Топик: Билеты и ответы на них по Английскому языку на 2002 год

Heritage - наследие

Burden - бремя

Hardship – неприятности

Substitute - заменить

Awareness – осведомленность, информированность

Immense – огромный

Vigour - решительные

Take actions – принимать действия

Culture of the youth

The foundation of the great schools which were named Universities was everywhere throughout Europe a special mark of the new impulse that Christendom had got from the Crusades. A new desire for study sprang up in the West from its contact with the more cultured East. Oxford and Cambridge are the oldest universities in England. Both of these universities are very beautiful. They have some of the finest architecture in Britain. Some of their colleges, chapels and libraries are three, four and even five hundred years old, and are full of valuable books and precious paintings. Of the early history of Cambridge little is known, but enough remains to enable us to trace the early steps by which Oxford gained its intellectual glory. The history of Cambridge is believed to begin in 1209 when several hundred students and scholars arrived at the little town of Cambridge after having walked 60 miles from Oxford According to the custom they joined themselves into “Universities” or a society of people with common employment. Only later they came to be associated with scholarship. '

Cambridge won independence from the Town rule in 1500. Students were of different ages and came from everywhere. Gradually the idea of the College developed and in 1284 Peter house, the oldest College was established. In 1440 King Henry VI founded King’s College, and other colleges followed. The first college of Oxford University was founded in 1249. At hat time with the revival of classic studies many teachers became enemies of parliament, and the Church. The lectures of Vicarious on the Civil Law at Oxford were prohibited by the English king. Now the university of Oxford has thirty-five colleges and about thirteen thousand students. There were no woman students at Oxford until 1878, when the first women’s college, Lady Margaret Hall, was up. Now, most colleges are open to man and women. Oxford is famous for its first-class education as well as its beautiful buildings. Many students want to study there. It is not so easy to get a place at Oxford University to study for a degree. But outside the university there are many smaller private colleges, which offer less difficult courses and where it is easy to enrol.

Vocabulary

Architecture - архитектура

Valuable - ценный

Precious - дорогой

Christendom – Христианский мир

Crusade – крестовый поход

Spring up - возникать

Revival of classic studies – возрождение классических наук

Prohibit - запрещать

Degree – ученая степень

Enrol – зачислять

Arts

American literature is dated from Mark Twain. Much of his writing was autobiographical. «Life on the Mississippi» was a story of his experiences as a pilot learning the great river and the country that it crossed, and the society that lived on its boats or along its banks. In 1884 came the greatest of his achievements«Huckleberry Finn». 'All modern literature comes from «Huckleberry Finn»', said Ernest Hemingway, and the aphorism is really true. Mark Twain was considered by his contemporaries the Lincoln of American literature. The «valley of democracy» that created Mark Twain produced his friend W.D. Howells. In his writing Howells gave the most comprehensive picture of middle-class American society to be found in the whole of American literature. Probably no other novelist except Balzac ever made so elaborate a report on his society as did W.D. Howells. He drew genre pictures of the New England countryside, the best of all portraits of the «self-made» businessman, the extravagant life of the Ohio frontier, the rough life and work in New York City, and the clash of cultures in European resorts. Howells was not only one of the most representative American novelists; but he was, too, at the same time, the leading American Literature literary critic. He edited the great «Atlantic Monthly». He introduced Ibsen, Zola, and Turgenev to American audiences, discovered and sponsored younger writers like Stephen Crane and Frank Norris.

The third of the major novelists who emerged during the 1870s and reached maturity in the transition years was Henry James. Henry James took middle-class America for his theme. His best novels -«The Portrait of a Lady», «The American», «The Ambassadors», «The Wings of the Dove» - explore the themes of manners and morals. Very often they are cast into a pattern of New World innocence and Old World corruption. Of all American novelists between Hawthorne and Faulkner, James was most completely preoccupied with moral problems. Because James wrote of characters and subjects alien to the average American, and in a style intricate and sophisticated, he achieved little popularity in his own lifetime.

Vocabulary

Pilot - лоцман