Вопрос № 1064136 - Английский язык

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 text is about …

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.
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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 …

Once Walt Irvine and his wife Madge, who lived in a small cottage in the mountains, found a dog. He was thin and weak, but he did not let them touch him. He ate the food they gave him only after they had gone away. But when he was strong again, he disappeared.
A few months later, when Irvine was in a train between California and Oregon, he looked out of the window and saw his dog running along the road, two hundred and thirty miles away from home. He got off the train at the nearest station, bought a piece of meat, caught the dog and took him home again. So Wolf, as they called him, came a second time to the mountain cottage. There he was tied up for a week.
To win him became a problem, but Irvine liked problems. At the end of the week he tied a piece of thin bright metal round the dog’s neck with the words: RETURN TO WALT IRVINE, GLEN ELLEN CALIFORNIA. Then the dog was allowed to go, and he disappeared. A day later came a telegram. The dog was reported to have run over hundred miles to the north. Wolf was still going when caught.
This time he was sent back by express train. He was tied up for three days, and was allowed to go on the fourth. And he disappeared again. As soon as he was given freedom he always ran north. He was always brought back weak and always ran away fresh and strong.
At last the dog decided to stay at the cottage, but Irvine and his wife had to wait a long time before they could touch him. When at last he let them do it, they said it was a great victory. The man and woman loved the dog very much.
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One day a train was traveling through the English countryside. That was in the days when trains had small compartments, and in one particular compartment there were four people. There was a young girl, quite pretty, who looked like a student or someone who was starting her first job; there was an old lady, dressed in black with bags and magazines and knitting; there was an army officer in his mid-thirties, dressed in his uniform and proper in his manners; and finally there was a young cockney, casually dressed with sparkle in his eyes and ever ready to have a joke. It was quite obvious that both the men were attracted to the young girl, though they didn’t show it.
Suddenly the train went into a tunnel; the lights had not been on, so for half a minute the carriage was in complete darkness, and in the darkness came the sound of a large kiss followed almost immediately by a loud slap. What took place while the train was in the tunnel? When the train finally emerged and it was light again in the carriage, everybody saw the officer with a bleeding nose and a swollen eye.
And the old lady, seeing that, thought to herself: ‘What a brave young lady, who dared to hit the officer for stealing a kiss in such a cowardly way!’ And the young girl, seeing the suffering of the officer, was puzzled: ‘How strange”, she thought, ‘that the officer kissed the young old lady not me!’
The poor officer, having two injuries that caused him more than a little pain and embarrassment, considered to himself: ‘That cockney’s quite a clever chap! He kissed the girl and the girl hit me!’
And the cockney laughed silently to himself at the trick he had played. “I am a clever chap”, he thought to himself. ‘I kissed the back of my hand, hit the officer in the face and nobody said a word!’
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