Стратегии выполнения задания:
1. Читать внятно, выразительно.
2. Правильно произносить звуки, слова.
3. Расставлять паузы и фразовые ударения.
4. Читать с интонацией.
Интонационное оформление текста
- расстановка пауз – правильное деление текста на смысловые группы (отрезки), с помощью пауз
- расстановка фразового ударения – чередование ударных и неударных слов в зависимости от характера слов (знаменательные и служебные части речи);
- владение нисходящим тоном для законченной смысловой группы;
- владение восходящим тоном для оформления незаконченной группы, в том числе в случае перечисления;
- правильное интонационное оформление разных коммуникативных типов высказывания.
Перед тем, как приступить к выполнению задания 1 устной части ЕГЭ по английскому языку, советуем повторить «Правила чтения гласных в английском языке» и «Правила чтения согласных в английском языке».
Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1.5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1.5 minutes to read it.
№1
As soon as spring brings a new growth of bushes and berries, bears start feeding. They eat and eat. All through the spring and summer their feeding goes on. The bears build themselves up. They store food and fats that they will need in the fall when they start their long sleep. As days grow shorter, and the temperature begins to fall, bears hunt for a sleeping place. It may be a shallow cave, or a deep crack between rocks. Some bears end up sleeping in hollow logs. Logs seem to be bears’ favourite places. Bears seem to choose small spaces. They can keep warmer in a cave that’s just large enough to hold them than in a larger cave. They often line their sleeping place with leaves and dried grass. All through their winter naps, bears will not eat. Often they will sleep for 7 months, moving only now and then.
№2
Many lands that had once been swamps were drained or filled in. There are different reasons why people drained swamplands. Some were drained to fight diseases caused by insects that lived in them. Because swamps were considered unpleasant places in which to live and harmful to health, many people thought that unless they were drained the land was worthless. Other swamps were drained to make new land. As the population grew and more land was needed, people drained swamps or filled them to make room for more farms and factories, more roads and airports. Few people thought that it might be harmful to get rid of swamps. As swamps disappeared, other things happened. There were both more floods and more droughts than before. There were also more fires, for swamps had acted as firebreaks. Hunters noticed that there was less wild game. Wild life that once lived in the swamps was dying out, because it had no place to live.
№3
A hobby is an activity you enjoy doing, it is something of your choice, something unique to your taste and talent. A hobby can improve our well-being; it can give more meaning to our life. Just as physical exercise is important for the body, relaxation of the mind is also essential. In fact, studies reveal that people who cultivate themselves through such activities are less likely to suffer from anxieties, depression and other negative feelings. A hobby is the easiest way to restore your balance whenever you are over-worked or stressed. Since it is an activity of your choosing, it will always give you pleasure and help you to relax. Even if you indulge in your hobby for a short period of time, you still can feel the difference in your energy level and spirit. When you have a hobby, you will always find time for it.
№4
The first maps were drawn by explorers to help them find their way home and show people where they had been. The maps showed the shape of the land, distances between places and special features such as caves and old trees. Nowadays, maps show the towns and villages, and the roads, railways, rivers and mountains. Symbols are used to show all the different things on a map and there is a key to explain what the symbols stand for. Over the centuries, people explored most of the Earth and put together the map of the world we use today. Maps of the world or large areas are often either “political” or “physical”. The political map shows territorial borders. The purpose of the physical map is to show features of geography such as mountains, soil type or land use including roads, railroads and buildings.
№5
People have enjoyed sports for thousands of years. Children, men and women play sports both for pleasure and for challenge. Every sport involves physical skill. Every sport has a set of rules that the players of the sport follow. In some sports one person competes against other individuals. Examples of these sports include boxing, tennis and so on. In many games one team competes against the other team. People can go in for winter and summer sports. Summer sports are typical for warmer countries. Those who live in regions that experience cold winters have long enjoyed ice skating, skiing, and sledding. These activities have grown immensely in popularity over the years. Today thousands of resorts cater to the winter tourist trade, and millions of people each year take winter sports vacations.
№6
You don’t see many birds in winter. Most have left your area. Those that stay are not as active. Activity uses energy that is needed to keep warm. The worst problems for birds in winter are getting enough heat and holding on to the heat once it is made. These are problems for all birds. But it is especially true for very small ones. They cannot find enough food. The weather stays so cold for so long that they cannot eat enough to keep alive. But birds have many ways of fighting the cold.
You shiver to keep warm. The heat that you make is made mostly in your muscles. The muscles make more heat when they are active. So one way of keeping warm is to move about, use your muscles. Another way is to shiver. When your body needs heat, the muscles tighten and loosen quickly. They become active. Just as you shiver to keep warm, so do birds.
