Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(1807 -1882)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is an outstanding American poet and humanist of the 19^th century. He was born in Portland in the family of a rich lawyer. The poet’s ancestors had come to America in 1620 on the Mayflower and built the first village in New England. The family traditions helped the poet to understand the history of his country.

When Longfellow was 19 years old, his father sent him to Europe. The young man lived in France, Italy, Spain and Germany, where he studied foreign languages and literature. He was preparing to be a college professor of foreign languages.

When Longfellow returned from Europe, he became a teacher at the college from which he had graduated. Longfellow delivered lectures on literature and wrote poems and articles. He translated the works of European poets into English.

In 1836 Longfellow was invited to deliver lectures on literature at Harvard, the oldest university of the United States. In 1838 his first book of poems was published. The next book of poems, “Voices of the Night”, published in 1839, made him famous. His best work is a long poem, called “The Song of Hiawatha”(1855), which is based on old Indian legends.

7. Ответьте на следующие вопросы:

1) Where was Longfellow born?

2) When was his first book published?

3) What poem was his best work?

В одну колонку выпишите из текста “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow” даты, в другую – события, им соответствующие.

Переведите текст на русский язык.

Clothes washer

In the good old days, clothes were washed in a stream, by pounding the garments with rocks, stones and heavy sticks.

Fire added heat to the laundry mix, when clothes were washed in tubes with water heated over open fires and soap made at home from a combination of lye and ashes. Clothes were scrubbed on a corrugated board, wrung by hand, rinsed, then wrung again, and draped on lines or bushes to dry.

Women’s hands were freed by 1927, when wringer washers become standard, eliminating the washboard, open tubs and the boiler. A few “pumps” with the foot started the motor of the machine and kept it humming.

The first automatic washer – one that washed, rinsed and extracted water from clothes in one process – debuted at a county fair in Louisiana, in September of 1937.

After World War II, the demand for washers was enormous. By 1953, automatic washers were outselling wringer washers ten to one. Today, washers offer a variety of different features.

Выпишите из абзаца №1 все имена существительные в форме множественного числа и преобразуйте их в единственное.

Выпишите из текста все имена прилагательные и преобразуйте их в сравнительную и превосходную степени сравнения.

Вариант 3

1. Образуйте множественное число следующих существительных:

tabby, shoulder, box, life, donkey, child, bird, sheep.

2. Образуйте степени сравнения следующих прилагательных и наречий:

good, expensive, boring, far, short, happy, much, dangerous.