are 25 Houses at Eton, each with its centuries old traditions. This is related, in particular, to the color of caps, hats, socks, and soccer uniforms.
4. .........................................................................
In the past, 99 percent of students were from aristocratic families. Now the situation has changed drastically. Whereas in the past, there was one student from a middle-class family for every 19 offsprings of dukes, earls, or barons, today, most of the students come from the families of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, politicians, scientists, and academics.
5. ...........................................................................
Very few. As a general rule, they constitute a very small proportion of our scholarship students who showed outstanding ability at entrance examinations. Another reason is that the majority of our students get to Eton from private preparatory schools where there are practically no children with working class backgrounds.
6. .........................................................................
Indeed, many terms that are used here are incomprehensible outside the school. For example, the word "lesson" or "class" is not used at Eton. "Division" is used instead. In the 15th century, the classroom was separated by a wooden division, hence the word, which is confusing to the uninitiated. There are hundreds if not thousands of such examples. There are many archaisms in "Eton English." Newly employed teachers are issued a special Eton dictionary. This language tradition has remained unchanged for the past 500 years.
7. ........................................................................
Like any old educational establishment, Eton has gone through different periods. But to many people, the name still has a magic ring. When I go to some international conference and say that I work at Eton, I immediately feel interest and respect. Eton traditions are not about ossified conservatism. The school uses modern, state-of-the-art teaching methodologies, but the most important thing of course are the moral principles and rules of gentlemanly behavior that are part of the education process.
(From MN)
1. Match parts of the interview with these questions:
1)Boys’ schools are known for their brutal hazing practices. Have there been any such incidents at Eton?
2)What is the social makeup of the student body?
3)Is it true that Eton is losing its status as an elite school?
4)Has the school preserved its importance in the British education system that it had, e.g., before World War II?
5)Does Eton English markedly differ from Standard English?
6)How does the Eton curriculum differ from the curricula of maintained schoolspublic schools in the U.S. sense?
6) Are there any children from working class families?
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2. What part of the interview is this sentence taken from?
“I am sure that if Russian children could speak Eng lish as fluently as the natives, they would have no problem entering the school.”
3. What do bold type words, word combinations and the proverb mean?
Can you explain their meaning in English?
Text 6
THE ACADEMY OF LABOUR AND SOCIAL RELATIONS
The Academy of Labour and Social Relations is a Higher Institute of education that has trained specialists for almost 90 years. It was founded in 1919 and used to be “The Higher Institute of Trade Union Mov ement”.
Now it is one of the leading Higher Schools that has more than 10 thousand students, trainees and post-graduates. The Academy has State Accreditation and is authorised to issue diplomas acknowledged as State diplomas.
The Academy has six departments: Economics, Finance and Law with the specialities: Economics and Labour Sociology, Management, Accounting and Auditing, Finance and Credit, Law. Three other deparments are: Economics of Labour and Employment, Protection of Labour and Social Partnership.
There are four forms of tuition: full-time, evening classes, tuition by correspondence, full-time - postal tuition. More then 250 highly qualified teaching staff are working at 27 different chairs, among them 85 Doctors and Professors.
Many interesting things accompany the teaching process in the Academy. There are all necessary facilities: computer rooms and TV-equipped rooms with modern equipment. There are three educational buildings and two dormitories, libraries and a reading hall.
The Academy runs a complex of international programs under bilateral and multilateral cooperation with the educational and scientific centres of CIS countries, Switzerland, the UK, Holland, Japan, Korea and others. It organizes joint seminars on social - economic problems, visits to the industrial enterprises, and offers special Russian language courses.
Now our country is in a period of global changes in its economy and we are badly in need of highly qualified specialists with fundamental knowledge of the national economy and high professional level.
The main goal of the Academy is to train highly qualified specialists and in fact it is the right place to acquire a real profession and excellent employment opportunities. Not a single graduate has ever been in doubt of the choice.
