Text I
The World’s First Megapolis
In 1982 the town of Shenzhen, just forty kilometers north of Hong Kong, was a fishing village with two main roads, fields and a population of 30,000. Now its population is about 3 million. It is growing at an incredible speed. The Chinese government hopes that in less than ten years this area will be the biggest city on earth, with a population of 40 million people.
China is changing. It is no longer a country where absolutely everything is owned and controlled by the state. Developers are welcome. The old China of bicycles and Little Red Books is disappearing. A world of mobile phones and capitalism is arriving.
The Chinese people seem to welcome all changes. They don’t worry about losing traditional ways of life. They want the new.
Shenzhen is a shocking place, like nowhere else on earth that I have ever seen. It is a city with no boundaries and no centre. There are thousands of new concrete office blocks, factories, and housing blocks as far as the eye can see. And it is all happening so fast. It takes just six months to design, build and finish a 60-storey, air-conditioning sky-scrapper. As one architect said to me, ‘If you move too slowly here, someone will walk over you.’
The new Hopewell Highway runs from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, and it takes just two hours to do the 123 kilometers. This superhighway will become the main street of a huge new city.
There will of course be more and more cars on the road. People don’t want bicycles. If you have a car, it means you have made money. So the traffic will be like in Bangkok. People ear and work in their cars.
This Pearl River City won’t be beautiful, but its power, energy, and wealth will be felt in all corners of the world.
Vocabulary:
population – население;
developer – 1. развивающийся человек;
2. застройщик;
boundary – граница;
concrete – бетон;
sky-scrapper – небоскреб;
highway – шоссе, магистраль.
Text II
Mobile Revolution
No consumer product in history has caught on as quickly as the mobile phone, global sales of which have risen from six million in 1991 to more than 400 million a year now.
The mobile phone has transformed our lifestyles so much that men now spend more time on the phone than women, according to the results of our special opinion poll.
The survey found that men with mobile phones (72% of all men) spend more than an hour a day making calls on an average weekday. The average man spends sixty-six minutes on his landline or his mobile.
But the poll reveals that, while men are using their phones a lot more, women are actually spending less time on the phone. Slightly fewer women (67%) have a mobile phone, and the survey shows that the average amount of time they spend on the phone on a weekday has gone down from sixty-three minutes before they got a mobile to fifty-five minutes now. The explanation might lie in the fact that men love to play with techno toys while women may be more conscious of the bills they are running up.
Innovation in mobile phones has been happening so fast that it's difficult for consumers to change their behaviour. Phones are constantly swallowing up other products like cameras, calculators, clocks, radios, and digital music players. Mobiles have changed the way people talk to one another, they have generated a new type of language, they have saved lives and become style icons.
Obviously, the rich have been buying phones faster than the poor. But this happens with every innovation. Indeed, as mobile phones continue to become cheaper and more powerful, they might prove to be more successful in bridging the gap between the rich and the poor than expensive computers.
There are obviously drawbacks to mobiles as well: mobile users are two and a half times more likely to develop cancer in areas of the brain adjacent to their phone ear; mobile thefts now account for a third of all street robberies in London; and don't forget about all the accidents happening to people when they drive with a mobile in one hand.
Vocabulary:
to catch on – становиться модным;
poll – опрос;
survey – опрос, анкетирование;
average – нормальный, среднестатистический;
to swallow up - поглощать;
to account – насчитывать.
Text III
The Rise of the Machines
Cars have given us freedom. We can go wherever and whenever we want to go. They have also given us independence. Cars provide us with personalised, door-to-door transport solution that's always available. But they also change the world we live in.
If you had to consider the impact of cars on your town first of all you would probably think of traffic jams and the difficulty of getting about in a car in the rush hour. Or maybe you would think of pollution, and how the toxic fumes erode the facades of buildings. But there is a much bigger change we almost never think about. Cars change the face of the towns themselves.
As people buy more and more cars, roads keep getting widened to accommodate the increasing volume of traffic. They encroach upon formerly green spaces: lawns, flowerbeds, or trees that used to line the roads. They expand until the pavements become a thin strip along the foot of the buildings, further narrowed by the parked cars that invade the last remaining inches of pedestrian space.
We all enjoy the facilities that shopping malls, cinemas and enormous entertainment complexes bring - because we can use our cars to get to them. They are efficient, convenient, and fast. At the same time, we are saddened by the loss of our local groceries, our beautiful Art Deco picture-houses and the friendly neighborhood community centres. What we must also realise is that these changes go hand in hand, and we are to blame.
Preferring our freedom to sharing transport with others, we get into our cars to get to our workplaces, to do our shopping, to go out to the theatre, and many would even drive to go for a walk in the fields. And wherever we drive to, we have to park, too. Parking spaces are huge areas used up by empty cars waiting for hours for their passengers to return. What used to be a vast grassy meadow now becomes a small muddy field fringed by a square of concrete and tar. And what cars have changed will never be like it used to be, ever again.
Vocabulary:
available – доступный;
traffic jam – автомобильная «пробка»;
rush hour – час пик;
to accommodate - приспосабливать(ся);
to encroach ((up)on) – вторгаться;
pedestrian – пешеход;
grocery - бакалейная лавка;
to fringe - обрамлять, окаймлять;
concrete – бетон;
tar - смола.
Text IV
Child Prodigy
Child prodigy Ruth Lawrence made history yesterday when she came first out of the 530 candidates who sat the entrance exam for St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. The all-women’s college is likely to offer her a scholarship. Ruth sat three three-hour papers – Algebra and Geometry; Calculus, Probability and Statistic; and Maths, Pure and Applied.
Ruth, who lives in Huddersfield, has never been to school. Her father, Harry Lawrence, a computer consultant, gave up his job when Ruth was five to educate her at home. Her mother, Sylvia, who also works in computers, is the family breadwinner.
Harry Lawrence explained that, besides mathematics, Ruth also enjoyed English, history, geography, nature study and other subjects. She began to read at four and started academic subjects at five. ‘We did not start off with the thought that she would not go to school’, he said, ‘but we enjoyed teaching her so much that we just carried on.’
Because she does not go to school, Ruth has not mixed much with other children. She enjoys serious conversation with adults, so her father hopes that she will not feel out of place at Oxford. He does not think she works harder than children her age, but concentrates on what she enjoys, principally mathematics. She also watches TV, plays the piano and has quite a wide range of interests.
If she does well at St. Hugh’s, Ruth expects to take further degree and eventually hopes to become a research professor in mathematics. The Lawrence family plans to move to Oxford when Ruth takes up her place in October 1983. Before then, she plans to take four A levels to satisfy the college requirements.
Miss Rachel Trickett, the principal of St. Hugh’s, said last night: ‘We are all very excited about Ruth. She is obviously quite brilliant and has shown genuine originality.’
When Ruth becomes a student, her father looks forward to concentrating his efforts on his younger daughter Rebecca, who is seven.
Vocabulary:
prodigy - одаренный человек; to satisfy – удовлетворять;
to sit the entrance exam – сдать requirement – требование;
вступительный экзамен; to look forward to – с нетерпением ждать.
paper – письменная работа;
to educate - воспитывать, обучать;
давать образование;
breadwinner – кормилец;
to mix with – общаться, дружить;
to feel out of place – чувствовать себя не в своей тарелке;
Text V