My Favourite Holidays and Celebrations (Мои любимые праздники)

   I want to tell you about my favourite holidays. I have quite a lot of them. I usually celebrate holidays with my relatives and friends. We gather together, lay up the table full of food, dance and play different games.

   New Year is my favourite holiday since early childhood. My brother and I usually decorate a New Year tree with colourful glass balls and toys. I also like cooking New Year supper. I always help my mother to decorate New Year dishes. At night we have a real feast. We eat what we have cooked and watch TV. After clock strikes midnight, New Year comes. We drink champagne and give each other presents.

   My other favourite celebration is my birthday which is in May. On this day I am in the centre of attention. My parents and friends give me presents. If the weather is nasty I have a birthday party at home. If the weather is fine I invite my friends to have picnic in the forest. I invite close friends and we have fun together.

   I also like St.Valentirie's Day, which is a new holiday in Russia. It is celebrated on the 14-th of February. I like this holiday because it gives a lot of fun. We have Love mail at school. A box is placed on the ground floor of the building and anybody can put into it a card with the name of the person it is addressed to and the number of the form. In the middle of the day the mail is delivered and it is nice to get a card from a person you don't know.

   I really enjoy holidays and celebrations!

My Favourite Writer (Мой любимый писатель)

   I believe that books are one of the greatest wonders in the world. Books are the way to live hundreds of lives and to have thousands of adventures being at home. The work of my fantasy and imagination while reading is what makes me happy. I started reading myself at 5 years old. But first books that impressed me deeply were read to me by my mother. These are fairy tales of Christian Andersen and forest short stories of Vitalij Bianki.

   If somebody asks me about my favourite writer I won’t probably find the answer. Every book that I read becomes the best one for me for the time of reading. Usually I try to read the books of one author one by one. In such a way I can understand his thoughts, images, ideas and the writing manner better.

   At the moment I become acquainted with the works of John Fowles. John Fowles is an English novelist and essayist, master of layered story-telling, illusionism, and purposefully ambiguous endings. His first novel, and the first that I read, “The Collector” , is a study of a clerk who is psychologically impelled to kidnap and murder. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is a “Victorian” novel that has three endings. It reflects contemporary self-consciousness about nineteenth-century England and the form of the novel itself. I really enjoyed the works of John Fowles and for the time being I am going to start his book “The Magus”.

My Biography (Моя биография)

   The topic that is given to me is «My biography». It sounds too meaningful. It means something very important. I am sorry to say that there is little to speak about my short past life. I am too young to have my own family, I am not married yet. My name is Sergey. My last name is Petrov. The patronymic is Vadimovich. So my full name is Sergey Vadimovich Petrov. I am seventeen years old. I was born on the twelfth of June. I am a former pupil. I left school a month ago. I did not attend any nursery or kindergarten. I began to go to school at the age of six. It was eleven years ago. I had been studying at the same school for eleven years running without changing it. We had many subjects: history, English, biology and many others. I liked to study at school and my impressions of it are rather pleasant. My favorite subjects are English and informatics. On the English lessons we read and translate the text and learn new words. On the informatics lessons we write the pro¬grams. That is why I choose English examination.