The affiliate of the Academy in Chelyabinsk is the Urals Social-Economic Institute. The Institute was founded in Chelyabinsk in 1975 in order to train economists for the Urals-Siberian region. Now we have 2 faculties with full-time, part-time and correspondence departments. Training students is organized in some
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specialties: ”Labour Economy”, “Accounting and Audi ting”, “Finance and Credit”, “Management of Organization”, “Applied Information Science in Economy”. Highly qualified lecturers teach the students.
1. Answer the questions:
1)Where is the Academy situated?
2)When was it founded?
3)What forms of tuition can students take?
4)What specialists are trained at the Academy?
2.The Urals Social-Economic Institute is a branch of the ALSR. Write a presentation essay about the institute where you study. These questions can help you:
1)What specialists does the Institute train?
2)What modern facilities does the Institute provide?
3)What subjects do you study?
4)What traditions does the Institute have?
5)Who makes our students’ newspaper? How is it called?
6)Have you made any new friends here?
7)What foreign languages are taught at the Institute?
Text 7
MY ADVICE TO STUDENTS: EDUCATION COUNTS
By Bill Gates
Hundreds of students send me e-mail each year asking for advice about education. A smaller number of parents send messages seeking guidance for their son or daughter. My basic advice is to get the best education you can. Take advantage of high school and college. Learn how to learn.
It's true that I dropped out of college to start Microsoft, but I was at Harvard for three years before dropping out — and I'd love to have the time to go back.
I Finished high school! The computer industry has lots of people who didn't finish college, but I'm not aware of any success stories that began with somebody dropping out of high school. I actually don't know any high school dropouts, let alone any successful ones.
Quite a few of our people didn't finish college, but we discourage dropping out. Having a diploma certainly helps somebody who is looking to us for a job.
College isn't the only place where information exists. You can learn in a library. But you want to learn with other people, ask questions, try out ideas and have a way to test your ability. It usually takes more than just a book.
Education should be broad, although it's fine to have deep interests, too. In high school there were periods when I was highly focused on writing software, but for most of my high school years I had wide-ranging academic interests. My parents
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encouraged this, and I'm grateful that they did. Although I attended a lot of different kinds of classes in college, I signed up for only one computer class the whole time. I read about all kinds of things. High school and college offer you the best chance to learn broadly — math, history, and various sciences - and to do projects with other kids that teach you first-hand about group dynamics. It's fine to take a deep interest in computers, dance, language or any other discipline, but not if it jeopardizes breadth.
I’m impressed when an 11-yеаr-old can do calculus. He or she is learning to think logically. But a kid who is reading about Robinson Crusoe is thinking logically, too. It's not completely different.
In college it's appropriate to think about specialization. Graduate school is one way to get specialized knowledge, although extended college education isn't always a good investment from a purely economic standpoint. Choosing a specialty isn't something high school students should worry about. They should worry about getting a strong academic start. There's not a perfect correlation between attitudes in high school and success in later life, of course.
But it's a real mistake not to take the opportunity to learn a huge range of subjects, to learn to work with people in high school, and to get the grades that will help you get into a good college.
(From Bill Gates column / MN)
1. Answer the questions:
1)Why do many students and parents ask Bill Gates for advice about education?
2)What is the author’s basic advice?
3)What are the advantages of learning at college?
4)Do you agree that it is important for a child to read about Robinson Crusoe?
5)How can you comment on the words from the title of the text “EDUCATION COUNTS”?
2.Learn these words and word combinations and use them when speaking about education and career: to ask for advice, to take advantage (of), to drop out of college, a success story, to look for a job, to try out ideas, to test one’s ability, to be highly focused (on), to have wide-ranging academic interests, to do projects, to take a deep interest (in), to get specialized knowledge, to take the opportunity, a huge range of subjects.
Text 8
BUT HARD WORK ISN’T BAD FOR YOU
When I got into medical school at the age of 18, I was so fascinated by the possibilities of research that I used to get up at 4 a.m. and study, with very few interruptions, until about 6 p.m. I still remember my mother telling me that this sort
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of thing could not be kept up for long and would undoubtedly cause a nervous breakdown (нервный срыв). Now I am 66. I still get up at 4 a.m. and work until 6
p.m. Yet I am perfectly happy leading this kind of life.
