About Friends and Friendship
Text 1
As far as I’m concerned, the first semester away at college is possibly the single worst time to make friends. You’ll make them, but you’ll probably get it all wrong, through no fault of your own, for these are desperate hours.
Here’s desperation; standing in a stadium-like cafeteria, I became convinced that a thousand students busy demolishing the contents of their trays were indifferent to me, and studying me with ill-disguised disdain at the same time. Sitting alone at the table, I see the girl I’d met that morning. I was thrilled to see her. The need for a friend had become violent. Back at the dorm, I told her more about my family peculiarities. All the right sympathetic looks crossed her faсe at all the right moments. I realized that I found a soul mate. But what seemed like two minds mixing and matching on a cosmic plane was actually two lonely freshmen under the influence of unprecedented amounts of caffeine and emotional upheaval. This wasn’t a meeting of souls. This was a talking jag of monumental proportions.
By February, my first friend and I passed each other in the hall with lame, bored smiles, and now I can’t remember her name for the life of me. But that doesn’t make me sad in the least.
Loneliness and the erosion of high school friendships through change and distance leave yawning gaps that beg to be filled. Yet, I never made a real friend by directly applying for the position of candidate or soul mate. I made my best friendships by accident, with instant intimacy marking none of them – it wasn’t mutual loneliness that drew us together.
I met my best friend Jean in a film class when she said Alfred Hitchcock was overrated. I disagreed and we argued out of the building and into a lifelong friendship where we argue still. We became friends without meaning to, and took our intimacy step by step. Deliberate choice, not desperate need, moved us closer. Our friendship is so much apart of us now that it seems unavoidable that we should have become friends. But there was nothing inevitable about it. It’s easy to imagine Jean saying to me in that classroom, “Hitchcock’s hack, you’re a fool, and that’s all I have to say.” But that was not at all she had to say. That is why we’re friends today. We always have more to say.
Friendship’s value wasn’t always clear to me. In the back of my mind, I believed that platonic friendships were a way of marking time until I struck the pay dirt of serious romance. I’d managed to digest many romantic notions by my first year of college, and chief among them was the idea that I’d meet the perfect lover who would be everything to me and make me complete.
Women are friends, I once would have said, when they totally love and support and trust each other, and bare to each other the secrets of their souls, and run to help each other, and tell harsh truths to each other when harsh truths must be told.
I once would have said that a friend is a friend all the way, but now I believe that’s a narrow point of view. For the friendships I have and the friendships I see serve many different functions and, meet different needs and range from those as all – the- way as the friendship of the soul sisters mentioned above to that of the most nonchalant and casual playmates.
Consider these varieties of friendship:
Convenience friends. These are women with whom, if our paths weren’t crossing all the time, we’d have no particular reason to be friends: a next-door neighbor, the mother of one of our children’s closest friends and so on.
Convenience friends are convenient indeed. They will lend us their cups and silverware for a party. They’ll drive our kids to soccer when we’re sick. They’ll take us to pick up our car when we need a lift to the garage. They’ll even take our cats when we go on a vacation. As we will for them.
But we don’t, with convenience friends, ever come too close or tell too much; we maintain our public face and emotional distance.
Special- interest friends. These friendships aren’t intimate, and they needn’t involve kids or silverware or cats. Their value lies in some interest jointly shared. And so we may have an office friend or a yoga friend or a tennis friend or a friend from the Women’s Democratic Club.
My playmate is a shopping friend, a woman of marvelous taste, a woman who knows exactly where to buy what, and furthermore is a woman who always knows beyond a doubt what one ought to be buying.
Historical friends. We all have a friend who has known us since childhood. The years have gone by and we’ve gone separate ways and we’ve little in common now, but we’re still an intimate part of each other’s past.
Crossroads friends. Like historical friends, our crossroads friends are important for what was – for the friendship we shared at a crucial, now past, time of life. A time, perhaps, when we roomed in college together; or worked as eager young singles.
Crossroads friends forge powerful links, links strong enough to endure with much more contact than once-a-year letters at Christmas. And out of respect for those crossroads years, for those dramas and dreams we once shared, we will always be friends.
