Home is where you make it!
As soon as Frank heard that someone a)_________ (try) to sell the ladies’ loo, he wanted it. He was sure that he could make the building, which b)________(situate) next to the famous gardens at Kew, into a beautiful home. Now he’s very busy – he c)_________ (convert) it into one bedroom house.
“It might seem rather odd to want to live in a place which used to be a lavatory,” he said, “ but I d)_________ (think) it’s really beautiful”.
He was divorced recently, and he needed somewhere to live. He knew he wanted something small but unique. “ A friend e)________ (tell) me about it. I think she f)________ (joke), but it was exactly what I g)_________ (search) for”.
He is 57. His 25-year-old daughter, Kathy, h)________ (love) the place, too. She i)_________ (help) her father with the work for the past few weeks as she has been on holiday. He advises visitors not to go into the kitchen. “It’s j)________(decorate) at the moment, and it looks awful”.
Since he bought the lavatory, several ladies k)_________ (knock) on the door, wanting to use it. He lets them use his own bathroom. When he first saw the building, it l) ________ (not use) for several years, so it was in quite a mess.
It m) ________ (build) in 1905. It is very solid, so he n)________ (not have) to do any work on the walls or roof. He o) ________ (pay) £60,000 for it a year ago and since then he p) ________ (spend) an extra £20,000 putting in an upper floor for the bedroom.
“I like the thought that my home has a history,” he says with great pride.
Listening
Listen to two descriptions of places to live. Complete the information in the table.
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First house |
Second house |
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Location
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Type
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№ of rooms
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Facilities
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Transport
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Vicinity
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Listen again and make notes about the advantages and disadvantages of each house.
Role-play
Student A
Persuade your partner that the first house is the best. Point out its advantages and compare it with the second house.
Student B
Persuade your partner that the second house is the best. Point out its advantages and compare it with the first house.
Exercise 7
Complete the sentences below:
We share the house with another family. We live in a _____________.
My friend lives in a small house in the countryside._____________.
Look at this building having several floors. It is a ____________________.
What a huge building it is! I guess it has got about 40 floors. It’s a _________________.
I’ve been living here since 1972. It’s my _________________ residence.
I’m not going to live here till the end of my life. It’s only my____________ residence.
If the house is very old we can say it is_____________________.
I live in my own house. It’s a ___________________.
In front of our house there is a charming place where there are a lot of flowers. It’s a _____________________.
At the back of the house there is some space for growing vegetables (tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, cabbage). It is our _________________________.
Exercise 8
Translate these sentences into English:
Містер Спліт переїхав до цього маєтку кілька років тому. Спочатку споруда виглядала занедбаною, але хазяїн доклав усіх зусиль, щоб зробити його досить привабливим і величним.
Я – студент і живу у гуртожитку. Це моє тимчасове помешкання. Ті, хто мають постійне помешкання, мають більше можливостей зареєструватися у міській бібліотеці чи звернутись до лікарні.
Перед будинком місіс Томсон є чудова зелена галявина і доріжка з гравію, що веде якраз до вхідних дверей.
На жаль, я не можу собі дозволити побудувати теплицю. Я б дуже хотіла вирощувати там різні овочі, а, можливо, і квіти.
В українців є звичай огороджувати двір парканом. Мені подобається, коли цей паркан не кам’яний і не дуже високий. А взагалі мені подобається англійська жива огорожа.
Люди завжди приділяють багато уваги умовам проживання. Нехай то буде палац чи замок, мотель чи вілла, або розкішний готельний номер, люди прагнуть відчуття затишку і спокою, залишаючись там.
Reading
A. Read the text and translate it into Ukrainian. Think of the title for it.
Soon we found ourselves in Spook’s Lane. It is a very short side street leading out to an open country. On one side there are no houses at all. On the other there are only three. The first one is just a house … nothing more to be said about it. The next one is a big, imposing, gloomy house of stone-trimmed red brick, with a mansard roof warty with dormer windows and so many spruces and firs crowding about it that you can hardly see the house. And the third and last is Windy Poplars, right on the corner, with the grass-grown street on the front and a real country road, beautiful with shadows on the other side.
I fell in love with it at once. You know there are houses, which impress themselves upon you at first sight for some reason you can hardly define. Windy Poplars is like that. I may describe it to you as a white house … very white … with green shutters … very green … with a tower in the corner and a dormer window on either side, a low stone wall dividing it from the street, with aspens, poplars growing at intervals along it, and a big garden at the back where flowers and vegetables are delightfully jumbled up together … but all this can’t convey its charm to you. In short, it is a house with a delightful personality and has something of the flavour of Green Gables about it.
I was glad we didn’t have to go in by the front door. It looked so forbidding. It didn’t seem to belong to the house at all. The little green side door, which we reached by a darling path of thin, flat sandstone sunk at intervals in the grass, was much more friendly and inviting. The path was edged by very prim, well-ordered beds of ribbon grass and bleeding heart and tiger lilies and so on. Of course they weren’t all in bloom at this season, but you could see they had bloomed at proper time and done it well.