I. Home

1. For many years now, mail-order shopping has served the needs of a certain kind of customers. Everything they order from a catalogue is delivered to their door. Now, though, e-mail shopping on the Internet has opened up even more opportunities for this kind of shopping.

2. Shopping centres are full of all kinds of stores. They are like small, self-contained towns where you can find everything you want. In a large centre, shoppers can find everything they need without having to go anywhere else. They can leave their cars in the shopping centre car park and buy everything in a covered complex, protected from the heat, cold or rain.

3. Substantial remains of an octagonal Roman bath house, probably reused as a Christian baptistry, have been uncovered during a student training excavation near Faversham in Kent. The central cold plunge pool was five metres across, and stood within a structure which also had underfloor heating and hot pools, probably originally under a domed roof.

4. I am allowed to do what I like with it. I don’t have a lot of space, but it is my favourite place, so I spend a lot of time there. I am the youngest in the family so I also have a lot of old toys on the shelves. I sometimes get bored with the way it is and then I change it round. I often move the bed and change the posters on the walls. I’ve asked my parents for a television but I don’t think I’d get one.

5. About 40 million tourists visit New York City each year. Major attractions include the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Times Square, Central Park and, of course, the luxury shops along the Fifth Avenue. If you are fond of theatres, you can find a lot of them on Broad Way.

6. Tourists are also attracted by the incredible variety of places to eat, from diners with their burgers, barrels and pizza, to many of the finest haute cuisine restaurants in the US, and forgetting the Grand Central Oyster Bar, and the streaming hotdogs sold on every street corner. With so much to do and see it is no surprise that New York is often called “The city that never sleeps”.

7. The Maldives are now one of the West’s most popular tourist destinations but, depending on the island you choose, it can still be easy to get away from the crowd. Professional divers come to these clear waters for the 320 different kinds of coral, many of which exist nowhere else in the world. But if you have never been scuba-diving or snorkeling before, you will be more astonished by the 3,200 different species of fish, some of them swim up to you and nibble your hands.

8. But for an outsider to get a taste of the Maldives beyond their natural beauty, they should visit the island of Gan, only recently opened to tourists. Here a short bicycle ride takes you through areas where whole families are at work collecting coconuts. The people living here are not poor – the shops are full of goods, and every house has electricity.

(Романова Л.И. EГЭ.. Английский язык. Чтение)