Men who are friends – I must mention man—woman friendships too. For these friendships can be just as close and as dear as those that we form with women.
6. There are medium friends, and pretty good friends, and very good friends indeed, and these friendships are defined by their level of intimacy. And what we’ll reveal at each of these levels of intimacy is calibrated with care.
Comment the following:
There is one more type of friends –a fair-weather friend. Have you ever met such kind of friends?
What does it mean in Russian? To live in each other’s pocket, to pocket an insult .
Can we associate these expressions with a real friendship? If not, why?
The best of friends, I still believe, totally love and support and trust each other, and bare to each other the secrets of their souls, and run – no question asked – to help each other, and tell harsh truths to each other when they must be told.
But we needn’t agree about everything to tolerate each other’s point of view. To accept without judgment. To give and to take without ever keeping score. And to be there, as I am for them and as they are for me, to comfort our sorrows, to celebrate our joys.
Answer the questions:
How and by what criteria do men (women) choose friends?
What types of friendships do you know?
How do the issues of power and competition effect friendships?
Can frequent disagreement and arguments result in the break of friendship?
Has your friendship ever been affected by financial problems?
Do you think that men and women can be friends?
Can people of different age be friends?
What do you look for in a friend?
Do you think it’s necessary for friends to be on a par financially, professionally, personally and otherwise?
Could you live without friends?
Is it wise to keep making new friends?
Comment on the following quotations:
1. Little friends may prove great friends. (Aesop)
2. Never trust a friend who deserts you in a pinch. (Aesop)
3. Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read .(F.Bacon).
4. You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by fis friends. (J.Conrad)
5. When Zeno was asked what a friend was, he replied, “Another I”. (Diogenes)
6. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud…(R.W.Emerson)
7. The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself. (J.B.P.Moliere)
8. A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on a friendship. (J.D.Rockfeller)
9. A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities. (W.Shakespeare)
10. Inferirity is what you enjoy in your friends. (Ph.D.S. Chesterfield)
11. Associate with men of good quality, if you esteem uoyr own reputation, for it is better to be alone than in bad company. (G.Washington)
Use the following proverbs in situations of your own. Give suitable Russian equivalents if possible.
1. Among friends all things are common.
2. A friend to all is a friend to none.
3. A friend in need is a friend indeed.
4. A man is known by the company he keeps.
5. Friendship cannot stand always on one side.
6. A broken friendship may be soldered, but will never be sound.
Solve the problems:
Your best friend and you had a major quarrel. You apologized, but he still won’t talk to you. What can you do?
Your friend has a really serious problem, and he made you promise not to tell anyone about it. But you feel that you won’t be able to help him without breaking the promise. How will you do it?
You have a friend who has just become very famous. In what way will it tell on your relations?
You used to have a lot of friends before you got married. Your wife (husband) objects to some of your old relationships which are very dear to you. What would you do?
5.You introduced your boyfriend to your group mate and he took fancy to her. Would you break your relationship with your group mate?
Теxt № 2
Friendship, like love affairs, can run out of steam. As we grow up, sometimes we grow apart. Recently, a good friend and I parted company. There was no scandal, no crashing dishes, no dramatic pie-in-the-face. Just a gradual loss of mutual interests, complicated by geographical distance and the demands of our careers, our new lives we are leading require changes.
Women are more often prepared for the end of a love affair than that of a friendship. We have endless advice books on how to recover when your lover's left you, but little seems to be said about friends who break each other's hearts. Maybe it's because we never think of our relationships with other women as being passionate or deep. But a woman can be as emotionally dependent on a friend as she is on a lover, and when the relationship ends, it can leave both women hurt and angry, wondering what went wrong.
I've learned from experience that good friendships are based on a delicate balance. When friends are equal, professionally and personally, it's easier for them to support each other. It's taken me a long time to realize that not all my "friends" wish me well. Someone who wants what you have may not be able to cope with your good luck: if you find yourself apologizing for your hard-earned rise or getting your long-awaited promotion, it's a sure sign that the friendship is off balance. Real friends are secure and steady enough in their own lives to share each other's successes - not envy them.
