5. Read two texts below and discuss with a partner arguments to prove that ambition is a healthy impulse. Give both texts suitable titles. Retell the texts.

1. Five nights a week she pins back her hair, puts on an apron and works as a school cleaner. On a wage of 4 an hour, Gan, the 18 – year old girl from China .sweeps floors, stacks chairs, empties bins and washes out toilets.

She does this work willingly in the knowledge that the work will help her to pay for her education. Now she is studying on a scholarship of 9.500 a year at Bruton School for girls in Sommerset. She has just been offered a place at Cambridge, but the fee and living costs for a foreign student will be 14.000 a year. That’s why she works every weekday evening as a cleaner at her school and does a restaurant waitress’s job in the holidays.

“I am tired sometimes’ said Gan, who has been in England less than 18 months. “But it is a hard year for everyone who wants to go to university. And I think it has made me a more experienced and mature person. I am also proud I am making money for myself and my mother back home.”

Three years ago Gan sent letters to a dozen schools in England. “I began studying English at the age of six”’ she wrote. “I don’t have any difficulties in studying academic subjects in English, and could be treated as normal English students. My mother’s income is not enough to pay all the school fees. As I consider myself a good student, I hope I can get a scholarship.”

Gan’s letter impressed Bruton school, and she was offered a place. She flew to England on a one-way ticket paid for by her mother’s life savings.

In several years Gan is expecting to come back to China where there will be lots of work for her.

2. At eighteen the young clerk realized there was little future for him in his native Germany. Scraping up enough money for the passage, he made the long journey across the Atlantic to America, where his two older brothers had preceded him. He was disappointed to discover that his brothers were peddlers, not millionaires in New York. But with no skill or trade, and only a few words of English, h was forced to become a peddler as well. He learned quickly and soon began to earn a decent living. Although his brothers seemed content with their lives, he knew that America offered far greater potential. When he heard that gold had been discovered in California, he took his savings, bought all the merchandise he could, and sailed on a ship to San Francisco.

There was such a need of goods of all kinds that he sold almost everything as soon as he arrived. He had nothing left to sell except several rolls of light canvas with which he intended to make tents for the miners. He bought a wagon, loaded it with his rolls of material, and set out to sell it. But when one of the first miners told him of a special problem, he suddenly got an idea. It was then that one of the great success stories of America was born.

Nowhere in San Francisco could the miners find clothing which was strong enough to withstand the wear and tear of the rocky terrain where they looked for gold. The young immigrant went to a tailor and had all of his material, a light canvas called “denim”, made into pants in several sizes. He sold them all in one day, then began improving his new product. Learning that the pockets often tore from the weight of heavy rocks, he got the idea of fixing the pockets in place with copper rivets.

As the years went by, the pants he made became extremely popular throughout the West. He died a wealthy man, having founded a company which today is known all over the world. It all began with a few rolls of material in the back of a wagon owned by a little peddler named Levi Strauss /Li:vai Stros/.