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Funny story.
Oh, no! Here comes Mrs. Gomes with her 4 children. Every Friday night is the same story. The supermarket manager is watching them from the service counter. His hand is on his head. Mrs. Gomes is smiling, pushing her cart up and down the isles. Ada the youngest, is sitting in the cart, screaming.
Mrs. Gomes isn’t listening. She is at the meat counter picking out some chicken. Ada is crying louder and louder. She wants ice -cream.
Marco is helping his mother. He is putting food in the cart when she isn’t looking. He is adding cookies, potatoes chips and doughnuts.
The produce manager is talking to Carmen. He is telling her she can’t eat the bananas. He is taking a bunch of grapes from her too.
One of the employees is walking towards the manager. She is angry. She’s pulling a child after her, while he was running, one Gomes knocked over 5 bottles of soda. Another employee is mopping the floor.
Thanks Goodness, Mrs. Gomes has finished. She is walking out of the store pushing her cart. Her children are following quietly behind her.
,,Goodbuy!’’- Mrs. Gomes is smiling at the manager, ,,We’ll see you next week.’’
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The Indian who could foretell the weather
Two men were traveling in a very wild and lonely part of America. For days they had not even seen a house, only a few hats made of wood, or tents made of skins. Then one day they met an old Indian who earned his living by trapping animals for their fur. They found that he knew their language and they had a little conversation with him. One of them asked him if he could tell them what the weather would be like within the next few days.
“Oh yes,” he said. “rain is coming, and wind. Then there will be snow for two days, but after that there will be bright sunshine.”
“Isn’t that wonderful?” said one man to his friend. “These old Indians know more of the secrets of Nature than we do with all our science. They have not been spoiled by civilization.” Then he turned to the old Indian.
“Tell me,” he said, “how you knew all that.”
The Indian replied, “I heard it on the radio.”
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Meals in England
The English are very particular about their meals and strictly keep to their meal times.
Breakfast is any time until 8 o’clock in the morning, lunch is between 12 and 2 p.m., afternoon tea is between 4 and 5 p.m. and dinner between 7 and 9 p.m.
The usual English breakfast is porridge or corn flakes with milk or cream and sugar, bacon and eggs, marmalade with buttered toast, rolls, tea or coffee. For a change you can have a boiled egg, cold ham, or perhaps fish.
The English often serve tea with milk. English tea is so strong that pouring it out into a cup together with a little milk you get a brownish liquid looking like weak coffee with milk.
Most English people put milk in their coffee too – this is known as «white» coffee. Waiters will ask you if you want your coffee « black or white» rather than «with or without milk
or without milk».
At lunch time they usually have cold meat and salad or fish often with potatoes or other vegetables.
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The World around us
The Earth is a planet. We live on the Earth. This planet is our home. We want our home to be clean and new. We want to see blue seas, green trees and clear sky. We want to breath clean air. If you care about your planet, don’t make it dirty, don’t leave plastic bags, bottles, cans, newspapers in the streets, parks, forests, and on the beaches. Remember that the future is in our hands.
There are seven continents on the Earth. They are: Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, Antarctica and Australia.
Australia is one of the most interesting continents. Seventeen million people live in Australia. English people found Australia two hundred years ago. Many families came to Australia from England, so most people speak English there.
The weather in Australia is hot and dry and the centre of the country is a desert.
There are many interesting animals in Australia. Dingoes are dogs but they don’t live with people. They are wild and you can find them in the desert. Kangaroos and koalas live in Australia too. They carry their babies in a special pocket called a “pouch”.
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An economic lead over Asia
The US has long regarded itself as a natural role model for other countries. For most of its history it has offered a certain mixture of personal freedom and material abundance. But its status as a role model is now being challenged by East Asia. For the past three decades this region’s per capita economic growth is more than 5 per cent annually.
Asian leaders emphasise that their model of development has social as well as economic advantages. Many believe that Americans are «too free».
Lee Kuan Yew , the fomer prime minister of Singapore and architect of its economic transformation, said in his interview with the journal Foreign Affairs, of American society: «I find parts of it totally unacceptable: guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, - in other words it’s a breakdown of civil society».