If a good-looking boyfriend or a new friend appears, it can also be a test of your old friendship. It's not uncommon for friends to try unconsciously to destroy these new relationships if they feel threatened by them and ignored by you. But if that happens often, it may be time to reevaluate your friendship. A frank discussion can work wonders in this situation - in my case, I found out that my friend and I were not as close as we'd once been. My life had taken a different direction since we'd first met, and I'd expected her to follow with the same speed and enthusiasm. We finally agreed that we are not as alike as we had once thought, nor should we be. We decided that it was time to take a leave of absence from each other. Putting each other "on hold" for an indefinite period is hard, but sometimes it's the wisest thing to do. It never hurts to put some distance between friends if the relationship is strained, and it may even prevent a final break.
Sometimes, friendships can be renewed on their own; unlike love affairs, which demand a certain degree of commitment and effort to stay alive, a little healthy neglect
can be good for a friendship and it may even lead to restoring relations that might not have taken place without it. And if that happens, you'll likely find yourself in a more honest, and certainly more balanced, relationship.
A45. Why did the author and her friend part with each other?
Their lives became very different.
They had had a dramatic quarrel.
Their relations were complicated.
They had been demanded to do it.
A46. According to the text, the problem women often have is how to...
end their love affair.
face the end of their friendship .
get advice on friendship.
recover after the break with the lover.
A47. The author believes that real friends are those who ...
never ask you to apologize.
do not to envy you.
differ from you in their social position.
want the same things that you do.
A48. What can help if your friends try to spoil your new relations?
Discussing everything frankly with them.
Threatening them with a break.
Ignoring them.
Becoming closer with them.
A49. If two friends grow apart it's better for them.
to terminate their friendship.
to make efforts to keep their friendship alive.
to take a pause in their relations.
to change nothing in their lives.
A50. What should be done to renew your broken friendship?
You should forget about it for a while.
You should make some effort to restore it.
You should be more honest with your friend.
You should be more balanced in your relations.
Comment on the following poem:
TO A FALSE FRIEND
( By Th. Hood)
Our hands have met, but not our hearts,
Our hands will never meet again.
Friends, if we have ever been,
Friends, we cannot now remain;
I only know I loved you once,
I only know I loved in vain.
Our hands have met, but not our hearts,
Our hands will never meet again.
Points to ponder:
Making new friends can be exciting at 50 as it is at 20.
Making friends is not easy.
The only way to have friends is to be one.
Friendship works wonders.
Adult friendship is no more than a mutual fight from boredom.
Only childhood friends are true friends.
You can never have too many friends.
Ulyanovsk oblast and its economic potential
Ulyanovsk oblast is located in the central part of European Russia and a part of Middle Volga Valley. It occupies a territory of 37,300 square kilometers and has a population of about 1,5 mln people. Ulyanovsk oblast has 21 administrative areas and 6 towns. Ulyanovsk, its administrative center, located 441 miles east of Moscow, has around 700,000 residents.
Approximately 73% of residents are Russians, 11,4% are Tatars, 8,3% are Chuvashes. One of the valuable assets is its forests, 82 oil fields have been discovered in Ulyanovsk oblast. With overall reserves of 35 m tons. 24 oil fields are currently under development.
The oblast also has substantial deposits of quartz, diatomite, chalk, marlstone and clay.
The key oblast industry sectors are aircraft building, automobile industry, electronic engineering and textile industry. The machine building sector accounts for 56% of the oblast industrial output.
The automobile industry is represented by the Avto UAZ. It specializes in UAZ cross-country vehicles, small trucks and minibuses.
The aiecraft industry is represented by the Aviastar Aviacraft Building Plant. It manufactures AN-124 Ruslan and TU-204 freight and passenger airplanes.
Agriculture land with fertile black earth amounts to 3,7 mln hectares, or 59% of the whole territory. Ulyanovsk oblast specializes in producing grains (largely wheat), fodder, sugar beets and sunflowers as well as dairy and beef cattle breeding. Now a considerable decrease was reported in meat, milk, egg production and in cattle breeding.
