номер 21, страница 40 - гдз по английскому языку 8 класс рабочая тетрадь Вербицкая, Уайт

Track eight.

Bill Gates, who started Microsoft in nineteen seventy five with Paul Allen, is the richest man in the world. He has forty five point three billion dollars.

Although he is very rich, he is also very generous. His charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is one of the most generous in the world.

In nineteen ninety nine, the foundation gave three point two billion dollars to a health charity. The world's biggest donation to an aid organization.

However, Bill Gates has spent some of his enormous fortune on himself and his family. In the nineteen nineties, he built a house next to Lake Washington near Seattle. The house which cost ninety seven million dollars is in a great place with views of the lake from many of the windows.

It is, as you'd expect from a man whose money comes from computers, very modern and has all the latest computer equipment. It has all the normal things you find in a home, like a kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms.

In addition, it has the things only very rich people can buy. A hall which is big enough for two hundred people, a swimming pool that has an underwater music system, a sauna, a library where he keeps a sixteenth century Leonardo da Vinci notebook, which he bought for three point eight million dollars, a theatre with state-of-the-art technology, a formal dining room that's big enough for twenty four guests, an underground garage, a boathouse and a guesthouse for visitors. In fact, the guesthouse was built first to test the main house's technology.

The computer technology is remarkable. All the floors, the drive and the paths in the garden are heated. There are fifty two miles of communication cables. Bill Gates can fill his bath at the correct temperature while he is driving home, and his wife's clothes are in a computerised wardrobe which brings the correct dress or jacket automatically.

The architects, builders and designers used the best materials that money can buy. There is wood on the floors and in the walls from all over the world. In one bathroom, the shower curtain is a two hundred and twenty five kilo piece of stone.

Most of us can't afford to live like the Gates family. But do we want to? It depends on your point of view. A utopian dream with perfect comfort or a science fiction nightmare with computers controlling everything?