pensive to keep it well-heated in win­ter. This makes a big change from some other flats I've lived in, like in London where I was freezing cold in the winter with no fires or heating of any sort. Then there is a bed and also a sofa-bed, where I sleep, which you can pull out and change from a sofa into a double-size bed. There're two huge cupboards. One of them is quite modern, and the other one is an old-style white cupboard with a large oval mirror built into it. We also have a desk, where I work. I have a typewriter on it, which I bor­rowed from a friend who I used to work with at the newspaper offices, so now I can work from home. We've got a colour ТУ which is nice, with about 29 or 30 different chan­nels. Then we've got about four blocks of shelves, which are mainly full of language books and books on Hungarian literature. We've got a telephone as well, which is some­thing, I think, that people in Eng­land take for granted, but I realise that in Hungary it can be quite dif­ficult to get one as you can be on the waiting list for a long time, so we're lucky to have that.

The other room used to be a kitchen, but my flatmate's dad has converted it into a kind of study room. There's a big table in there where we usually have breakfast and supper. There's quite a strange setup in the room really, be­cause it has tiles on the floor, so it looks like a cross between a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room. It's also got a lot of shelves with books on them, and some plants which I brought from the last flat that I lived in - oh, and there are also quite a lot of plants in the living room as well. Then we've got a kind of kitchen - well, it's a little cup­board really - which has a stove, a washing up basin, a couple of little cup­boards and some shelves.

Then we've got a bathroom, which is also quite small, with rather lurid pink tiles in it, which has a bath, a toilet and a washbasin, and also a Hungarian washing machine, which leaps around all over the bathroom and gets very violent, so we have to watch it when it's on. There is a big boiler to heat up the water, too. We also have a vacuum cleaner, (which we usually call a "hoover" in Eng­land), and there is a large metal stepladder (but I'm not sure why it is there), and there are a lot of cup­boards as well, full of shoes and old newspapers and saucepans and all kinds of rubbish.

We've also got a very narrow bal­cony, which you could sit on but you can't do much else with, and we've got big French windows that lead out onto the balcony. The view is of a hotel opposite, so it's not really the most beautiful view, and you can almost see into the hotel rooms, and unfortunately they can see back into ours so we've put net curtains up to keep out visitors, as we've had incidences of people, tourists, taking pictures. I don't know what they're interested in, maybe they think they're taking pictures of Hungar­ians eating breakfast or something like that.

As our flat is so small, it's cheap and easy to keep warm, and also quite easy to keep clean. However, on the other hand, there's not much space, as there's only one room really to speak of. It's right in the middle of the city, so it's very quick to get to from any­where, and is near to different metro lines, the red line and the blue line, so you can get to any part of the city.

My ideal flat or house would be, I suppose, somewhere not quite so cen­tral, but then I would like to have a car so that I could get in and out of town quickly. I would like to have a house, ideally with a garden so that I could have pets, maybe dogs and cats, and do gardening and grow plants. I'd like quite a few rooms in the house so that I could use one room as an office, which would be nice as I find it difficult to work in the same room as I normally live in, because there's always a temptation to switch on the TV or to go and make a cup of coffee. So, I have to be very disciplined, or else have a sepa­rate room for working where I wouldn't be distracted by outside in­terference or by my own laziness.

I'd also like to have a nice view, maybe a view of the river, and fresh air, so maybe to be up in the hills. I've always been used to living by water, and in Hungary I really miss being near the sea. I don't know what it is, but there's something I like about liv­ing on an island. It's just so nice to be able to go out to the seaside and get some fresh air.