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Supermarkets and Malls
Among big shops both in Britain and the USA there are supermarkets. A supermarket is a
self – service store selling foods and household goods ( merchandise).
In a supermarket there are no shop assistants, there are only employees. Customers must
take a cart when they enter a supermarket. Then they go along the aisles of the store choosing
the goods they want. Before going to a supermarket some customers make up a shopping list
not to forget the articles to be bought.
In the USA there are typically American shopping centers. They are called malls. A mail is
a group of shops with associated passageways and parking space. In a mail you can also find a
restaurant and a cinema for the shoppers (buyers) to spend the whole day at one location.
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Westminster Abbey
Not far away, in Westminster another important part of London where most of the Government buildings are situated, is Westminster Abbey.
It is the Cathedral where English sovereigns are crowned. As the scene of the coronation of English sovereigns, Westminster Abbey maintains a tradition established by William the Conqueror, whose crowning took place on Christmas Day 1066 in the church built by Edward the Confessor. In the 11th century the ritual was the same in essentials when Queen Elisabeth ІІ was crowned on 2 June 1953, although the architectural setting had changed.
Westminster Abbey is also the place where many outstanding English statesman, painters, poets, and musicians are buried.
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English meals
People of any country have their own mode of life and their own cuisine. The English usually have three meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner 9or high tea). A cup of coffee or tea at about eleven o’clock in the morning and afternoon tea are not called meals. People have only a cup of coffee or tea at these times and eat a small cake or a biscuit. Children are generally given milk between meals. Some people, especially those who have high tea instead of dinner, have a light supper before they go to bed. It is usually milk and dry biscuits.
For breakfast English people usually have cornflakes or porridge with milk, sometimes with milk, sometimes with milk and sugar, and then bacon and eggs or sausages or fish with toast, followed by tea or coffee.
In the afternoon the English have lunch. For lunch they have some hot or cold meat with potatoes and salad and then a sweet pudding. There is water on the table if people want to drink. The most important meal of the day is dinner. Dinner is usually at seven o’clock or a little later. For dinner Englishmen usually eat a little soup, then meat, vegetables and potatoes, or fish and potatoes. There is usually a green salad, too. They finish dinner with a sweet pudding and fruit. After dinner many people have a cup of coffee.
Instead of dinner many people have high tea. There are usually cheese and jam on the table for tea and also cake and biscuits. The time for high tea is between six and seven o’clock.
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The Seasons
The year is divided into four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter.
December, January, and February are the winter months.
February is the shortest 9it has 28 days a month and 29 – in a leap year) and the coldest month of the year in our region. It is usually cold in winter. Lakes and rivers are frozen, the roads are covered with slippery ice or deep snow.
March, April and May are the spring months. In spring the days are longer and the nights are shorter than in winter. Nature awakens from her long winter sleep. The snow melts and turns to slush. It gets warmer and the trees are in bud. All the people enjoy the spring odour of the trees blossoming, the first flowers such as snowdrops, primroses, tulips daffodils, lilac.
June, July, and August are the summer months. The days get hotter- the sun shines brightly and the sky is cloudless. The grass is soft, the trees are in leaf.
September, October, and November are the autumn months. The weather is very much changeable in autumn. After windy, misty, rainy days there are fine sunny periods. The leaves turn red, yellow and brown. Birds migrate to warm countries. Autumn brings with it the harvest –work when the crops are gathered in and the fruit is picked.
It’s hard to say which season is the best, everyone is beautiful in its own way.
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New York City
Unlike old cities, such as Rome or London, New York is relatively young. It was founded in the 17th century. Now New York is the largest city of the United States of America and one of the largest cities in the world. It’s population is nearly eight million. It’s partly situated at the estuary of the Hudson River on Manhatten Island. New York City consists of 5 boroughs:
Brooklin, the Bronx, Manhatten, Queens and Richmond.