№7
How many nostrils do you have? Four. Two you can see, two you can’t. This discovery came from observing how fish breathe. Fish get their oxygen from water. Most of them have two pairs of nostrils, a forward-facing set for letting water in and a pair of «exhaust pipes» for letting it out again. The question is, if humans evolved from fishes, where did the other pair of nostrils go. The answer is that they migrated back inside the head to become internal. To do this they somehow had to work their way back through the teeth.
Similar gaps between the teeth can also be seen at an early stage of the human birth. When they fail to join up, the result is a cleft palate. So one ancient fish explains two ancient human mysteries. The most recent research on noses, incidentally, shows that we use each of our two external nostrils to detect different smells.
№8
Antarctica is the driest place on Earth. Parts of the continent have seen no rain for two million years. A desert is technically defined as a place that receives less than 10 inches of rain a year. The Sahara gets just 1 inch of rain a year.
As well as the driest place on Earth, Antarctica can also claim to be the wettest and the windiest. Seventy percent of the world’s fresh water is found there in the form of ice, and its wind speeds are the fastest ever recorded. The unique conditions in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica are caused by so-called katabatic winds. These occur when cold, dense air is pulled downhill simply by the force of gravity. Though Antarctica is a desert, these completely dry parts of it are called, somewhat ironically, oases. They are so similar to conditions on Mars that NASA used them to test the Viking mission.
№9
The highest mountain is located on Mars. The giant volcano Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in the solar system and in the known universe. At 14 miles and 388 miles across, it is almost three times the height of Mount Everest and so wide that its base would cover Arizona, or the whole of the area of the British Isles. The crater on the top is around 45 miles wide and over nearly 2 miles deep, easily big enough to swallow London.
We traditionally measure mountains by their height. If we measured them by their size, it would be meaningless to isolate one mountain in a range from the rest. That being so, Mount Everest would dwarf Olympus Mons. It is part of the gigantic range which is nearly 1,500 miles long.
№10
The ostrich is the bird that lays the smallest egg for its size. Although it is the largest single cell in nature, an ostrich egg is less than 2 per cent of the weight of the mother. A wren’s egg, by comparison, is 13 per cent of its weight. The largest egg in comparison with the size of the bird is that of the Little Spotted kiwi. Its egg accounts for 26 per cent of its own weight.
An ostrich egg weighs as much as twenty-four hen’s eggs; to soft-boil one takes forty-five minutes. Queen Victoria tucked into one for breakfast and declared it among the best meals she had ever eaten. The largest egg laid by any animal – including the dinosaurs – belonged to the elephant bird of Madagascar, which became extinct in 1700. It was ten times the size of an ostrich egg, nine litres in volume and the equivalent of 180 chicken’s eggs.
№11
Despite its status as a proverbial fact, a goldfish’s memory isn’t a few seconds long. Research demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that goldfish have a memory-span of at least three months and can distinguish between different shapes, colours and sounds. They were trained to push a lever to earn a food reward; when the lever was fixed to work only for an hour a day, the fish soon learned to activate it at the correct time. A number of similar studies have shown that farmed fish can easily be trained to feed at particular times and places in response to an audible signal.
Goldfish don’t swim into the side of the bowl, not because they can see it, but because they are using a pressure-sensing system called the lateral line. Certain species of blind cave fish are able to navigate perfectly well in their lightless environment by using their lateral line system alone.
№12
Half the human beings who have ever died, perhaps as many as 45 billion people, have been killed by female mosquitoes. Mosquitoes carry more than a hundred potentially fatal diseases including malaria, yellow fever and elephantiasis. Even today, they kill one person every twelve seconds. Amazingly, nobody had any idea that mosquitoes were dangerous until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1877, the British doctor Sir Patrick Manson proved that yellow fever was caused by mosquito bites.
Seventeen years later it occurred to him that malaria might also be caused by mosquitoes. He encouraged his pupil Ronald Ross to test the hypothesis. Ross was the first person to show how female mosquitoes transmit the parasite. Manson went one better. To show that the theory worked for humans, he infected his own son – using mosquitoes carried in the diplomatic bag from Rome.
№13
Chameleons don’t change colour to match the background. They change colour as a result of different emotional states. Chameleons change colour when they beat another chameleon in a fight. They change colour when a member of the opposite sex steps into view and they sometimes change colour due to fluctuations in either light or temperature.
A chameleon’s skin contains several layers of specialised cells. Altering the balance between these layers causes the skin to reflect different kinds of light, making chameleons a kind of walking colour-wheel. It’s odd how persistent the belief that they change colour to match the background is. The myth first appears in the work of a minor Greek writer of entertaining stories and potted biographies. Aristotle, far more influential and writing a century earlier, had already, quite correctly, linked the colour-change to fear. But it’s come back with a vengeance since and to this day is perhaps the only thing most people think they ‘know’ about chameleons.
№14
Who invented the steam engine? Heron from Egypt. Heron lived in Alexandria and is best known as a mathematician and geometer. Unfortunately for Heron, no one was able to see its practical function, so it was considered nothing more than an amusing novelty. Amazingly, had Heron but known it, the railway had already been invented 700 years earlier.
