Английский язык. Цыбина Е.А - 83 стр.

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83
Every poet always tells the same story, the epic of About Zeid El Hilali. The
poet never begins the story at the beginning, just as he never reaches the end. His art
lies in his ability to catch the listeners’ attention and control their sympathies and
emotions. There are a number of interruptions during the narrative for the musicians
to play and the whole evening’s entertainment lasts for several hours.
The wedding ceremony takes place on the following day. The musicians play all
afternoon during the presentation of the bride’s trousseau to her groom’s family.
4. Read and discuss.
Between 1971 and 1975, a researcher called Mark Abrams, at the Social Science
Research Centre, conducted a complicated series of studies designed to gauge
people’s satisfaction with various domains of their lives.
Throughout the series, marriage emerged as by far the greatest source of
satisfaction -ahead of ‘family life’, health, standard of living, house, job and much
more. The obvious inference, that marriage makes you happy, is widely accepted
among those who specialise in marital studies. So is the view that marriage, like
happiness, is good for your health, a view borne out by a number of studies.
Some of these studies present a confused picture because they compare the
health and life expectancy of married people with the health and life expectancy of
the divorced, separated and bereaved. (The latter group invariably come out worse,
but should that be blamed on the termination of their marriages or on the fact that
they married, perhaps unhappily, in the first place?)
But other studies have specifically compared the married with the single and
reached similar conclusions. Even these are slightly ambiguous. Are single people
more susceptible to serious illness because they are single? Or is their single status a
result of their susceptibility?
None the less, the general message seems incontrovertible: marriage is not as
bad as it seems. It is certainly not bad for you and almost certainly good for you. Few
sociologists, doctors or statisticians would dispute the statement that married
people live an average of five years longer than the unmarried and are significantly
less susceptible to strokes, ulcers, cancer, heart attacks, depression, mental illness and
high blood pressure.
Nor is the institution of marriage as beleaguered as it is sometimes made out to
be. As well as having the second highest divorce rate in Europe (Denmark’s is
highest), Britain has the equal-highest marriage rate (along with Portugal). The
divorce rate seems to have leveled out since 1985, and the huge long-term increase in
the twentieth century probably owes as much to changing legislation as it does to
worsening marital relations. The total numbers of marriages and of married people
are much the same today as they were in 1961 (although both increased briefly in the
early 1970s).
Since 1891 the proportion of the population who are married has increased
significantly, while the proportion who are single has decreased. Today, around 85
per cent of men and 91 per cent of women will marry at some point in their lives.

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