Вопрос № 1064121 - Английский язык

Mr. Black was on holiday in Scotland and he was staying at Fernie Castle Hotel which used to be just Fernie Castle when it was built 600 years ago. He went to bed after a good meal, and he was falling asleep when he heard someone knocking at the door. He got up, turned on the light and went to the door, but there was no one there. He decided it had been a dream or just imagination. Some minutes later he heard the knock again. He opened the door again, but there was no one there. Mr.Black wasn’t frightened but he was worried a little because he was staying by himself in a very old castle where he hadn’t been before. So he locked the door and went to bed but he left the light on, and nothing else happened that night.
When Mr. Black went down to breakfast he didn’t say anything about the knock he had heard. And all the other guests in the dining-room looked quite normal and nobody looked like the person who could knock at the door in the middle of the night. So he forgot about it.
The next night there was no knocking at the door but in the middle of the night Mr. Black woke up because he heard some noises and he saw a woman standing in the middle of the room. He got a bit frightened. Of course, everybody would. The woman was wearing a green dress with a high neck and she was looking at Mr. Black. When he turned on the light, she disappeared. And this time Mr. Black was really very worried and he couldn’t sleep that night.
The next morning Mr. Black told the owner of the hotel that he had seen a woman in his room the night before and the owner said: “Was she wearing a green dress?” And Mr. Black said: “Yes. Was she one of the staff?” And the owner said: “No, but many people have seen this woman, though I haven’t seen her myself. People say that she is supposed to be the wife of a man who ran away with her to get married, and her father didn’t want her to marry that man, so they hid in a small room of the West Tower of Fernie Castle. But her father’s men found the room where they were hiding and there was a terrible fighting. And somehow while she was trying to run away, she fell out of the window and fell on the stone courtyard below and died. Now her ghost walks about the castle and appears in people’s bedrooms with a sad expression, never says anything and sometimes knocks at doors. And that’s probably what you saw last night. Or you had too much champagne the night before.”
When Mr. Black woke up in the middle of the night, he saw a woman standing in the middle of the room. She was …

Mr. Black was on holiday in Scotland and he was staying at Fernie Castle Hotel which used to be just Fernie Castle when it was built 600 years ago. He went to bed after a good meal, and he was falling asleep when he heard someone knocking at the door. He got up, turned on the light and went to the door, but there was no one there. He decided it had been a dream or just imagination. Some minutes later he heard the knock again. He opened the door again, but there was no one there. Mr.Black wasn’t frightened but he was worried a little because he was staying by himself in a very old castle where he hadn’t been before. So he locked the door and went to bed but he left the light on, and nothing else happened that night.
When Mr. Black went down to breakfast he didn’t say anything about the knock he had heard. And all the other guests in the dining-room looked quite normal and nobody looked like the person who could knock at the door in the middle of the night. So he forgot about it.
The next night there was no knocking at the door but in the middle of the night Mr. Black woke up because he heard some noises and he saw a woman standing in the middle of the room. He got a bit frightened. Of course, everybody would. The woman was wearing a green dress with a high neck and she was looking at Mr. Black. When he turned on the light, she disappeared. And this time Mr. Black was really very worried and he couldn’t sleep that night.
The next morning Mr. Black told the owner of the hotel that he had seen a woman in his room the night before and the owner said: “Was she wearing a green dress?” And Mr. Black said: “Yes. Was she one of the staff?” And the owner said: “No, but many people have seen this woman, though I haven’t seen her myself. People say that she is supposed to be the wife of a man who ran away with her to get married, and her father didn’t want her to marry that man, so they hid in a small room of the West Tower of Fernie Castle. But her father’s men found the room where they were hiding and there was a terrible fighting. And somehow while she was trying to run away, she fell out of the window and fell on the stone courtyard below and died. Now her ghost walks about the castle and appears in people’s bedrooms with a sad expression, never says anything and sometimes knocks at doors. And that’s probably what you saw last night. Or you had too much champagne the night before.”
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Johnny was a young man who lived in America. He loved a girl whose name was Rosine. But they quarrelled, she refused to see him and he went to Coralio, a little town in South America, where he found a job and began working as an American Consul.
There wasn’t much work for the American Consul in the town, and Johnny’s friend Billy often came to see them. Johnny got many letters from America. People asaked what they could sell to the people who lived in Coralio.
One day Johnny got a letter from the town he came from. A man wanted to open a shoe shop in Coralio. Johnny laughed because there were about three thousand people in Coralio and only twenty of them had shoes as it was very hot there. The two friends decided to make fun of the man. They wrote to him that most of the people in Coralio had no shoes and there were no shoe shops there. A month later the man came and brought so many shoes that he would not be able to sell them even in twenty years. The man’s daughter came with him. When Johnny heard the man’s name, he realized that the girl was Rosine and the man was her father. The two friends had to do something about it. That night they began to think what to do next. Johnny was afraid to tell Rosine that the letter was just a joke. Billy said he would ask all his friends in the town to buy new shoes. But they could not buy so many shoes.
In the morning a good idea came to Johnny. He sent a telegram to his friend in America and asked him to send him 50 kilograms of dry burs. When the shop was opened, Johnny, Billy and their friends bought new shoes, but in a day or two Rosine’s father began to ask Johnny why the natives didn’t come to buy shoes. Johnny promised that the natives would come to buy shoes. Then the ship from America came, Johnny brought home several big bags. The burs were big and dry. At night Johnny and Billy went up and down the streets and dropped the burs onto the grass and sand. In the morning the natives came out of their houses, but they could not walk, they only jumped from one place to another. Johnny told them to go and buy shoes and they did. The friends had such walks every night. In two weeks Rosine’s father sold most of the shoes. That evening Johnny told him and Rosine everything.