“There is more to life than just work,” many say to day. Work is considered as something that wears you down, that produces stress.
It is true that biological stress causes many common diseases. But does this mean that we should avoid stress whenever possible? That we should avoid hard work because it is stressful? Certainly not. Stress is the spice of life. It is associated with all types of activity and we could avoid it only by never doing anything. Besides, certain types of activities help to keep the stress mechanism in good shape, as exercise of your muscles keeps you physically fit.
Work, to define it, is what we have to do; play is what we like to do. To function normally man needs work as he needs air, food or sleep. To look forward to total automation is senseless. Man’s characteristic feature is not his wisdom but his constant urge to improve his environment and himself.
Our aim, therefore, should not be to avoid work but to find the kind that suits us best. The best way to avoid stress is to select an activity, which we like and respect, and which is within our talents.
Work wears you out mainly through failure. Successful activity provides you with the feeling of youthful strength.
I believe one can live long and happily by working hard as long as he loves his activity and is reasonably successful at it.
Short hours are an advantage only for those who are not good at anything, have no particular taste for anything, and no hunger for achievement. These are the true paupers of mankind.
(After Hans Selye)
1. Answer the questions:
1)What is a common belief about hard work?
2)Why do people commonly think that hard work will undoubtedly cause a nervous breakdown?
3)What are the most common arguments for “less work m ore play”?
4)What common diseases are caused by stress? Must we avoid stress?
5)What helps to keep the stress mechanism in good shape?
6)It is common knowledge that stress is harmful. What is the best way to avoid stress?
7)What is a common belief about short hours?
2. Work in pairs. Discuss the author's statements:
1)“Our aim, therefore, should not be to avoid work but to find the kind that suits us best.”
2)“Work wears you out mainly through failure.”
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Text 9
MONEY
Money is used for buying or selling goods, for measuring value and for storing wealth. Almost every society now has a money economy based on coins and paper notes of one kind or another. However, this has not always been true. In primitive societies a system of barter was used. Barter was a system of direct exchange of goods. Somebody could exchange a sheep, for example, for anything in the market place that they considered to be of equal value. Barter, however, was a very unsatisfactory system because people’s precise needs seldom coincided. People needed a more practical system of exchange, and various money systems developed based on goods that the members of a society recognized as having value. Cattle, grain, teeth, shells, feathers, skulls, salt, elephant tusks and tobacco have all been used.
Precious metals gradually took over because, when made into coins, they were portable, durable, recognizable and divisible into larger and smaller units of value. A coin is a piece of metal, usually disc-shaped, which bears lettering, designs or numbers showing its value. Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coins were given monetary worth based on the exact amount of metal contained in them, but most modern coins are based on face value, the value that governments choose to give them, irrespective of the actual metal content. Coins have been made of gold (Au), silver (Ag), copper (Cu), aluminium (Al), nickel (Ni), lead (Pb), zinc (Zn), plastic, and in China even from pressed tealeaves.
Most governments now issue paper money in the form of notes, which are really ‘promises to pay’. Paper money is obviously easier to handle and much more convenient in the modern world. Cheques, bankers’ cards, and credit cards are being used increasingly and it is possible to imagine a world where ‘money’ in the form of coins and paper currency will no longer be used. Even today, in the United States, many places - especially filling stations - will not accept cash at night for security reasons.
1. Answer the questions:
1)What is money economy based on?
2)What is money used for?
3)What was barter?
4)What things were used for barter?
5)What is a coin?
6)What are different coins made of?
7)Why is paper money more convenient?
8)Are cards more convenient than paper money?
2. Put these words in the correct places in the sentences below: coins/cash/currency/money
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1)The ... of Japan is the yen.
2)She has got a lot of ... in her bank account.
3)It costs £10 if you’re paying.... It’ll be more if you pay by cheque.
4)Can you change this pound note into ... for the coffee machine?