Wall Street inManhatten is the financial centre of the United States. It’s street of skyscrapers. One of the well- known buildings in Manhatten is the Empire State Building with its 102 floors. Broadway is the street where you can find New York’s best known theaters but most of the theaters and places of entertainment are actually located on the side streets near Times Square.
It’s easy to find one’s way in New York. The avenues, except Broadway, run north and south; streets run east and west and are numbered are parallel to each other.
The Subway (the underground is called «subway» in the USA) provides the cheapest and fastest way of traveling. A trip on the New York subway is a complete mystery to many tourists .Local trains operate in down town Manhattan ;express trains pass through and occasionally stop ,but they mainly go to the suburbs, so beware; you can be taken miles beyond your destination by mistake.
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A Life for a Life
The English author, Richard Savage , was once living in London in great poverty. In order to earn a little money he had written the story of his life, but not many copies of the book had been sold in the shops, and savage was living from hand to mouth. As a result of his luck of food he became very ill, but after a time, owing to the skill of the doctor who had looked after him, he got well again. After a week or two the doctor sent a bill to Savage for his visits, but poor Savage hadn’t any money and couldn’t pay it. The doctor waited for another month and sent the bill again. But still no money came. After several weeks he sent it to him again asking for his money. In the end he came to Savages’s house and asked him for payment, saying to Savage, “You know you owe your life to me and I expected some gratitude from you.”
“I agree,” said Savage, “that I owe my life to you, and to prove to you that I am not ungrateful for your work I will give my life to you.” With these words he handed to him two volumes entitled, The Life of Richard Savage
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Post Office
You can send and receive mail through a post office.
If you call at a post office or the General Post Office (G.P.O.) you’ll see a number of windows with notices in big letters showing the operations handled and you’ll see the post office clerks behind the counters. The windows are marked, «Stamps», «Postcards», «Envelopes», «Registered Letters», «Air Mail», «Telegrams», «Book Post» and the others.
In England you can buy stamps at the post office or from a small automatic machine by the side of a pillar- box, a round red letter -box standing in the corner of a street.
When sending a letter to a foreign country you should know the postage on a letter to a particular country and you may ask the clerk: “What is a postage on this letter to France (Italy, Russia), please?”
To send and receive mail in Britain and the USA you need to use a proper mailing address, which includes the full name of the addressee, a street address (a house number and street name), city, state, zip code country.
In the USA the addressee’s address is usually written below at the center of the envelope. They write the sender’s address in the top left corner. In Britain they sometimes write the sender’s address on the back of the envelope.
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Robert Burns
Robert Burns (1759-1796) is a Scotland’s national poet. He was born on January, 2 and this day of his birth is always celebrated in his country and all over the world with great excitement. The celebrations are going on everywhere: in a big city and in a small village, in every remote cottage with workers and farmers dressed in kilts or in ordinary working clothes.
The love for Burns I s indeed a unique phenomenon. Most nations consider political or military men as their national heroes. But Scotland honors the memory of her two great national liberators William Wallace and Robert Burns. I think it happened because Burn’s poetry was closely connected with the national struggle of the Scottish people for their liberation from English oppression. Burns considered his literary work as his patriotic duty.
Burns wrote many poems in English, but his best verses are written in the dialect of his own country. His best poems are; the jolly Beggars, Halloween, the Gotter’s Saturday Night,
To a Mouse, The Two Dogs and others.
Burns traveled a lot about Scotland collecting popular folk songs. Many of his own lyrical poems were put to music. All in all he contributed 200 songs to the Scots musical museum.
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Correspondent Banking Relationship
The key element of international finance and trade is the correspondent banking relationship.
Banks usually maintain a number of correspondent banking relationships. When two banks agree to be correspondents with each other, they exchange their signature books. The signature book includes signatures required for different transactions. To debit an account may require only one signature, and other transactions,such as letters of credit, may require two or more signatures.
Correspondent banks provide various services and charge fees for each service. The services may include clearing checks, foreign exchange trading, confirming and advising letters of credit,checking the credit of local customers, purchasing and selling securities, and safekeeping securities. Correspondent banks are agents in their respective local markets.
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