Вопрос № 348790 - Английский язык

Three men came to New York on holiday. Having taken the room at the hotel they went to amuse themselves. Their room happened to be on the forty-fifth floor.

In the evening the young men went to the cinema and then to the restaurant to have supper there. They came back to the hotel very late. On coming back they found out that the lifts in the hotel didn’t work at night.

“I am very sorry”, said the clerk of the hotel, “but if you don’t want to walk up in your room you can sleep in the hall.” But the young men preferred to sleep in their room. And then Alan said to his friend, “I think I Know how to make it easy for us to walk up to the forty-fifth floor. On our way to the room we’ll tell each other some jokes and funny stories.”

They began to walk up to their room. Having come to the forty-fifth floor, they were out of breath and being very tired they decided to have a rest. “Now listen to my story,” said Bernard, “it will not be long, but it will be sad enough. We have left the key to our room in the hall downstairs.”

George Harrison was born in 1943 in Liverpool, England. When he was 12 years old, he met and became good friends with Paul McCartney who was a member of John Lennon’s band, The Quarrymen.

Three years later George, a gifted guitar player, joined the band too. In the early 1960’s the band changed its name to The Beatles. In 1970 The Beatles disbanded.

But Harrison’s solo career was just beginning. George went on to release many songs. He also started his own record and movie companies. He was deeply interested in charity work.

George Harrison died of cancer at the age of 58. He will always be remembered as a talented musician as well as a caring and generous man.

Alexander Sokurov is considered one of the Russia’s best film directors. Sokurov was called one of the top ten contemporary film directors by the European Academy of Film. He, however, has not always been so appreciated in his homeland. His films were not allowed during the late Soviet period.

Sokurov has featured more than 20 films which are valued for their beauty. Watching Sokurov’s film is like a walk through the Hermitage: there is no need to rush through it.

“My work has its foundations in Russian and European literary traditions,” said Sokurov in one of his interviews. I don’t like to create if I don’t have the canon of classic of literature as a support standing behind me.”

One of Sokurov’s latest films, called Moloch, tells the love story of Hitler and Eva Brown. The actors are Russians, the language of the film is German - perhaps, it helps to create the aura of authenticity.

Douglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961. In 1965 his family moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. Coupland has studied art and design in Vancouver, Canada, Milan, Italy and Sapporo, Japan.

His first novel, “Generation X”, was published in March of 1991. Since then he has published nine novels and several non-fiction books in 35 languages. There are some books that reflect the philosophy of the young: “Microserfs”, “Life after God”, “Girlfriend in a Coma”, “Hey, Nostradamus”, etc.

He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England. 2006 marks the premiere of the feature film “Everything’s Gone Green”, his first story written specifically for the screen and not adapted from any previous work.

Douglas Coupland is really an amazing contemporary writer; he paints a vivid picture with words like no one else. He really adequately shows generation X.

Alexander Petrov received the Oscar for the best animated short film, which is an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”. “This is my favourite story of Hemingway’s. I think it’s one of the best works of the 20th century,” said the 43-year-old Petrov in his speech.

Petrov began developing the idea of the film in 1994 and the following year proposed it to Montreal Productions Pascal Blais, who accepted the idea. Then the venture was given an official go-ahead - at a budget of almost $ 3,4 million.

Working in Montreal together with his son and cameraman Sergey Rechetnikov, Petrov hand-painted almost 29000 individual frames - literary using his fingertips, to create each scene.

Now, despite his international fame, Petrov is not seeking further work abroad. Instead, he is developing an animation studio and school in his hometown of Yaroslavl to encourage the emergence of a new generation of talents.

Readers of the mid-twentieth century often turned to “the bible of the generation” - the book “The Catcher in the Rye” by D.Salinger. But there are books written later, in the 1980-s and in the early 21st century which are comparable to that one. Such is Sue Townsend’s cycle of books starting from “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13” written with mild humour and irony and profound psychological insight into the inner world of a teenager.

Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946. She attended Glen Hills school in the early 50s and then went to South Wigston Secondary Modem for Girls. But she left school when she was 15 and changed jobs several times (so she worked as a shop assistant, garage attendant and in a factory)!

Her writing career started when she was 35 - she won the Thames Playwrights Award. Her most famous and best known book is “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole” (1985) - a diary kept by a 13 year old boy - sort of intellectual. The book was so successful that it was followed by a number of sequels.

She got married when she was 18 and had three children. But her husband left her so she brought them up alone. Sue Townsend later got married again. In 1999 doctors found out she had diabetes and she slowly began losing her sight. Today she is almost blind.