Text 10
RUSSIAN COINS
In the past, scientists thought that for many centuries only feather and furs were used in ancient Russia as money. But now it is known that silver money was also used.
In the XII-XIV centuries almost all the coins disappeared in Russia. It happened because Russia was at war with the German knights and the MongolTartars at the same time. After the war the Russians had to pay much money to the Mongol-Tartars. So normal trade and economic ties with both the West and the East were broken. People began to hide money not to pay it to the Mongol-Tartars, that’s why archaeologists to this day find a lot of coins from that period.
In the XIV century some Russian principalities began to make their own silver coins. The coins weighed as much as one rouble. (In ancient Russia the word rouble meant a silver piece that weighed 200 grams). The coins were not round. They were called denga. Now we use this word as dengi and it means money. First coins were made in the Principality of Moscow, then in the Principality of Suzdal and Nizhny Novgorod and then in the Principality of Ryazan and Tver. There were more than 25 cities that made money. Coins were different in different cities, and it was difficult to use them in the country. At this time little copper coins and large gold coins appeared in Russia for the first time.
In 1534 a single monetary system was introduced in the Russian state. It showed that the long process of unification of the country was over. A new coin - a silver copeck - was made.
In the XVII century Peter the Great began to rule the country. He made many changes in Russia, and one of them was a new monetary system. A silver rouble became the main coin, there were 100 copecks in it. The rouble was large and round, it weighed 18 grammes. There were also other coins: 50 copecks, 25 copecks, 10 copecks and 5 copecks. There were no great changes in the Russian monetary system after that reform.
In 1769 the first Russian paper money appeared.
When World War I began all gold and silver coins disappeared. Only paper money was used at that time.
After the October Revolution a new monetary system was introduced.
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1. Find the answers to the questions:
1)What did people in ancient Russia use as money?
2)Why did coins disappear in Russia in the XII-XIV centuries?
3)How did the words rouble and denga come to our life?
4)Where were the first Russian coins made?
5)Why was a new monetary system introduced in Russia in 1534?
6)Why did Peter the Great make his monetary reform?
7)What kind of money was used in Russia during World War I?
8)What coins are used in Russia now?
Text 11
PAPER MONEY
Paper money. The notion of using paper as money is almost as old as paper itself. The first people to do it were the Chinese, who printed the earliest banknotes over 1,000 years ago. The most famous Chinese issuer of paper money was Kublai Khan, the Mongol who ruled the Chinese empire in the 13th century. Kublai Khan decreed that his paper money must be accepted by traders on pain of death. As further encouragement, he confiscated all gold and silver, even if it was brought in by foreign traders. Yet for all the threats, paper money did not succeed everywhere. In Persia, its forcible introduction in 1294 led to a total collapse of trade. By the 15th century even China had more or less given up paper money.
In Europe, the honour of being the first issuer of paper money belongs to Sweden, where in 1661 Johan Palmstruch's Stockholm Banco introduced the first banknotes. Other European countries soon followed the Swedish lead. One reason for establishing the Bank of England in 1694 was to print paper money, often in the form of “running cash notes”, the balance of which could be kept in an account. The Bank is now the longest continuous issuer of banknotes in the world.
The father of American paper currency is Benjamin Franklin, the man who features on today's $100 bill. He was a printer who was a fervent advocate of the benefits of paper currency.
Paper money. Forgery. Forgery is getting easier, not harder. Personal computers and colour-printing scanners have made the copying of anything much easier than it was. Yet there are still ways of staying ahead in the cat-and-mouse game of issuer and forger. One is through tight control of the paper. De la Rue, the owner of Portals, is the biggest commercial banknote printer in the world, with clients in 150 countries. Portals has supplied the Bank of England since 1742, and it says it has never had any paper stolen, although others claim that it did happen once in the 19th century.
Another way of foiling the forgers is through the choice of design and colour. For years green was the hardest colour to copy, which is why the Americans used it—hence the term “greenback”. Some intricacies of design can be hard to copy too.
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Plastic notes are another way forward, but experts say they too can be forged, and many users dislike them.
