Номер 1, страница 22 - гдз по английскому языку 10 класс рабочая тетрадь Вербицкая, Уайт

Track four.

A

The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson.

In The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson adds another extremely funny volume to his autobiography. In this one, he writes about the kid he used to be and the strange world of nineteen fifties America. Although this is a book about growing up in a particular time and place, Bryson makes it the story of anyone who has ever been young.

B

Best-selling author Bill Bryson was born in the USA in nineteen fifty-one. He settled in England in nineteen seventy-seven and lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He and his family then moved to America for a few years, but have now returned to the UK. His numerous successful books include The Lost Continent, Mother Tongue, Neither Here Nor There, and A Short History of Nearly Everything.

C

We didn't call it the kitchen in our house. We called it the Burns unit. 'It's a bit burned,' my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something, a much-loved pet perhaps, salvaged from a house fire. 'But I think I scraped off most of the burnt part,' she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate responded to only two tastes: burned and ice cream. So, everything was fine by him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad. All our meals consisted of leftovers. My mother had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of foods that had already been to the table, sometimes repeatedly. Apart from a few perishable dairy products, everything in the fridge was older than I was, sometimes by many years. The rule of thumb seemed to be that if you opened the lid and the stuff inside didn't make you actually recoil, it was deemed okay to eat. Both my parents had grown up in the Great Depression, and neither of them ever threw anything away if they could possibly avoid it. My mother routinely washed and dried paper plates and smoothed out for reuse spare aluminum foil. If you left a pea on your plate, it became part of a future meal. All our sugar came in little packets spirited out of restaurants in deep coat pockets, as did our jams, jellies, crackers, tartar sauces, some of our ketchup and butter, all of our napkins, and a very occasional ashtray. One of the happiest moments in my parents' life was when maple syrup started to be served in small disposable packets, and they could add those to the household hoard.