Вопрос № 1064134 - Английский язык

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.
The text is about …

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.
Picasso spilt some paint on the Minister’s trousers and …

Ever since it was the musical theme in the film “The Sting”, there are few people who have not tapped their feet to the bit piano tune, “The Entertainer” – the most famous composition of the American musician, Scott Joplin.
Scott was born in Texas in 1868, in a poor but musical black family, his father, who was a freed slave, played the violin, and his mother played the banjo and sang. Scott played the violin and bugle but his favourite instrument was his neighbour’s piano. His father worked extra hours to buy him an old grand piano, and soon Scott was playing by ear negro tunes, blues, and spirituals. Music flowed naturally from his fingers, and he quickly became the talk of the town.
Scott didn’t learn to read music until he was 11, when an old German music teacher spotted his talent and gave him free, formal piano lessons. He learned to play the works of such composers as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart as well as his improvised music. Thus when he started to write music, his tunes were a wonderful mixture of classical European and African beat. This unique style was known as Ragtime, and was played everywhere in the USA in the early 1900s by both black and white musicians.
In 1882, when Scott was 14, his mother died and he left home to seek his fortune in St. Louis. In the 1880s, St. Louis was noisy and bustling with life. The waterfront of the Mississippi River was full of gangsters, gamblers, and sailors. The sound of music was everywhere – black, white and mixed. The hot steamy nights were filled with blues, working songs, banjos, and honky tonk pianos. Scott was soon playing Ragtime piano in cheap bars on the waterfront. This was a rough, tough area of the city where arguments over girls, whisky, and money were settled with fists and guns. Scott grew up very fast and his musical talent continued to develop. All in all he wrote about 50 piano rags.
Scott Joplin died in 1917. Today he is the undisputed King of Ragtime, thanks to his natural ability, his unusual musical education, and the popularity of the film, The Sting.
The American musician, Scott Joplin became the talk of Texas because …

Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa in Italy in 1451. When he was 25 year old he moved to Lisbon, Portugal. While he lived there he sailed on many ships. He sailed as far north as England and as far south as Guinea on the west coast of Africa. He even said that once he sailed as far north as Iceland, but that is probably not true.
In Lisbon he studied a lot. He studied geography, read the Bible carefully, and listened to what other sailors had to tell about distant places. He loved the sea and sailing and when he got married he lived for some time on a small island near Madeira. Quite early in his life Columbus was absolutely sure that the passage across the Atlantic was quite short and that on the other side was Asia. He wrote: “From the point where Spain ends to the point where India begins, the ocean is not wide and it is possible to sail across it in a few days.”
He asked the Portuguese King, John II, to help him organize an expedition, but the king was himself a very good sailor and had studied maps and reports from other sailors. He didn’t believe in Columbus’s ideas at all and didn’t want to have anything to do with him.
Columbus moved to Spain. After some years, he managed to convince the Spanish Queen Isabella to help him finance an expedition. Queen Isabella was deeply religious. She agreed to help Columbus when he told her that they could spread Christianity to all those people who lived on the other side of the Atlantic. But there were, of course, also political and economic reasons for the expedition. And Columbus himself would become Viceroy of all the islands and all the land that he discovered.
On October 12, 1492, after 33 days at sea, they saw land. They had discovered a new continent, but Columbus was quite sure that they had arrived in India. He rowed ashore himself, put up the royal flag and claimed the land for Spain. He called the natives Indians.
Columbus called the island where they landed San Salvador, but today experts are not quite sure which island he landed on, because the logbook, which he sent to Queen when he got back, disappeared and has never been found. The island he landed on was one of the Bahamas. During this first expedition he also discovered Cuba and Haiti. Near Haiti the Santa Maria was shipwrecked and sank. When Columbus started the journey back to Spain in January 1493, some of the sailors stayed on Haiti as colonists.
Back in Spain, Columbus went to the Queen and told her enthusiastically about the rich countries he had visited and showed her some of the valuable things he had brought back – plants, spices and pieces of gold. He had also brought back some slaves from the islands.
The Spanish Queen Isabella decided to help Columbus because …

One day, George, who was tall, handsome and twenty-three years old, went to visit his grandmother, who lived in a small town fifty miles from his home. As he didn’t have a car, he had to travel by train.
He travelled in the middle of the morning, so there were not many people, but sitting opposite George was a fat gentleman wearing expensive clothes and carrying a stick with a gold top.
The train seemed to be going very slowly, and as George was afraid that he would arrive at his grandmother's place late, he said to the fat gentleman, "Excuse me, sir, can you please tell me the time?"
"No!" he answered in a rude voice. "But …" began George. "No 'buts'!" the man answered. "I've got very good reasons for not telling you the time. You are a pleasant young man, so if I tell you the time, we'll start talking to each other. Then, when the train stops, we'll find that we both get off at the same station. You will offer me a drink at the bar and I shall accept. After that, I shall invite you to my house and you will accept. Then, when you come to my house, you'll meet my daughter.
"My daughter is a very pretty girl, he continued, "so you will be pleasant to her. The next thing that will happen is that you will ask my permission to marry her." "But …"
"No 'buts'! You cannot expect me to allow my daughter to marry a man, who hasn't even got a watch, can you?"
George asked the time because …