Английский язык. Александрова Г.А. - 36 стр.

state and promoted the Russian economy, culture and science. Thanks to
his energy definite progress was made in practically every field of life.
       At the beginning of his reign Russia had no industry, her roads were
poorly developed; there was no secular education, there were no schools
for specialists. Russia had no navy. She had access neither to the Baltic
nor to the Black Sea which could give her convenient avenues of contact
with Western Europe. Large European states simply didn’t take her into
consideration. Her north-western neighbour, Sweden, was still holding
territories captured at the beginning of the 17 th century, cutting her off
from the Baltic Sea. In the south, the Crimean Tatars barred Russia from
the Black Sea and raided Russian territories every year, plundering the
communities, killing the people, driving thousands into slavery. Through-
out the 17 th century the Russian government paid tribute to the Crimean
Tatars. Such was the state of the country when Peter I came to power.

    I.      Read text 4 and discuss the following questions:
1. What was the state of the country when Peter I came to power?
2. What determined the main tasks of Peter I government?

      II.      Ask 7 questions on the text.

                                       Text 5
                    From the history of the Russian Language
       The first attempts to create a literary language date from the 11 th
century. The development of a Russian literary language was complicated
by the parallel existence of the Church Slavonic literary language which
was closely related to Russian. The Russia literary language began very
early to become a common language for all Eastern Slavs. The struggle
and interaction between the Russian and the Church Slavonic literary lan-
guages resulted in the domination of Church Slavonic in the fifteenth cen-
tury, while literary Russian was retained only in ukazes, correspondence,
memoirs. Fiction and all the orthodox literature of that period were writ-
ten in Church Slavonic.
       The final standardization of the Russian literary language is linked
with the name of. M.V. Lomonosov, the founder of Russian linguistics,
who laid down the rules of literary language in his Russian Grammar. The

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