Over 70% joint ventures are operating in Ulyanovsk oblast, the majority of which are located in Ulyanovsk, 60% of joint ventures have foreign partners from the United States, Germany< the United Kingdom and other countries.
About the famous and half forgotten people
Alfred Nobel – a Man of Contrasts
Alfred Nobel, the great Swedish inventor and industrialist, was a man of many contrasts. He was the son of a bankrupt, but became a millionaire; a scientist with a love of literature, an industrialist who managed to remain an idealist. He made a fortune but lived a simple life, and although cheerful in company he was often sad in private.
A lover of mankind, he never had a wife or family to love him; a patriotic son of his native land, he died alone on foreign soil. He invented a new explosive, dynamite, to improve the peacetime industries of mining and road building, but saw it used as a weapon of war to kill and injure his fellow men.
During his useful life he often felt he was useless: “Alfred Nobel”, he once wrote of himself, “ought to have been put to death by a kind doctor as soon as, with a cry, he entered life”. World-famous for his works he was never personally well known, for throughout his life he avoided publicity. “I do not see”, he once said, “that I have deserved any fame and I have no taste for it”, but since his death his name has brought fame and glory to others.
He was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833 but moved to Russia with his parents in 1842, where his father, Immanuel, made a strong position for himself in the engineering industry. Immanuel Nobel invented the landmine and made a lot of money from government orders for it during the Crimean War, but went bankrupt soon after.
Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred rejoined them in 1863, beginning his own study of explosives in his father’s laboratory. He had never been to school or university but had studied privately and by the time he was twenty was a skillful chemist and excellent linguist, speaking Swedish, Russian, German, French and English.
Like his father, Alfred Nobel was imaginative and inventive, but he had better luck in business and showed more financial sense. He was quick to see industrial openings for his scientific inventions and built up over 80 companies in 20 different countries. Indeed his greatness lay in his outstanding ability to combine the qualities of an original scientist with those of a forward- looking industrialist.
But Nobel’s main concern was never with making money or even making scientific discoveries. Seldom happy, he was always searching for a meaning to life, and from his youth had taken a serious interest in literature and philosophy.
Perhaps because he could not find ordinary human love – he never married—he came to care deeply about the whole of mankind. He was always generous to the poor. “I’d rather take care of the stomachs of the living than the glory of the dead in the form of stone memorials”, he once said.
His greatest wish, however, was to see an end to the wars, and thus peace between nations, and he spent much time and money working for this cause until his death in Italy in 1896.
His famous will in which he left money to provide prizes for outstanding work in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature and Peace, is a memorial to his interests and ideals. And so, the man who felt he should have died at birth is remembered and respected long after his death.
Text The Nobel Prizes
Any of the prizes (five in number until 1969, when a sixth was added) that are awarded annually from a fund bequeathed for that purpose by the Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Bernhard Nobel. The Nobel Prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious awards given for intellectual achievement in the world. In the will he drafted in 1895, Nobel instructed that most of his fortune be set aside as a fund for the awarding of five annual prizes “to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” These prizes as established by his will are: the Nobel Prize for Physics, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine; the Nobel Prize for Literature; and the Nobel Prize for Peace. The first distribution of the prices took place on December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel’s death. An additional award, the Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968 by the Bank of Sweden and was first awarded in 1969.
After Nobel’s death, the Nobel Foundation was set up to carry out the provisions of his will and to administer his funds. In his will, he had stipulated that four different institutions—three Swedish and one Norwegian—should award the prizes. From Stockholm, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences confers the prizes for physics, chemistry, and economics, the Karolinska Institute confers the prize for physiology or medicine, and the Swedish Academy confers the prize for literature. The Norwegian Nobel Committee based in Oslo confers the prize for peace. The Nobel Foundation is the legal owner and functional administrator of the funds and serves as the joint administrative body of the prize-awarding institutions, but it is not concerned with the prize deliberations or decisions, which rest exclusively with the four institutions.