10. Is cinema a kind of art?

Cinematography has rather a long story. Cinema plays an important role in the life of any society. It is an available popular form of art. Lots of people find going to the cinema one of the best ways of spending their leisure time. The movie audience is predominantly a young one.

Due to numerous video facilities, cinema attendances have declined sharply. But there is no denying the fact that the cinema-going habit is still a strong one.

No matter how large the place you live in is (whether it's a big city or a small provincial town, or even a settlement) there's most likely to be a cinema there.

There are such genres of feature films as the western, the thriller, the musical, the drama and the comedy.

The film that we see at the cinema is the product of joint efforts of many people.

Many films nowadays raise urgent problems facing contemporary society: ecology, ethnic conflicts, politics and moral, rise in crime and others. Cinema films help us to study these problems, to see our drawbacks and understand our life better.

9. Do you agree that music the universal language of mankind?

Can you imagine a day without music? I bet, you can't. There is music everywhere around us. Birds singing their nice songs in the forest, a brass band playing at a distance in the park, tunes of some lyrical song heard out of the open window. We hear so much music that we may not even notice it sometimes. And what is music? On the one hand, it is a language that is used to express our moods and feelings. On the other hand, it is an art, which reflects life, people's ideas and emotions. Anyway, it is not a combination of pleasant or rhythmic sounds only.

Some music is happy, and some is sad. Some is serious, and some can make people laugh. Everybody can listen to the music he prefers. Some people enjoy classical music. It enriches the spiritual life of the man, awakens his thought, and develops his imagination.

Light music improves the man's mood, heightens his capacity for work. Rhythmical music gives a supply of cheerfulness. People of the elder generation prefer light music, they enjoy lyrical songs, soft tunes, the so-called "songs to warm the heart", performed by well-known singers.

As for the young people, they look for new rhythms and new styles, and they find these in pop-music. It's quite natural; youth all over the world enjoys dancing, and pop-music provides this opportunity. Some youngsters get crazy about the music played by rock-musicians. Crowds of rock-fans pack large stadiums in order to give vent to their emotions and energy.

So, people love music, they listen to the music, they dance to music. Lots of children go to numerous music schools where they take singing lessons or learn to play musical instruments. People make their own music, too. So, music plays an important role in our life and is universal language of mankind.

7. You are a gude at the art gallery/ describing and outstanding piece of painting.

I am not very fond of arts but there are some masterpieces that I admire and that I would like to see with my own eyes. One of them is Van Gogh’s “Starry night over the Rhone”. It was painted in September 1888 in France. Now it’s located in Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

This oil painting is a landscape presenting a view of Rhone’s bank in Arles at night. The spectator seems to look towards the opposite shore. He sees the lights in the houses there and their traces on the water. There on the back ground fuzzy contours of buildings and trees are slightly visible through the dark. The sky is filled with big bright stars reflecting in the deep blue water. On this shore there are some boats and two people – a man and a woman - walking on the sand.

It’s difficult to define what the foreground of the painting is because there are lots of details and the whole composition which make your eyes examine every piece of the canvas. As for me, it’s the water surface with the reflections on it and the starry sky above. The sky and the river in the middle of the picture are much lighter. It attracts our attention there.

The principle devices used by Van Gogh here is coloring (he uses two optional colors – blue and yellow in great variety of tones and hues) and light and shade effects. The technique used by the artist is called impasto – the paint is laid on an area of the surface very thickly and roughly. It’s the manner of Van Gogh which makes his works very expressing and lively. Looking at “Starry night over the Rhone” I seem to feel a cool breeze, to smell the river, to hear the waves’ murmur and to be a little blinded by the bright starlight.