2. Скажите, соответствуют ли данные утверждения прочитанному тексту:

1. Communism was a combination of government and economic policy.

2. The effort to redistribute wealth had positive consequences.

3. The Soviet Union, led by a violent ruler named Joseph Stalin, had one hundred of people murdered.

4. China, Cuba, and several countries in Eastern Europe established Communism.

5. A dictator rules a nation through violent means.

6. Mussolini believed that the power of the state should encompass absolutely everything in society

7. Another name for totalitarianism is equality.

8. At the end of the 20th century it proved possible for most Communist dictatorships to hold onto power.

2. Найдите синонимы:

1. to own

2. to murder

3. to implement

4. to establish

5. attempt

6. to improve

7. goal

8. equal

A aim

B to make something start

C effort

D same

E to have

F to make

G to kill

H to make better

4. Замените подчеркнутые слова синонимами из текста:

   1. This discovery is a change in science.

   2. You should share these copies with the whole school.

   3. The people of London were against this law.

   4. Next summer I’ll go away from this terrible city.

   5. There were several reasons why the Soviet Union fell down.

6. He was one of the most powerful rulers in history.

6. His business continues to prosper.

7. Our aim in this project is to help children.

Text 6

1. Прочитайте текст

Political systems

As long as people have lived together in communities there have been governments to rule those communities. As the forms of communities grew and changed, governments developed many institutions to help them function. Political systems consist of all the ways in which the different parts of government interact through these institutions.

Types of government

Long before there were governments ruled by kings, queens, presidents, and dictators, early peoples organized themselves into tribes. Tribes organized their power around kinship, or family associations. Leaders guarded the customs of the group and recorded its history through oral tradition, a kind of storytelling that preserved the culture from one generation to the next.

As various tribes combined into larger units, the political system of a village came into being. Villages were organized around rural jobs and agricultural life. The government of early villages consisted of a basic form of democracy. Council or village elders held face-to-face discussions to settle disputes and cooperate on matters of public concern.

Later, cities began to grow. They differed from villages in size and function. The economies of villages depended on farming, while the economies of cities depended on commerce and a wide range of industries. Early cities were autonomous, meaning that they had their own government without being part of a larger government, such as a country. These cities, such as Sparta and Athens in ancient Greece, were known as city-states.

As the world population grew, cities began to form relationships with one another and with surrounding villages. In some cases they sought to resist some common military or economic threat by combining their forces. They formed leagues for these purposes though they remained separate cities with their own governments. In other cases the cities and peoples of a particular region were actually combined into one political unit ruled jointly by a single government. These often had similar religious backgrounds or local customs.

Sometimes a ruler would decide to expand his or her control over a wider region. As these rulers took over the lands of various peoples they formed empires. For thousands of years empires controlled much of the world, notably in Egypt, China, Persia, and Rome. These empires all eventually fell apart, sometimes because they were attacked by outsiders and sometimes because the ruler died and the lands were broken up by his or her children. Smaller kingdoms sometimes took their place. By the 20th century the last empires had been broken up, and the world was divided into nations.