Английский язык. Темы для экзаменов. Уровень В2
Шрифт:
My two brothers are a lot older than me, so I didn’t see them much when I was little because they weren’t at home that much. There are seven years between each of us, so one brother is seven years older than me and the other is fourteen years older than me. However, my auntie Patty lived with us in the country for a while, and she has four children, and the two girls, Catherine and Sarah, were around my age, so it was like having two sisters. This was nice, because we went to school together and we could play together, and it was nice having people of my age around.
My parents live in the country, in the south-west of England. When I lived in England, I used to go to visit them maybe every month, but now of course it’s much more difficult, and now I go about twice a year. Normally I go at Christmas, although not this year, and some time in the summer. They live in the middle of the country and it’s really nice. There is a river, and you can go for long walks and get some peace and quiet after living in the city. My brother Nigel who lives in London goes home quite a lot to visit them with his children, but my older brother Chris can’t go that often, of course, as he’s always very busy working in Hong Kong.
In England, the stereotypical family is husband and wife and 2.4 children, so they say, and a dog and a cat. We have two cats, by the way. They were my cats, but when I left to come and live in Hungary, I took them to my mum, who wasn’t overjoyed at the time, but now she quite likes them. We used to have a dog, a big golden labrador, but he had to be put down ‘cause he got very sick, so that was quite sad. The English stereotypical family of husband and wife is, I suppose, changing now because there are a lot of one-parent families. A lot of people get divorced now and live on their own and bring up their children on their own. What about my parents? Well, my mother never worked, she was a housewife, and she and my dad lived in Sri Lanka and India for much of their married life, ‘cause my dad was a businessman. He’s retired now but used to import, I think it was whisky and fertilizer, from England to Sri Lanka. My mum brought up two children there, so both of my brothers were brought up in Sri Lanka and India. They must have had a very idyllic childhood – I heard stories about them swimming in tropical seas and going on expeditions to tea plantations, and it sounded really nice. I was born a year after they moved back to England, near London, so that’s a bit different from exotic Asia. I suppose in a way we conformed to the typical stereotype of a family, in that my father was the breadwinner and the head of the family, and my mother was a housewife and brought up children. Nowadays in England, most women seem to want to go out to work, and even if they have children, they send them to a nursery or a cr`eche at a very early age and go back to work to resume their careers. Also, quite often now just the immediate family live together, and a lot of old people live on their own, not usually with their children and their grandchildren as used to be the case.
ACCOMMODATION
Vivien
I live in Budapest, in a flat in the centre of town, on the third storey, the third floor, of a building. It’s a typical Hungarian building with a courtyard and a big stairwell. There’s no lift, unfortunately, which means I have to stagger up three flights of stairs every day, a couple of times a day. It’s quite a small flat – I don’t remember how many square metres it is but it’s pretty small.
There’s a living room, where we sleep, which I share with my flatmate, who is a Hungarian student. It’s her flat, so that’s quite good. I pay her rent, but fortunately I don’t have to pay any of the electricity or gas bills, although I pay the phone bill because I’m always calling England, which makes it very expensive. So, in the main room there’s a huge old brick stove, which keeps us good and warm and is very efficient, and as the flat’s quite small it’s not expensive to keep it well-heated in winter. This makes a big change from some other flats I’ve lived in, like in London where I was freezing cold in the winter with no fires or heating of any sort. Then there is a bed and also a sofa-bed, where I sleep, which you can pull out and change from a sofa into a double-size bed. There’re two huge cupboards. One of them is quite modern, and the other one is an old-style white cupboard with a large oval mirror built into it. We also have a desk, where I work. We’ve got a colour TV, which is nice, with about 29 or 30 different channels. Then we’ve got about four blocks of shelves, which are mainly full of language books and books on Hungarian literature.
The other room used to be a kitchen, but my flatmate’s dad has converted it into a kind of study room. There’s a big table in there where we usually eat breakfast and supper. There’s quite a strange setup in the room really, because it has tiles on the floor, so it looks like a cross between a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room. It’s also got a lot of shelves with books on them, and some plants which I brought from the last flat that I lived in – oh, and there are also quite a lot of plants in the living room as well. Then we’ve got a kind of kitchen – well, it’s a little cupboard really – which has a stove, a washing up basin, a couple of little cupboards and some shelves.
Then we’ve got a bathroom, which is also quite small, with rather lurid pink tiles in it, which has a bath, a toilet and a washbasin, and also a Hungarian washing machine, which leaps around all over the bathroom and gets very violent, so we have to watch it when it’s on. There is a big boiler to heat up the water, too. We also have a vacuum cleaner, (which we usually call a “hoover” in England), and there is a large metal stepladder (but I’m not sure why it is there), and there are a lot of cupboards as well, full of shoes and old newspapers and saucepans and all kinds of rubbish.
We’ve also got a very narrow balcony, which you could sit on but you can’t do much else with, and we’ve got big French windows that lead out onto the balcony. The view is of a hotel opposite, so it’s not really the most beautiful view, and you can almost see into the hotel rooms, and unfortunately they can see back into ours so we’ve put net curtains up to keep out visitors, as we’ve had incidences of people, tourists, taking pictures. I don’t know what they’re interested in, maybe they think they’re taking pictures of Hungarians eating breakfast or something like that.
As our flat is so small, it’s cheap and easy to keep warm, and also quite easy to keep clean. However, on the other hand, there’s not much space, as there’s only one room really to speak of. It’s right in the middle of the city, so it’s very quick to get to from anywhere, and is near to different metro lines, the red line and the blue line, so you can get to any part of the city.
My ideal flat or house would be, I suppose, somewhere not quite so central, but then I would like to have a car so that I could get in and out of town quickly. I would like to have a house, ideally with a garden so that I could have pets, maybe dogs and cats, and do gardening and grow plants. I’d like quite a few rooms in the house so that I could use one room as an office, which would be nice as I find it difficult to work in the same room as I normally live in, because there’s always a temptation to switch on the TV or to go and make a cup of coffee. So, I have to be very disciplined, or else have a separate room for working where I wouldn’t be distracted by outside interference or by my own laziness.
I’d also like to have a nice view, maybe a view of the river, and fresh air, so maybe to be up in the hills. I’ve always been used to living by water, and in Hungary I really miss being near the sea. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something I like about living on an island. It’s just so nice to be able to go out to the seaside and get some fresh air.
AREA WHERE YOU LIVE
Vivien
As the district I’m living in now is right in the centre of town, it’s very convenient for schools and for work. It’s also good for shopping, although there aren’t many all-night or twenty-four-hour shops close by. I’ve lived in better places in this respect – although I have to say that Hungary is better than England, where there aren’t usually any 24-hour shops anywhere. Maybe there are a few in the centre of London, but they are the exception rather than the rule. But even if there are just a few 24-hour shops, if you want to go shopping in the daytime, for clothes or books or things like that, it’s perfect.
We have a park just around the corner which is very nice. It’s just been completely renovated. They dug up the whole park and put down new lawns, new grass, planted trees and built a playground for children and a dog toilet.
We’ve got a cinema right opposite us – actually, there are three within five minutes walking distance, which means we have a good choice of films.
The air is a problem. I have to say, the air quality is awful. I never go out onto the balcony of our flat, because you just get a big blast of smoke and fumes from lorries going past below. As a result, I’ve developed a cough, which is known as the Budapest chest. Almost everyone I know here who comes from abroad has developed some sort of cough, as a result of breathing in all the traffic fumes. I think the pollution in Budapest is much worse than in London, or at least it feels like it. Certainly, my lungs feel it. I think it comes from these old-style cars that don’t run on lead-free petrol.