Вопрос № 223831 - Английский язык

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Mrs. Sara Winchester of San Jose, California, was a very strange woman who built one of the world’s most unusual houses. When she died in 1922, aged 85, she was living alone in a house that had more than 150 rooms and covered an area of land greater than 2.5 hectares.
Mrs. Winchester’s problem was that she believed that if she stopped adding rooms to her house, she would die. Therefore, she employed workmen to keep on building and was happy only when she heard the sound of building. The house, when she bought it in 1884, was quite small, but 38 years later it was huge.
When she bought it, the house had two floors. By the time she died, it had eight. It had three lifts, 48 fireplaces and nine kitchens – none of which was ever used. In total, there were 2,000 doors and 10,000 windows. There were also miles of secret passages and tunnels that no one, not even Mrs. Winchester, knew how to get in to or out of.
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What was Mrs. Winchester’s problem?

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The palace of the Bishops of Winchester for over 500 years, Winchester House was set in 70 1_______ of riverside parkland. The original 2_______ was built for William Giffard in 1109 and the last occupant was Bishop Lancelot Andrews (1555 – 1626). For a time in the seventeenth century, Winchester House acted as a prison but was sold off for tenement 3_______ and gradually deteriorated. The 14th century building that now stands on the site was 4_______ by fire in 1814.

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Vernal is a small town in Utah, USA. In 1916 the owners of the bank in Vernal wanted a new building. They wanted the new bank to be made of bricks. However, the bricks came from a town that was very far away, and the brick makers wanted a lot of money to bring the bricks to Vernal.
The owners of the bank did not have enough money, so they found another way of getting the bricks to the town. They asked the brick makers to put them in the post. However, they could only post ten bricks at a time. There were too many packages for the postman in Vernal to take to the bank, and soon the post building was full of bricks. To help the postman, people in the town agreed to collect the bricks and take them to the new bank.
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What way of getting the bricks to the town did the owners of the bank find?

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Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist who lived from 1833 to 1896. Alfred and his brother made explosives, but in 1864 there was an accident in the laboratory and Alfred’s brother was killed. Alfred then decided to spend his life truing to make explosives safer to use.
One of the strongest explosives at that time was nitroglycerine. This explosive, which looks like oily water, is very dangerous to use or even to carry. Nobel wanted to study nitroglycerine so he could find a way to make it safer. Nobel had an idea of taking nitroglycerine out on a boat in the middle of a lake and working with it there.
When Nobel wanted to take the nitroglycerine he was working with from one place to another, he put it into small boxes. Then he put the small boxes into a larger box made of clay. One day, when he opened the large clay box, he found that nitroglycerine was coming out of one of the small boxes. To his surprise, the large clay box was still dry. This gave him the idea of mixing clay with nitroglycerine. The clay would take the oil out of nitroglycerine and make it safer. He called this explosive ‘dynamite’.
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Why did Alfred decide to spend his life trying to make explosives safer to use?

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One day, Nicola Tesla had a vision of a whole new type of electric power system. Tesla went to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company. While he was there, he built the first model of his motor. But the people at the company weren’t interested in it. Tesla decided to go to the United States to talk to the great inventor Thomas Edison.
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Why did Tesla decide to go to the United States?

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Nicola Tesla is one of the most important inventors in history. Tesla designed over 120 inventions. Most of them are still used today in one form or another. He invented fluorescent lights, sun-powered engines, robots, the first electric clock, and a very important machine part that is used in every home, factory, and office in the modern world. Yet most people do not even know who Nicola Tesla is.
Nicola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljian, Croatia. Nicola was an unusual child. He had a photographic memory, so he remembered whole pages of books after he looked at them very quickly. He also liked to write poetry. When he was five, he built a waterwheel and he tried to fly in a homemade plan. That same year, Nicola’s older brother died. People said Nicola accidentally pushed him down the stairs. After this, Nicola began to act strangely.
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Where is the electric system used?