A month later Johnny and his young wife Rosine went back to America and Billy became the new American Consul in Coralio.
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This event happened in England shortly after the Second World War. Mrs. Green invited some of her friends for dinner and a game of bridge. But she didn’t know what to cook for the dinner as it was difficult to buy good food in Great Britain at that time. However on the morning of the party the problem was solved. A stranger came to Mrs. Green’s house and offered to sell mushrooms. Mrs. Green knew almost nothing about mushrooms and asked the man if the mushrooms were not poisonous. The man said he knew everything about mushrooms and that the mushrooms he offered were eatable. The price was reasonable and Mrs. Green paid money at once. While the servant emptying the basket, she dropped a mushroom on the floor. Mrs. Green’s little dog immediately ate it. “The dog knows what is good”, the man said.
The guests arrived at the appointed time, they were served a dish of mushrooms. They thought the dish was delicious. The dinner wasn’t over yet when Mrs. Green noticed that the servant’s eyes were red. The lady asked her why she had been crying. “Oh, Madam. I didn’t want to upset you. Your little dog, the poor thing has died”, the girl said.
Mrs. Green was shocked but she addressed her guessed: “Ladies and gentlemen. I am sorry to say that, but I have just learnt that the mushrooms I have offered you were poisonous. We must act quickly if we wish to save our life”.
The guests were frightened and very angry. One of them suggested going to the nearest hospital and asking doctors for help. The doctors of the hospital were surprised to see a group of people in evening dresses running towards the hospital. When they learnt the reason, they did everything necessary in such cases. Then the doctors let the patients go home. Naturally none of Mrs. Green’s friends thought of playing bridge after that. Everybody went home at once. Nobody wanted to speak to Mrs. Green, they didn’t even look at her.
When Mrs. Green arrived home, she wanted to know where the dog’s body was. “Oh,” said the servant, “the gardener has already buried it. We didn’t want you to look at the dead body of your pet. Unfortunately we didn’t notice the number of the car that cruelly ran over the little dog. The driver even didn’t stop”.
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Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie is possibly the world’s most famous detective story writer. She wrote 79 novels and several plays. Her sales outnumber those of William Shakespeare. However, behind her 4,680,000 words was a painfully shy woman whose life was often lonely and unhappy.
She was born in 1890 in Devon, the third child of Clarissa and Frederick Miller, and grew into a beautiful and sensitive girl with waist-length golden hair. She didn’t go to school but was educated at home by her mother. Her father died when she was 11 and both she and her mother were grief-stricken.
During World War I, while she was working in a hospital dispensary, she learned about chemicals and poisons, which proved very useful to her in her later career. She wrote her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920. In it she introduced Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who appeared in many subsequent novels. Her other main detective was an elderly spinster Miss Marple.
In 1914, at the beginning of the war, she had married Archibald Christie but the marriage was unhappy. It didn’t last and they divorced in 1926. That year there was a double tragedy in her life because her much-loved mother died. Agatha suffered a nervous breakdown, and one night she abandoned her car and mysteriously disappeared. She went missing for 11 days and was eventually found in a hotel in Harrogate, in the North of England. It is interesting to note that it was while she was suffering so much that she wrote one of her masterpieces, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Agatha desperately wanted solitude and developed very bitter feelings towards the media because the newspapers had given her a hard time over her breakdown and disappearance. She was determined never to let them enter her private life and she buried herself in her work. On 25 November 1952 her play The Mousetrap opened in London. Today, over 40 years later, it is still running. It is the longest running show in the whole world.
She enjoyed a very happy second marriage to Max Mallowan, an archaeologist. Her detective skills were a help to him in his excavations in Syria and Iraq. By successfully staying out of the limelight she ultimately found happiness with her beloved husband. She died peacefully in 1976.
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On 25 October 1881 a little boy was born in Malaga, Spain. It was a difficult birth and to help him breathe, cigar smoke was blown into his nose! But despite being the youngest ever smoker, this baby grew up to be one of the 20th century’s greatest painters – Pablo Picasso.
Picasso showed his truly exceptional talent from a very young age. His first word was lapiz (Spanish for pencil) and he learned to draw before he could talk. He was the only son in the family and very good-looking, so he was thoroughly spoilt. He hated school and often refused to go unless his doting parents allowed him to take one of his father’s pet pigeons with him!
Apart from pigeons, his great love was art, and when in 1891 his father, who was an amateur artist, got a job as a drawing teacher at a college, Pablo went with him to the college. He often watched his father paint and sometimes was allowed to help. One evening his father was painting a picture of their pigeons when he had to leave the room. He returned to find that Pablo had completed the picture, and it was so amazingly beautiful and lifelike that he gave his son his own palette and brushes and never painted again. Pablo was just 13.
From the onwards there was no stopping him. Many people realized that he was a genius but he disappointed those who wanted him to become a traditional painter. He was always breaking the rules of artistic tradition and shocked the public with his strange and powerful pictures. He is probably best known for his “Cubist” pictures, which used only simple geometric shapes. His paintings of people were often made up of triangles and squares with their features in the wrong place. His work changed our ideas about art, and to millions of people modern art means the work of Picasso. Guernica, which he painted in 1937, records the bombing of that little Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, and is undisputedly one of the masterpieces of modern painting.
Picasso created over 6,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures. Today a “Picasso” costs several million pounds. Once, when the French Minister of Culture was visiting Picasso, the artist accidentally spilt some paint on the Minister’s trousers. Picasso apologized and wanted to pay for them to be cleaned, but the Minister said, “Non! Please, Monsieur Picasso, just sign my trousers!”
Picasso died of heart failure during an attack of influenza in 1973.
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