A third way of defeating the forgers is to change your notes frequently. Typically, banknotes used to remain in circulation for 15-20 years, and designs might change even less often. Now notes usually stay in circulation for less than ten years; and design changes are made more often still. New denominations are less common. But most countries have gradually replaced their smallest denomination notes with coins.
One final way to beat the forgers is even more drastic: do without notes at all. Yet the merits of plastic cards, Internet money or e-cash have been touted for many years without appearing to make much impact on the demand for paper money. If anything, the pattern has been for these new forms of money to replace not cash but cheques. Demand for paper money has been rising, not falling, as countries have got richer.
Paper money. The best and the brightest. So who has the best banknotes? Top position depends, naturally, on taste, although it is often the more obscure countries, such as Guatemala, that print the most attractive notes.
Over the past decades, most of the countries of Eastern Europe and the exSoviet Union have chosen to introduce new banknotes: when Belarus brought in one featuring animals, it rapidly became known as the bunny. The most attractive are said to be Estonia's and Macedonia's.
The best notes of all are, in many ways, those not printed by central banks at all. Many commercial banks have long printed their own notes: a fine collection of some printed by local country banks in Britain is currently on display at the British Museum. The big three Scottish banks still produce their own notes, although they have to be backed one-for-one by Bank of England notes.
But the purest example is Hong Kong, all of whose banknotes have always been printed by the former British colony's commercial banks. Even today, its notes are much admired. In the collectors' market, old Hongkong Bank notes fetch exceptionally high prices - one note from 1867 was sold in London recently for £85,000 ($125,000).
As for the new euro notes, they mostly get low marks. They have been heavily criticised for the banality of their designs. In an effort to avoid offending anybody, they omit any images of people. The bridges and doorways that have been chosen instead are all supposedly imaginary, although one or two bear a suspicious resemblance to real-life examples.
That means that were Britain ever to join the euro, its notes would lose the queen's head that appeared on British banknotes in 1960.
(From “The Economist”)
1. Answer the questions:
1)When did the earliest banknotes appear?
2)What was the reason of establishing the Bank of England?
3)Who is the father of American paper money?
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4)Is forgery getting harder?
5)What are the ways of defeating the forgers?
6)Is demand for paper money falling?
7)What countries issue the most attractive banknotes?
8)Does Scotland have its own currency?
9)Why is the price of an old Hongkong Bank note from 1867 so high?
10)Why are euro notes blamed of banality?
11)What symbol would Great Britain lose if it joined the euro?
12)What are the designs of Russian banknotes?
Text 12
GREAT DEPRESSION
On October 24, 1929 - “Black Thursday” - a wave of panic selling of stocks swept the New York Stock Exchange. Once started, the collapse of share and other security prices could not be halted. By 1932, thousands of banks and over 100,000 businesses had failed.
The Republican president, Herbert Hoover, in 1932 approved the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
But to masses of unemployed workers, Hoover seemed uncaring and unable to help them. In the 1932 election, he was resoundingly defeated by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who promised “a New Deal for the Amer ican People”.
Jaunty, optimistic and commanding public speaker, Roosevelt, a former governor of New York State, was able to inspire public confidence, as Hoover could not. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself ”, Roosevelt stated at his inauguration and he took prompt action to deal with the emergency. Within three months the historic “Hundred Days” - Roosevelt had rushed through Congress a great number of laws to aid the recovery of the economy. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) put young men to work in reforestation and flood control projects. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) aided state and local relief funds, which had been exhausted by the Depression. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) paid farmers to reduce production, thus raising crop prices. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) built a network of dams in the Tennessee River area in the southeastern region of the United States to generate electricity, control floods and manufacture fertilizer. And the National Recovery Administration (NRA) regulated “fair competition” among businesses and ensured bargaining rights and minimum wages for workers.
In 1935, the Social Security Act established contributory old age and survivors’ pensions as well as a joint federal state program of unemployment insurance. The Wagner Labor Relations Act banned unfair employer practices and protected the workers’ right to collective bargaining.
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