Text 12. YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT
It's in our bodies. It's in living things around us. It's used in .some church services and in social customs. We have superstitions and sayings about it. It has thousands of uses in the world today. One of these is to flavor the egg you have for breakfast. Can you guess what it is? Common table salt.
Salt is necessary for the life and health of people, plants and animals. Blood, sweat and tears are all salty. Body cells must have just the right amount of salt to function properly. Too much salt can be dangerous for your heart and blood vessels. But if you work or play hard enough to perspire heavily, you must replace the salt lost from your system or you could suffer from heat exhaustion. Wild animals replace the salt in their systems by licking natural salt deposits. To keep domestic animals healthy, farmers put out salt blocks for their livestock to lick.
Salt is made up of two elements, sodium and chlorine, its chemical name is “sodium chloride.” Ordinarily these two work together in proper balance in the body. However, if something disturbs this balance, the sodium can collect in large amounts and attract and hold water in the tissues.
This can cause swelling in parts of the body, kidney trouble, and high blood pressure. To help correct these problems, the diet must be changed so that the salt needs of the body are still taken care of, but extra amounts of salt cannot collect and cause trouble. Such special diets must be prescribed by a doctor.
Today we take salt for granted, but many years ago salt was scarce, it was used as money. African traders exchanged it for twice its weight in gold. The soldiers in Julius Caesar's army received common salt, called salarium, as part of their pay. From this came the word “salary.” In Great Britain four or five hundred years ago, at the great feasts of the ruling families, the saler, or salt container, was placed in the middle of the long dining tables. Those who were seated above the saler, closest to the host, were the honored guests. Those who sat below the saler were the common people. Our name for a salt container, “salt cellar,” comes from the word “saler.”
From the earliest times, salt has been a symbol of lasting friendship and honor. When the Arabs say, “There is salt between us,” they mean, “We have eaten together and are friends.” Hebrews have a custom of taking bread and salt to the home of a friend. By this they mean. "May you always have everything you need — and some added flavor as well." As part of a religious ceremony, the Hebrews also used to rub salt on newborn babies to insure their good health. Catholics use salt as a symbol of purity in their baptismal service and for the preparation of holy water.
When salt was scarce, it was considered bad luck to spill any of it. Many people still believe this. To prevent bad luck, they say, you must take a pinch of the spilled salt between the thumb and first finger of your right hand and throw it over your left shoulder.
Have you ever heard someone say, “That man isn’t worth his salt”? This means he hasn't earned his salary. If they say, “She's the salt of the earth,” they mean she's the finest kind of person. When someone tells you a story that you know is only partly true, you "take it with a grain of salt." This means you will have to look hard to find the tiny part of the story that is true. If you “salt something away,” you are storing it or putting it away for future use.
Today, almost 40,000,000 tons of salt are produced in the United States alone, taken from mines, wells, and the sea. Some salt deposits are thousands of feet thick and have been mined for hundreds of years. In Poland, 900 feet underground, miners have cut out whole rooms and have carved statues and alters cut of pure salt crystals. In another old mine in Colombia, 345 feet down, there is an excavation large enough to hold 10,000 people.
Only a small amount of all the salt produced seasons - our food. The rest of it is used in other ways - to preserve food, to cool refrigerated railroad cars, to cure animal hides, to melt winter snow and ice. Chemical compounds made from table salt are also used in manufacturing things like glass, soap, paper, and rayon, in heat-treating, smelting, and refining metals, and in water-softening. Common table salt is necessary in many ways we take for granted — our very lives depend upon it.
Margaret Gramatky
From "Cricket"
American English
I. Read the text ‘You Can’t Live without It’. Note both the order in which the ideas come in the text and the important details.
II. Read the text again and find the answers to the questions below.
1. What are extra amounts of salt dangerous for?
2. Why must you replace the salt lost from your system?
3. What do farmers do to keep domestic animals healthy?
4. What elements does salt consist of?
5. Many years ago salt was used as money, wasn’t it?
6. What idiomatic expressions with the word ‘salt’ are given in the text?
7. What do they mean?
8. What was salt a symbol of?
9. What ways is salt used in?
III. Write the summary of the text in English.
Text 13. CANNED FOOD
One of the first men to make a commercial success of food conservation was Henry John Heinz. He started by bottling horse-radish, and he was so successful that in 1869 he founded a company in Pittsburgh, USA. Like other Americans of his generation, Heinz made his name a household word throughout the western world. At last, man seems to have discovered how to preserve food without considerably altering its taste. The tins оf food (Heinz tins!) which Captain Scott abandoned in the Antarctic were opened 47 years after his death, and the contents were not only edible, but pleasant.
