Номер 6, страница 110 - гдз по английскому языку 11 класс учебник Вербицкая, Каминс Карр

Unit ten.

Track seventy-four.

Part two.

Now, let us turn to the question of how one becomes a celebrity nowadays. Well, the obvious way is still to be a film star, sportsperson, supermodel or international musician. But we also now find some authors, journalists, and even lawyers joining the ranks.

A reliable alternative is to belong to a celebrity family. For example, the Jacksons or the Clintons. And just be famous for being famous.

Another way of achieving celebrity status is to appear on a reality TV show like Big Brother. However, this celebrity is often short-lived and has no social or economic value.

Alternatively, people like chefs, gardeners and interior decorators who have their own show will usually become a celebrity. But once again, their fame is only based on one program and may not last.

As the artist Andy Warhol once said, in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.

Of course, there are both advantages and disadvantages of being a celebrity. They have a great deal of money and they have the freedom to do whatever they want. It seems simple for an actor to launch a singing career, or for a singer to launch their own line of underwear. And the result is that they stay in the public eye for longer.

However, the downside is that they cannot escape the public eye. And this can have a devastating effect on their private lives.

Who knows, for example, how many Hollywood marriages end in divorce or how many child celebrities have difficulty developing into well-balanced adults.

Finally, I want to talk about why so many people are obsessed with celebrities. One reason is that in a very large impersonal world, celebrities provide human faces and human dramas. Another is that we live out our fantasies through them. We wish we could have their kind of freedom and power over people. This also means that we often resent celebrities. And therefore, we are also fascinated by their downfall. Take for example, the case of Michael Jackson.

Doctor Doug Hartman, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, says that celebrities have another function. Since most of us know few people in common, the rich and famous become our link. Everybody knows them. So you can strike up a conversation with a lot of different people. As he says, it's a kind of way to bring us together. An interesting idea, don't you think?

Okay. Well, to finish, I'll leave you with this theory, which is that our obsession with celebrities may be primal. That is, one of our most basic instincts. Some scientists gave a group of monkeys a choice. Drink some juice or look at photos of the most popular monkey in the pack. Despite their thirst, the monkeys chose the photos.

Well, thank you for your attention everyone, and I'll see you in two weeks when our subject will be...