The president of the United States
Text 1
Country and people
The United States is a large country with many different natural wonders. It goes from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to the islands of Hawaii in the Pacific, and from cold, snowy northern Alaska to sunny Florida in the southeast. The US has almost every kind of weather. Also, it has many kinds of land – rocky coasts, dry empty deserts, and powerful rivers, lakes of all sizes, high mountains, great forests, sunny beaches, and lands of endless winter.
More than 250 million people live in the U.S. The people of the United States are a mixture of many different nationalities.
The United States is a young country. Its written history is a few hundred years old. It is sometimes, in fact, called the “New World”. Over the last four hundred years millions of people have come to start a new life in this “New World”.
Americans are not afraid of new ideas. They built the first skyscrapers and they put the first man on the Moon. They like to be modern. They like exciting, modern cities, new houses, and new cars.
At the same time, Americans love old things. They like to visit historic houses and museums. They build old pioneer houses and remember the days of the “Wild West”. Americans are interested in old traditions, but they are good at making new traditions too.
Text 2
The stars and stripes
The “Stars and Stripes” is a popular name for the red, white, and blue flag of the United States. This is also the name of the national anthem of the United States.
Every country has its own flag. In 1776, the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. The United States was born. George Washington was the general of the American Army. He decided that the United States needed a flag, too.
There is a story that General George Washington asked Betsy Ross to make the flag. She used three colours: red, white, and blue. The colour red was for courage, white was for liberty, and blue was for justice. She sewed thirteen red and white stripes and thirteen white stars in a circle on a blue square. The thirteen stars and stripes stood for the number of states at the beginning of the United States. On June 14, 1777, Congress voted this flag to be the national flag.
Later, new states joined the United States. This was a problem for the flag. In 1818, Congress made another law about the flag. The thirteen stripes stayed the same, but for each new state there was a new star. Today, there are fifty stars on the flag. Hawaii was the last star in 1959.
Text 3
New York City
New York is the largest city in the United States. More than eight million people live there. New York has very tall buildings. It is the city of sky-scrapers. It is also the biggest port in the world. Thousands of ships come to the port of New York each year.
New York is a very cosmopolitan city. People from many countries came to live in New York. Three-quarters, or 75 percent, of the people in New York City come from five groups. The groups are: blacks, Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Irish. The other quarter, 25 percent, comes from all over the world.
New York City is the center for culture in the United States. It has the finest museums and the best art galleries in the country. If you want to see a play, there are many theatres you can go to on Broadway. The street called Broadway is the center for theater in the United States.
People call New York City the “Big Apple”. Jazz musicians in the 1920s gave New York this name. When a musician says he is going to the Big Apple, it means he is the best. Today, New York is still the US center for art and business.
Text 4
The president of the United States
Do you want to be president of the United States of America? Maybe you can apply for the job. Answer these three questions. Are you a U.S. citizen? Are you thirty-five years old or older? Have you been a resident of the United States for fourteen years or longer? Did you say “yes” to all three questions? Then you can take the first steps to the White House.
You become president for a term. A term is four years. You can only serve two terms. This means that you can only be president twice. This became law in 1951. Before that, the law was different. In fact, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933. He was still president when he died in 1945. He was president for twelve years. No one was president longer than he was.
As president of the United States, you earn $200,000 a year. You also get an extra $50,000 for expenses, tax free. You have your own limousine, jet, and housekeepers, all free. You also live rent free, in the White House in Washington, D.C. And you are head of the richest country in the world.
Presidents of the United States are very different people. Twenty-two were lawyers, four soldiers, four farmers, four teachers, two writers, two businessmen, one engineer, one tailor, and one actor. Eight of them did not have a college education!
Text 5
The Pentagon
The Pentagon is a building in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. It has the offices of the U.S. Department of Defense. The Department of Defense includes the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard.
The word pentagon comes from the Greek penta, which means “five”. A pentagon is a figure with five sides. The Pentagon has five rings. The rings are inside each other. Each ring has five sides. How tall do you think the Pentagon is? The answer is easy. Each ring is five stories tall.
The Pentagon is the largest office building in the world. It has seventeen miles of halls. People can get lost in the Pentagon. So the walls on each floor are a different color (brown, green, red, gray, and blue). This helps people to know where they are. There are also many maps in the halls!
The Pentagon is so big that it is like a city[1]. Almost 30,000 people work there. The Pentagon has its own doctors, dentists, and nurses. It has its own banks and stores. It has a post office, a fire department, and a police department. It also has an important center for communications. This center guards the country. It is hundreds of feet under the ground. The Pentagon even has its own radio and TV stations.
