Контрольная работа № 3

1. Read the text. Different Washingtons

As you walk along the streets of the USA's capital, you will see different cities within the city. There is a Washington of politics and lobbyists. Its inhabitants move from the Capitol to House and Senate office buildings nearby, down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, then by taxicab swiftly back to the Capitol, which is at the top of Jenkins Hill. Over 43 per cent of the land of the District Columbia is occupied by the Federal Government. This is the Washington of the Federal reservation, an official city of great monuments and memorials, of vast bureaucracies housed in buildings of neoclassical or modern Congressional Grotesque design.

There is also a Washington of hurried lunches, of packed trolley cars, of bus rides to residential districts across the Potomac River in Arlington, of Sunday afternoons at the Zoo adjoining Rock Creek Park. There is a Washington of ‘Society’ in Georgetown along Massachusetts Avenue.

The Old Washington is sleepy Southern town of ceiling fans, sleeping porches, devoted Negro servants and old families who were actually born here. At the beginning of the 19^th century, the new capital was called ‘Wildness City’ and the ‘City of Streets Without Houses’. Old Washington is dying off now. The University-Washington is the northern section of pleasant homes on tree-lined streets, where almost everyone is white, well-educated, and has a high income.

The newspaper man's Washington is a composite of all these cities. Hundreds of reporters are continually visiting the Capitol and the White House both are connected with the heroic past of the country, the court-rooms, the offices of department heads and the national headquarters of labor unions and business associations. It is a place where big money is made, but it is not a centre of commerce and industry.

Tourists usually see only one and smaller city – Washington North West and its suburbs in Maryland or Virginia where prosperous people live. These places are inhabited by few privileged. Few people realize that Washington is a predominantly Negro city (over 70 per cent of its population are Negroes), largely low-income and low-education, though this city has a relatively large number of professional and middle-to-upper-income Negro families. But the majority have come to the capital in the hope of escaping poverty, degradation and race discrimination. They live in badly overcrowded row houses, their children go to decrepit schools, separated from and largely unseen by the other Washingtons.

But Washington has another place, one that is not part of its diplomatic image or its institutional face. ‘The Crime Capital of the World’, a horror of racial producing violence too terrible to speak of, has the slumps to which you will not be taken and to prisons behind are overcrowded.

II. Answer the questions on the text in written form.

1. What different Washingtons can be seen within one city?

2. What part of the capital are tourists never taken to? Why?

3. What Washington’s sights are connected with the heroic past of the country?

4. What makes people think of Washington as a great political empire?

5. Visiting Washington it isn’t to learn more of America there than anywhere else! Do you agree?

6. Washington still preserves its originally designed street plan, doesn’t it?

7. What purpose was Washington created for in 1791?

8. What ethnic minority constitutes the largest part of the city’s population?

9. When was the US capital founded and whom was it named after?

10. Where is the Capital situated?