After each term in school we had our holidays. It's fun to have holidays, you can do whatever you like, you don't have to get up too early, do your homework or think of troubles which occur very often at school.

Most of all I liked summer holidays, they were the longest ones, though, when winter was snowy and and frosty, I enjoyed my winter holidays skating and skiing, sledging and making a snowman or having a fight with snowballs....

Hobby is a favourite occupation of a person in his free time. I have many friends. They are very different and they have different kinds of hobbies.

One of my girl-friends, for example, likes to knit very much. Another girl-friend of mine spends all her free time sewing things: skirts, blouses, dresses. She makes it nicely and she always looks fine.

One of my friends likes to make everything with his own hands. He can repair an iron, a radio-set, or a tape-recorder. I think it's a very good hobby....

Learning a foreign language isn't an easy thing. Nowadays it's especially important to know foreign languages.

Some people learn languages because they need them for their work, others travel abroad, for the third studying foreign languages is a hobby. Everyone, who knows foreign languages can speak to people from other countries, read foreign authors in the original, which makes.....

"Honour your mother and father and you will live long and be well, if not, you will die" — says the Bible. Some families are happy, some are dead. It seems to me the reason is misunderstanding of each other in the family.

One more thing, teenagers can take on most of the rights and responsibilities of adulthood. Before this occurs, however, they go through....

How close are you as a family?

We usually see each other at least once a month, maybe more often. We have lunch together on Sunday if we haven't got anything special to do. We live in Tula, which is about an hour and a half away, but we always come to Moscow where my mother and father live. It's not so far.

Usually my grandmother and my uncle and aunt are there too — we're quite a large family! Sometimes my brother and his girlfriend come over — they live nearby. The meal takes about four hours, we spend a lot of time chatting....

«Do you speak English?» — with this phrase begins the conversation between two people, that speak different languages and want to find a common language.

It's very good when you hear: «Yes, I do», and start talking. People of different countries and nations have to get along well with the progress in world trade and technology as well as with each other.

So it is very useful to learn foreign languages. Knowledge of foreign languages helps us to develop friendship and understanding among people....

One of the most difficult problems a young person faces is deciding what to do about a career.

There are individuals, of course, who from the time they are six years old "know" that they want to be doctors or pilots or fire fighters, but the majority of us do not get around to making a decision about an occupation or career.....

Many, many years ago a town cryer ran through the streets and shouted out all the news. But now we live in the Atomic Age. Too many things happen too quickly for us to learn about them in the old-fashioned way. That is why we have to read more and more in order td find out what is happening in the world. Reading is rarely a waste of time.

Have you ever thought about the kind of books people used long ago? It is only in the last 500 years that books have been printed on paper. Before that time the only way of making books was to write them out by hand. No one knows when writing first began, but we have found drawings on the walls of caves and scratchings on bones which are at least 25,000 years old.

Nowadays it's almost impossible to imagine our life without books. Perhaps, there are more books on our planet than men alive.

Long before the invention of printing people valued books as treasure troves of the human knowledge and experience. Hand — written manuscripts took months of writing and were collected by and kept in monasteries with utmost care. We can distinguish books between three classes of them.

Firstly, books on different branches of knowledge, works by brilliant minds of mankind. Secondly, textbooks, reference books and numerous dictionaries. And at last, books of all kinds and genres to read at leisure.

Libraries are very important in the life of all people. We can't buy all the books we want to read. That's why we take out books from libraries.

A lot of people go to libraries on Saturdays. They have some time to spare, because Saturday is a day off. They bring their books to the library and go home taking new books.

The librarians take books from the people who come in and give them some new books to choose for reading at home.

In a book there is a little pocket and in this pocket there is a piece of paper. The librarian takes this piece of paper out of the pocket in the book. She fills it in, that is, puts the date on the piece of paper and on the right page of the book. Then she puts the piece of paper in the person's reading card.