Upward Bound: First year. Воробьева М.Г - 146 стр.

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— 146 —
There are no traffic jams — though it doesn’t mean that there
are no traffic problems. Someone recently ran an ad offering to sell a
Subaru. It did have a dented hood, admitted the seller, occasioned by
a collision with a highway-hogging moose.
And if we leave the lights on in our car or a window open
during a storm, if the sheep get out of the meadow or the cows get
in the corn, there is always a neighbour to set things right. In the
close confines of the city, where the need for privacy teaches people
to ignore what goes on next door, this would be an intrusion. In the
country, with space to protect our privacy, such concern is a kindness.
We’ll never see a Degas exhibit at the local museum. The
distances that give us privacy deprive us of other things. There is one
Chinese restaurant, not 100. And only one movie theatre.
You either like that kind of thing or you don’t, and if you
belong to the part of the world that relishes looking in the windows
of the 15 new restaurants that have sprung up over night trying to
decide where to eat, life in a rural region will seem stark and stale.
«What do you do?» the urban visitor asks, looking across the
meadow at the pine forest, seeing a curtain of green that shuts out
the world. «We walk through that curtain of green and into the
forest,» we answer. There, in late spring, there will be lady’s slippers
in bloom, and then the wild rhododendron and lily-of-the-valley
and little starlike flowers called bunchberry, and then on the barrens
the tiny rose-tinged flowers of the blueberry. We are about to continue
the rhapsody, singing simple songs of picking raspberries and
blackberries, following cross-country ski trails through silent woods,
taking the canoe out to the islands for lunch, but the visitor has
found a four-day-old New York Times folded on the table. The
world is blowing up all over the front page, and the visitor is
happy at last, comforted by the knowledge that somewhere
something is going on.
Ex. 2. Answer the questions using the text.
1. Where can you have a meal in a city/in the country?
2. How do nature and the weather complicate your life in a
city/in the country?
3. Who suffers more from natural disasters: city or country
dwellers?
4. What traffic problems are there in a city/in the country?

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