Прочитайте текст и вставьте вместо каждого пропуска нужную грамматическую форму, выбрав её из выпадающего спи ка. My favourite room Му favourite room is our kitchen. Perhaps the kitchen is the most important room in many houses, but it is particularly so in our house because it’s not only where we cook and eat but it’s also the main meeting place for family and friends. I have so many happy A of times spent there: special occasions such as homecomings or cooking Christmas dinner; troubled times, which B to comforting cups of tea in the middle of the night; ordinary daily events such as making breakfast on dark, cold winter mornings for sleepy children before sending them off to school, then sitting C to read the newspaper with a steaming hot mug of coffee. Whenever we have a party, people gravitate with their drinks to the kitchen. It always ends up the fullest and noisiest room in the house. So what does this special room D like? It’s quite big, but not really huge. It’s big enough to have a good-sized oval table in the centre, E is the focal point of the room. There is a large window above the sink, which looks out onto two apple trees in the garden. The cooker is at one end. At the other end is a wall with a large notice-board, which tells the story of our lives, past, present, and future, in words and pictures. All our world is there for everyone to read! Without doubt some of the happiest times of my life have been spent in our kitchen. A 1) memorials 2) memoirs 3) souvenirs 4) memories B 1) take 2) lead 3) drive 4) guide C 1) up 2) down 3) on 4) around D 1) glance 2) watch 3)see 4) look E 1) what 2) who 3) which 4) where
I think it’s hard to create an ideal school uniform. First of all, it’s very cold in winter and really very warm in Russia in spring and the beginning of autumn, and school uniform should be perfect for the whole school year. Then comes the question of the materials – it’s of course cheaper to make uniform from modern synthetic materials, than from natural fabrics and wool, but each mother would choose the last variant. At the same time, school uniform should be affordable to each family. If speaking about the design of the ideal school uniform, it should suit every pupil, boy and girl, regardless if he or she attends elementary school or is almost a school graduate.
But I support the idea of school uniform. I like that school uniform is a part of school tradition, and makes you honor your school more. Also I support the idea that pupils should think more about studying, and not about what are they dressed in. Introduction of school uniform can help to ease the gap between the rich and the poor and make pupils treat each other as personalities.
Contents
The Reader of Books Mr Wormwood, the Great Car Dealer
The Hat and the Superglue
The Ghost Arithmetic The Platinum-Blond Man Miss Honey
The Trunchbull The Parents Throwing the Hammer
Bruce Bogtrotter and the Cake
Lavender The Weekly Test
The First Miracle The Second Miracle Miss Honey’s Cottage
Miss Honey’s Story
The Names The Practice
The Third Miracle A New HomeThe Reader of Books
It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It’s the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring, that we start shouting, "Bring us a basin! We’re going to be sick!"
School teachers suffer a good deal from having to listen to this sort of twaddle from proud parents, but they usually get their
own back when the time comes to write the end-of-term reports. If I were a teacher I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of doting parents. "Your son Maximilian", I would write, "is a total wash- out. I hope you have a family business you can push him into when he leaves school because he sure as heck won’t get a job anywhere else." Or if I were feeling lyrical that day, I might write, "It is a curious truth that grasshoppers have their hearing-organs in the sides of the abdomen. Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she’s learnt this term, has no hearing-organs at all."
I might even delve deeper into natural history and say, "The periodical cicada spends six years as a grub underground, and no more than six days as a free creature of
sunlight and air. Your son Wilfred has spent six years as a grub in this school and we are still waiting for him to emerge from the chrysalis." A particularly poisonous little girl might sting me into saying, "Fiona has the same glacial beauty as an iceberg, but unlike the iceberg she has absolutely nothing below the surface." I
think I might enjoy writing end-of-term reports for the stinkers in my class. But enough of that. We have to get on.
Occasionally one comes across parents who take the opposite line, who show no interest at all in their children, and these of course are far worse than the doting ones. Mr and Mrs Wormwood were two such parents. They had a son called Michael and a daughter called Matilda, and the parents
looked upon Matilda in particular as nothing more than a scab. A scab is something you have to put up with until the time comes when you can pick it off and flick it away. Mr and Mrs Wormwood looked forward enormously to the time when they could pick their little daughter off and flick her away, preferably into the next county or even further than that.
It is bad enough when parents treat ordinary children as though they were scabs and bunions, but it becomes somehow a lot worse when the child in question is extraordinary, and by that I mean sensitive and brilliant. Matilda was both of these things, but above all she was brilliant. Her mind was so nimble and she was so quick to learn that her ability should have been obvious even to the most half-witted of
parents. But Mr and Mrs Wormwood were both so gormless and so wrapped up in their own silly little lives that they failed to notice anything unusual about their daughter.