И. Б. Абрамова О. П. Кириченко

BRITISH HOMES

1. 
   About 80 per cent of British people live in houses built close together. Detached houses are usually in expensive suburbs, quite far from the town centre. Terraced houses and blocks of flats are mostly found in town centers. They can either be very small two-storey houses with one or two bedrooms or large houses with three or five floors and four or five bedrooms.
   
2. 
   About 67 per cent of people in Britain own their houses or flats. Most of the rest live in rented accommodation. People in Britain buy houses or flats because there is not enough rented accommodation and what there is can be expensive.
   
3. 
   Council flats¹ and houses are built and owned by the local council. After the Second World War a lot of council flats, known as tower blocks, were constructed. Some were as high as 20 storeys and so badly built that they had to be pulled down only thirty years later.
   
4. 
   Modern housing estates² are built differently now. There might be a mixture of two-storey terraced houses together with a four-storey block of flats. There are play areas for children and there is often a community centre³ where people who live on the estate can meet.
   
5. 
   Since 1980’s council tenants have been able⁴ to buy their own homes very cheaply if they have lived in them for over two years. By 1993, 1,5 million council houses had been sold, but only 5000 council houses or flats were built to replace them. This means that it is now very difficult to find cheap housing or rent.
   
6. 
   Most British houses have a garden and many British people spend a lot of time in it. Most gardens, even small ones, have flowers and a lawn. If you don’t have a garden, it is possible to grow flowers and vegetables on at allotment⁵ which is a piece of land rented from the local council.
   

1. 
   муниципальное жилье
   
2. 
   микрорайон
   
3. 
   центр общения
   
4. 
   зд. – жители могут
   
5. 
   зд. – участок
   

Вариант 4

1. 
   Many outstanding statesmen, painters, writers and poets are buried in the Abbey.
   
2. 
   Many visitors to the Abbey are attracted to Poets’ Corner.
   
3. 
   The street called Whitehall stretches from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square.
   

1. 
   Scotland Yard is situated on the Thames Embankment close to the Houses of Parliament and the familiar clock tower of Big Ben.
   
2. 
   An interesting branch of Scotland Yard is the branch of Police Dogs, first used as an experiment in 1938.
   
3. 
   The popular nickname of the London policeman “bobby” is a tribute to Sir Robert Peel, who introduced the police force in 1829, and whose Christian name attached itself to members of the force.
   

1. 
   Most museums of London are free and give free guided tours as well as lectures.
   
2. 
   Some cinemas are cheaper on Mondays; others sell half-price tickets before 6 p.m.
   
3. 
   The Cutty Sark¹ at the village of Greenwich on the River Thames is the most famous tea clipper in Britain.
   

1. 
   Some people think that the monarchy should be abolished.
   
2. 
   The monarchy in Britain has no power and it costs the State a lot of money to maintain.
   
3. 
   Can you give any examples borrowed from books and films characterizing the British people?
   

1. 
   Everybody knows about the devotion of the English to animals.
   
2. 
   You might think that marriage and the family are not so popular as they once were.
   
3. 
   During the nineteenth century Britain traded all over the world.