1.What is the main idea of the text?

2. What happened on an Italian motorway?

3. What did the professor do with the ticket?

4. Why did the victim decline the thief's proposal of fee?

5. What do you think about this story?

БИЛЕТ 12

1 Вопрос

HOME LESSONS FOR SCHOOLGIRLS UPBRAIDED OVER HAIR EXTENSIONS

Two schoolgirls facing GCSE exams are being taught at home after being banned from classrooms by a headmaster who considered their hairstyles to be "attention-seeking". They have been told they will not be allowed to study with other pupils until they either tie their hair in buns or take out the plaits. The 15-year-olds paid $85 each to have chest-length extensions braided into their last month. After their hairstyles went unmentioned for two weeks, they were ordered into "seclusion", studying by themselves in a separate room. Their parents were so appalled by the decision to keep them from other pupils that they are now helping the girls to study at home, "...the school is willing to impede Faye's results by punishing her during the run-up to her GCSE exams", Faye's mother said. Ted Rowley, the headmaster, said yesterday: "The school rules say that extreme or attention-seeking hairstyles are inappropriate. It is a matter of judgment after that, of course, as to what constitutes attention seeking... The school is a community and its members have to conform to a set of standards. With 1,000 pupils, the others can be very quick to pick up when someone is flouting those rules. It is up to the parents to decide if their children are going to support the standards we have set. If they do not, they are free to send them to other schools with different standards to our own".

1.What is the main idea of the text?

2. Why were two schoolgirls forbidden to attend school?

3. Why are their parents helping the girls to study at home?

4. The school is a community and its members have to conform to a set of standards, isn’t it?

5. What do you think about the story?

БИЛЕТ 13

1 Вопрос

AWAY FROM IT ALL

I don't know if it happens the other way around, but almost everybody who lives in the city sometimes thinks of leaving it. Stuck in a traffic jam, squeezing onto the underground train, pushing a buggy at noxious exhaust-fume level along a crowded street, we imagine a more innocent world, where the horizons are wide and the air pure, where birds sing from the tree tops. Of course, the countryside isn't natural any more; it is manufac-tured and tame. The forests have gone, the coasts are eroded by global warming. There is oil on the beaches, pollution in the rock pools. The countryside has been abolished; the hedgerows where wildlife flourished have been wiped away, and pesticides have meant the death of hundreds of species of insects and birds and wild flowers. Yet I am very glad to be leaving the city. I don't want to be in the swing of things really, in the grip of fashion and speed and ambition. I won't miss the city where everything is carved up by roads and dual carriageways, and with mile upon mile of houses, factories, shops, broken windows, untended gardens, stations, industrial wastelands, great rubbish dumps, scrap yards, plastic bags flying in the dirty wind, cemeteries, and walls covered with graffiti. I dream of the sensuous and earthy smells of the countryside; wet grass, pigs, flowers, mulched leaves, the salty east wind, autumn bonfires. I long to be in the garden, sinking my fingers into the earth, getting my hands dirty at last. I imagine evenings, after work is done, when we can all drive to the coast and walk on the shingle beaches.