The main argument against conserved foods is not that the canning of food makes it taste different; rather, people complain that the recipes which the canning chefs dream up are tedious or tasteless. But any recipe is tedious or tasteless when it is eaten in great quantities. And a company like Heinz can only produce something if it is going to be eaten in great quantities. The tomato is very pleasant to eat when it is freshly picked. A regular diet of tomatoes alone could well prove tedious. The canning companies try to cook the tomato in as many ways as possible. The Heinz factories in Britain use millions and millions of tomatoes every year. They claim that if all the tomatoes were loaded on to 15-ton lorries, the line of lorries would stretch for 60 miles.
But there are many people who do not like to eat food out of season. They like their food to be fresh, and they like to cook it themselves in “the old-fashioned way”. But it is very difficult for modern man to realise what it is like to live without the advantage of pre-packaged and canned food. European society in its present form could not cope without modern methods of food processing. Imagine your local supermarket without all the cans of prepackaged foods. Тhere wouldn’t be much variety left, and what was left would have to be increased enormously in order to give the same amount of food. The supermarket would turn into a chaos of rotting vegetables, stale bread and unhealthy meat. The health problems would be insurmountable, unless we all went back into the country to support ourselves.
So next time you reject canned food as being tasteless or unimaginative, remember that you can only afford to eat fresh food because canned food exists.
I. Read the text and decide whether the arguments contained in the italicized sentences are for or against food canning.
II. Translate the text.
Text 14. THE BEATLES
The Beatles became nationally famous in England in October 1962, when their first single record, “Love Me Do”, entered the Hit Parade at number 27. The famous four who recorded that song were, of course, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and drummer Ringo Starr. This was the original line-up of the band.
Three years before, when John Lennon was 19 and George Harrison approaching his seventeenth birthday, the group was offered its first “big job” - playing at the famous Star Club in Hamburg. In those days there were five Beatles: Pete Best on drums, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and the mysterious fifth Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe.
The Beatles returned to England penniless and exhausted. Stuart Sutcliffe left the group and stayed in Germany, where he died a few months later. The Beatles began a series of lunchtime concerts at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. They were now playing better than ever.
The lunchtime concerts were a great success. The road outside the club was always crowded with girls who worked in nearby shops and offices. They came to see the Beatles during their lunch-break. Local shopkeepers often complained about the crowds and the noise. The man who ran the local record shop went to see what all the fuss was about. His name was Brian Epstein, the man who became the Beatles manager.
The first thing that Epstein did as manager was to sack Pete Best. There are many different stories about why this happened. Probably it was because there was a serious clash of personalities between Lennon and Best. Lennon said: “He goes, or I go.” In Best’s place came Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr), the drummer they met in Hamburg.
The job of producing the Beatles records went to George Martin, an extremely nice and remarkably old-fashioned man who worked at the EMI studios in Abbey Road, North London. George Martin became the brains behind the recording successes of the Beatles (although John Lennon never agreed with that).
Martin had some unusual and immensely successful ideas. He persuaded the group to have instruments on some of their songs that they didn’t want to begin with: the cello on “Yesterday”, the violins on “Eleanor Rigby”, the oboe on “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”.
During the sixties, it seemed that the Beatles were always in the news headlines. They made successful records and interesting films. Lennon caused anti-Beatle demonstrations in America by saying that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. Beatlemania was the word used to describe the reaction of fans all over the world.
When Epstein died in 1967, things began to go wrong for the Beatles' industry. The relationship between Lennon and McCartney became very difficult; they disagreed about music, they disliked each other's wife, and they disagreed about who should be the new manager of their affairs.
Eventually, an American called Allen Klein bought a controlling interest in the group. This was the beginning of the end, as McCartney couldn’t stand Klein.
During the seventies, the Beatles went off in their different directions, Lennon became a solo performer and then property speculator in New York, buying and selling expensive apartments. McCartney formed a middle-of-the-road pop group called “Wings” with his wife, Linda. George Harrison was rarely seen, but spent time raising money for charity. Ringo Starr began a surprisingly successful career as a film star. John Lennon was murdered in New York in December 1980.
In October 1982, 20 years after “Love Me Do” entered the British Hit Parade, a Beatles song was again in the Top Ten. The song was... “Love Me Do”.
Ken WILSON
From “Modern English International”
I. Read the text ‘The Beatles’. Find the key sentence in each paragraph of the text.
II. Suggest a headline to each paragraph.
III. Make up the plan of the text ‘The Beatles’. Retell the text according to your plan.
