UNIT 2 - Урок 2 - Тексты для аудирования к рабочей тетради

Аудиозапись № 5

Our Fantastic Journey

I would like to tell you about my trip this summer. Two of my best friends and I travelled through Europe by train. Our plan was to visit Germany, Italy, Greece and France. Gro, Borgur and me are from Norway, we live in the city of Bergen and go to the same school. We started our journey two days before Norway was going to play an important football match against Ireland. We went to Germany with the stop in Copenhagen. When we arrived in Copenhagen, we understood that we were in time to see the football match. We found the only place in the nearby streets where they had a television. It was an Irish pub. It was fairly easy to speak to people in Copenhagen. They understood us because Norwegian and their language, Danish, are not very different.

When we entered the pub, we saw at once that the majority of people there were Irish football fans. In fact, we were the only boys in the place who shouted for Norway. Norway lost the match, the Irish footballers were much better. We had a quick meal in the pub and went to the railway station to catch the next train to Berlin. My friends and I don’t speak German, our foreign language at school is English. Luckily, it turned out that people in Berlin could understand English. Young people and older people helped us to find the places we wanted to visit, and explained everything in English.

After a wonderful week in Italy we found a boat to take us to the Greek Island of Corfu. Corfu is very popular with tourists. There were a lot of young people coming from all over the world on the boat. There we met some Norwegian girls. It was great to speak Norwegian again after a week abroad trying to understand fast-speaking Italians. But English helped us in Italy and in Greece too. The time we spent on the island was really fantastic. It was about forty degrees Centigrade but we swam a lot and had fun. Then we went through France and returned to Norway. And nearly everywhere English helped us to speak to people from different countries. It is really a global language.

Аудиозапись № 6

Interviewer: Mrs Morrison, lots of people these days speak about the rise of English. You can hear English in all the countries of the world. Is this something unusual?

Glenda: I don’t think so. For example, over the centuries Greek, Latin, French, Spanish and other languages were very important for people of Europe. At different periods of our history each of them was an international instrument for trade, religion, economy, diplomatic problems.

Interviewer: True. Even nowadays people use some of them a lot. Latin is the language of medicine, isn’t it?

Glenda: It is, though Latin is a dead language. We all understand that we need a world language, a sort of “lingua franca”.

Interviewer: What is a “lingua franca”?

Glenda: It is a language people use when they have different first languages. For example, if your native language is Russian and my native language is Spanish but we both know French, the French language is our lingua franca.

Interviewer: So, English nowadays is a kind of lingua franca for a lot of people in the world?

Glenda: It is and more than that. It is a real global language. People use English in all corners of the world, they use it in science and sport, in education and in fashion, in cinema and in medicine.

Interviewer: But most of us feel that our own languages are extremely important for us. We want to keep our mother tongues and to speak them.

Glenda: It’s a natural wish of many people. Honestly speaking the rise of English makes our lives easier but not all the people are happy about it. They are afraid that their own languages can disappear. They say, “It is like sleeping next to an elephant that is a very big animal. It is not going to do you any harm, but its size is dangerous for you.”

Аудиозапись № 7

Follow, endless, meaning, dictionary, prefer, pronounce, fantastic, awful, sound, probably, useless, develop, already, tongue, vocabulary.

Аудиозапись № 8

a) Air, already, beginning, borrowing, carry, develop, dislike, even, ever, happening, meeting, speechless, children, borrow, need;

b) fresh air, a French borrowing, an unusual beginning, to carry a suitcase, to develop slowly, to dislike swimming, an awful story, to borrow a book, an endless meeting, a fantastic sound;

c) I have just finished doing my homework. Bob has read a fantastic book. There was a yellow balloon in the air. Sara has come to an important meeting. Can you pronounce this sound, please? I have taken an English dictionary from the library. They don’t know any foreign languages, so they speak their mother tongue. Could you follow me? He hasn’t read the letter yet. The student has pronounced the new words slowly.