Text 6
George Washington
The first US President known to all Americans as “The Father of the Nation” was George Washington. George was born in Virginia in a planter’s family. When the boy was eleven his father died. The family had a lot of land but not enough money to send George to school in England as rich families used to do[2] at that time.
G. Washington began his career in the service of his country as a major in the Virginia militia and later became Commander in Chief of the Colonial Army during the Revolutionary War. He was among those who wrote the US Constitution in Philadelphia. People respected him for his courage, honesty and wisdom.
After the Revolutionary War Washington wanted to retire and live at Mount Vernon where he had a beautiful house and a big plantation. But he knew that his duty was to serve his country. He hurried off to New York City which was the capital then. On April 30, 1789, before a large crowd Washington promised to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”. So, George Washington became the first President of the country and served two terms. He refused the third term and in 1797 he retired to Mount Vernon where he died two years later.
Text 7
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the USA. Like* George Washington, he takes a special place in the list of American presidents.
Abe grew up in the Middle West. His first home was a small, one-room house in the woods. His family was pioneers who helped to fight Indians and push the borders of the United States farther west. The family lived in poverty. His parents moved from Kentucky to Indiana when Abe was 7, and this was his home for 14 years. Thomas Lincoln, Abe’s father, hoped to make a better living there. Although Abe had little chance to go to school, he liked to read. Everyone liked him. But no one could say that this shy young man with a quiet voice would become one of the greatest American presidents.
In 1861 he became 16th American President. In the same year the Civil War began, so Lincoln had to lead the country through the four terrible years of war. He wanted the northern and southern states to stay together and he hated slavery. In 1863 he signed the Emancipation Proclamation – the document that made all the slaves free. This was a great event in the history of the United States. In 1865 the North won the Civil War. Five years after the war ended, president Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre, Washington.
Text 8
White house
The White House is the residence of the president of the United States of America. It is situated in Washington. The White House was the first public building which was built in the capital of the USA. They laid the cornerstone in 1792.
In 1800 President John Adams and his wife moved into the building. At the beginning of the 19th century it was a light-grey structure made of sandstone. There were no conveniences in the house. There were no bathrooms and people brought water by hand into the house from a spring which was five blocks away.
Work continued on the structure when Thomas Jefferson became President. In 1814 the building got on fire. The fire burnt the interior to ashes, it destroyed a part of outer walls and the remaining walls got black. In 1818 they reconstructed and reopened the building. Its light-grey sandstone exterior became (turned) white to cover the effects of fire. Some people think it was from its white walls that the home of the president of the U.S.A. got its name. Other people believe that it got its name even before the fire when it was still grey. Nevertheless officially the president’s home got its name the White House in 1902.
Text 9
The statue of liberty
One of the most famous statues in the world stands on the island in New York Harbor. This statue is, of course, the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty is a woman who holds a torch up high. Visitors can go inside the statue. The statue is so large that as many as twelve people can stand inside the torch. Many more people can stand in other parts of the statue. The statue weighs 225 tons and is 301 feet tall.
The Statue of Liberty was a gift to the United States from the people of France in 1886. Over the years France and the United States had a special relationship. In 1776 France helped the American colonies gain independence from England. The French wanted to do something special for the U.S. centennial, its 100th birthday.
The French people gave money for the statue. Americans designed and built the pedestal for the statue to stand on. The American people raised money to pay for the pedestal. The French engineer Alexander Eiffel, who was famous for his Eiffel Tower in Paris, figured out how to make the heavy statue stand.
In the years after the statue was put up, many immigrants came to the United States through New York. As they entered New York Harbor, they saw the Statue of Liberty holding up her torch. She symbolized a welcome to a land of freedom.
Text 10
Modern Babylon
Some people call New York a poem in steel and stone, others a monster. It doesn’t look like any other city in the world.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century only the wigwams of the Iroquois stood where the sky-scrapers of New York now touch the clouds. In 1626 the Dutch Governor, Peter Minuit, bought a large island from Indians. Later the Indians named this island Manhatta (today Manhattan, one of the famous parts of New York).
Beginning from the end of the 18th century the city’s real growth began. As it is situated at the mouth of the Hudson River, which is open to ocean-going ships all the year round, New York quickly became one of the largest ports in the world.
After the war of Independence in 1776, New York City became the first capital of the new country. After only one year, however, the capital was moved to Philadelphia, where they built a new city as the capital of the U.S.A., Washington D.C.
At the beginning of the 19th century millions of poor people came to the United States from different countries of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of them settled down in New York. That is why people call it the “Modern Babylon”. At present more Irish live in New York than in Dublin, more Italians than in Rome. Emigrants from 70 countries and all the continents of the world, all speaking their own languages, make up this “Modern Babylon”.
[1] like a city – похож на город.
[2] used to do – обычно делали.