The principle of railways was then completely forgotten about for almost another 500 years, until people had the idea of using them in mines in the fourteenth century. The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote a brilliant essay speculating what would have happened if the two inventions had been combined to create a global Greek empire, based on a fast rail network. Heron also invented the vending machine – for four drachmas you got a shot of holy water – and a portable device to ensure that no one else could drink the wine you brought along to a bottle party.
№15
Is French toast from France? Yes and no. Dipping bread in eggs and frying it is a pretty universal solution to making stale bread go further. The French certainly had a medieval version and this later became a name that has been enthusiastically adopted for the de luxe versions. The earliest recorded recipe for the dish occurs in the work of the Roman cook in the first century AD. In his book The Art of Cooking, he writes, rather casually, that it’s just another sweet dish.
However, the dish was also sometimes referred to as ‘Poor Knights of Windsor’. One theory offered in explanation is that the most expensive part of a medieval banquet was dessert – spices and nuts were costly imports. Although titled, not all knights were rich, so a dish of fried eggy-bread served with jam or honey would have fulfilled the requirements of etiquette without breaking the bank.
№16
Champagne was not invented in France. It may come as surprise – even an outrage – to them but champagne is an English invention. As anyone who has made their own ginger beer knows, fermentation naturally produces bubbles. The problem has always been controlling it. The English developed a taste for fizzy wine in the sixteenth century, importing barrels of green, flat wine from Champagne and adding sugar and molasses to start it fermenting. They also developed the strong coal-fired glass bottles and corks to contain it.
A legal loophole uniquely allows Americans to call their sparkling wines champagne. The Treaty of Madrid decreed that only the Champagne region may use that name. This was reaffirmed by the Treaty of Versailles but the US signed a separate peace agreement with Germany. When prohibition was lifted, American wine-merchants took advantage of this loophole, freely selling their own Champagne, much to the annoyance of the French.
№17
Only seven prisoners were freed by the storming of the Bastille. In France, 14 July, Bastille Day, is a national holiday and a glorious national symbol. From the rousing paintings of the scene, you might think hundreds of proud revolutionaries flooded into the streets waving tricolours. In fact, only just over half a dozen people were being held at the time of the siege.
One hundred lives were lost in the attack, including that of the governor, whose head was carried through Paris on a pike. Soldiers invalided out of regular service – and conditions were fairly comfortable for most inmates, with relaxed visiting hours and furnished lodgings. The painter Jean Fragonard’s sketch of visiting day in 1785 shows fashionable ladies promenading around the courtyard with the prisoners, who were given a generous spending allowance, plenty of tobacco and alcohol, and were allowed to keep pets.
№18
St Bernards have never carried brandy barrels. The dog’s mission is entirely different – apart from anything else giving brandy to someone with hypothermia is a disastrous mistake – but tourists have always loved the idea, so they still pose wearing them. Before they were trained as mountain rescue dogs, they were used by the monks at the hospice to carry food, as their large size and docile temperament made them good pack animals.
The brandy barrel was the idea of a young English, who was much favoured by Queen Victoria. He was a renowned painter of landscapes and animals, best known for his painting The Monarch of the Glen and for sculpting the lions around the base of Nelson’s Column. Originally, St Bernards were known as Barry hounds, who rescued forty people but was unfortunately killed by the forty-first, who mistook him for a wolf.
№19
Charles Darwin was driven by gastronomic, as well as scientific, curiosity and once ate an oil. While reading Divinity at Cambridge University, he became a member of the Glutton club which met once a week and actively sought to eat animals not normally found on menus. Darwin’s son commenting on his father’s letters, noted that the Glutton club enjoyed, among other things, hawk and bittern.
Over the years, Darwin sharpened up considerably in the academic arena and lost his faith in God, but he never lost his taste for the allure of an interesting menu. In the Galapagos, Darwin wolfed down a few helpings of giant tortoise. Not realising the importance of giant tortoises to his later evolutionary theory, forty-eight specimens were loaded aboard the Beagle. Darwin and his shipmates proceeded to eat them, throwing the shells overboard as they finished.
№20
As well as mercury, gallium and francium can all be liquids at room temperature. Gallium was discovered by French chemist in 1875. It was the first new element to confirm Dmitri Mendeleev’s prediction of the periodic table. Gallium is used chiefly in microchips because of its strange electronic properties. Compact disc players also make use of it because when mixed with arsenic it transforms an electric current directly into laser light.
Francium is one of the rarest elements. It has been calculated there are only ever thirty grams of it present on Earth. This is because it is so radioactive it quickly decays into other, more stable elements. So it is a liquid metal, but not for very long – a few seconds at most. It was the last element to be found in nature. These elements are liquid at unusually low temperatures for metals because the arrangement of electrons in their atoms makes it hard for them to get close enough to each other.