Ознакомительное чтение (General reading): понимание общего содержания текста

Прочитайте текст и выполните задание. On the first evening of the storm, the lights flickered twice and then went out completely. At first I was annoyed rather than worried. My phone had only eight per cent of its battery left, and I had promised to send my friend the photos from our school trip. By nine o'clock the screen was black, and so was the whole village. 'Well,' said Dad, 'it looks like we'll have to entertain ourselves the old-fashioned way.' He disappeared into the garage and came back with Grandad's radio, a heavy wooden box that nobody had touched for years. To our surprise, it still worked on batteries. The local station was telling people which roads were closed and where they could get drinking water. We listened to the news and then to an old concert, sitting together in the kitchen by candlelight. Mum taught us a card game she had played as a child, and my little brother, who usually hates losing, laughed every time he lost. The electricity came back two days later. Within minutes everyone was staring at a screen again. But that evening I put my phone in a drawer and asked, 'Shall we play cards?' Nobody said no. What is the main idea of the story?

1. АA family decided to give up their phones for ever.
2. БA power cut helped a family discover a new way of spending time together.
3. ВA father repaired his own father's old radio.
4. ГA storm seriously damaged the family's house.

Прочитайте текст и выполните задание. Should teenagers have part-time jobs while they are still at school? Many parents say no. They worry that work will take time away from homework and that tired students will get worse marks. These fears are understandable, but in my opinion they are only half of the story. A few hours of work a week can teach young people things that no textbook can. When sixteen-year-old Tom started working at a café on Saturdays, he was shy and hated talking to strangers. After six months he could calmly deal with angry customers, and his manager trusted him to open the café in the morning. 'I also stopped asking my parents for pocket money,' he says, 'and I finally understood how long it takes to earn it.' However, there must be limits. Some studies suggest that students who work more than fifteen hours a week often sleep less and do worse in exams. The problem, then, is not the job itself but the number of hours. A weekend job or a summer job is very different from working every evening. So my advice to parents is simple: do not say no at once. Talk about the hours, agree on the rules and let your children try. According to the text, why do many parents not want their children to work?

1. АThey do not want to stop giving them pocket money.
2. БThey think teenagers cannot deal with customers.
3. ВThey believe that cafés are dangerous places to work.
4. ГThey are afraid that school marks will get worse.

Прочитайте текст и выполните задание. Every day millions of products pass through shop checkouts, and almost nobody thinks about the small black stripes printed on them. Yet the barcode has a surprisingly long history. In 1948 a young American engineer, Joseph Woodland, heard that a supermarket owner wanted a faster way to record what customers bought. Woodland knew Morse code, which uses dots and dashes. One day, sitting on a beach in Miami, he drew some dots and dashes in the sand with his fingers. When he pulled them downwards, they turned into thin and thick lines. This, he realised, could be a code that a machine might read. Woodland received a patent for his idea in 1952, but for more than twenty years almost nothing happened. The problem was not the code itself: the machines needed to read it were huge and expensive, because cheap lasers and small computers did not exist yet. Only in the 1970s did technology become good enough. In June 1974, in a supermarket in Ohio, a cashier scanned the first product with a barcode – a packet of chewing gum. Today the same simple lines help shops, hospitals and airports keep track of millions of things. What is the text mainly about?

1. Аhow cheap lasers and computers were invented
2. Бwhy Morse code is no longer used by engineers
3. Вhow the idea of the barcode appeared and why it was used only many years later
4. Гhow supermarkets in the USA grew in the 1970s

Прочитайте текст и выполните задание. On the first evening of the storm, the lights flickered twice and then went out completely. At first I was annoyed rather than worried. My phone had only eight per cent of its battery left, and I had promised to send my friend the photos from our school trip. By nine o'clock the screen was black, and so was the whole village. 'Well,' said Dad, 'it looks like we'll have to entertain ourselves the old-fashioned way.' He disappeared into the garage and came back with Grandad's radio, a heavy wooden box that nobody had touched for years. To our surprise, it still worked on batteries. The local station was telling people which roads were closed and where they could get drinking water. We listened to the news and then to an old concert, sitting together in the kitchen by candlelight. Mum taught us a card game she had played as a child, and my little brother, who usually hates losing, laughed every time he lost. The electricity came back two days later. Within minutes everyone was staring at a screen again. But that evening I put my phone in a drawer and asked, 'Shall we play cards?' Nobody said no. Which of these events happened FIRST?

1. АThe narrator put the phone in a drawer.
2. БDad brought Grandad's radio from the garage.
3. ВMum taught the family a card game.
4. ГThe electricity came back.

Прочитайте текст и выполните задание. When volunteers began repairing the old lighthouse on Karn Island last spring, they did not expect to make a discovery. Behind a loose board in the keeper's cottage, one of them found a small notebook wrapped in oilcloth. It turned out to be the diary of Ellen Price, the daughter of the lighthouse keeper, written between 1911 and 1913. Ellen was fourteen when she started writing. Her entries describe a hard but busy life: carrying oil up the 120 steps of the tower, cleaning the huge lamp every morning and recording the weather three times a day. Because her father's eyesight was getting worse, Ellen gradually took over most of his duties, although officially she was never paid for her work. The most dramatic entry describes a night in November 1912, when a fishing boat lost its way in thick fog. Ellen kept the lamp burning and rang the fog bell for six hours until the boat reached the harbour safely. Local historians say the diary is valuable because very few records of lighthouse families have survived. The volunteers now plan to display copies of the pages in the cottage, which will open to visitors next summer. Which statements are TRUE according to the text? (выберите все верные варианты)

1. АEllen received money for looking after the lighthouse.
2. БThe cottage is already open to visitors.
3. ВThe notebook was hidden behind a board in the cottage.
4. ГEllen recorded the weather several times a day.
5. ДEllen started the diary when she was twenty.