II. To decline – deny – give up – refuse – reject – turn down

1) Они отказались продлить контракт.

2) Не отвергайте мое предложение, прежде чем хорошо обдумаете его.

3) Ему было отказано в разрешении последовать за семьей.

4) Наша клиника предлагает альтернативные методы лечения пациентам, которые отказываются от традиционной терапии.

5) Джулия тактично отклонила предложение Чарльза.

6) Тед отверг ее, чтобы жениться на Кристин, и Полли так никогда и не простила его.

7) Он отказался от мысли вести самому это расследование.

8) Рудольф очень умен, в этом ему никак не откажешь.

9) Джорж категорически отрицал свое участие в этом деле.

10) Адвокат хотел сразу отказать просителю, но жалкий вид старика вызвал в нем сочувствие.

Make a review of a newspaper article using your active vocabulary.

Text 3

THERE’S NO TIME FOR “HOUSEWIFE’S BLUES”

How on Earth do you write about the working day of a housewife? Washing up is washing up, and that’s dull. Scrubbing a floor is scrubbing a floor, and that’s drudgery. Tidying up is putting things away, and it’s monotonous. There is little or no craftsmanship or skill involved, except in cooking. Yet, despite this, there is no such thing as a routine day.

A neighbour calls unexpectedly when you’re in the middle of the housework, and that’s the schedule gone for a burton. Or one of the children stays home from school with a cold. Or somebody spills paint over the carpet. So there’s no typical working day. And there’s no typical housewife either, because the working day of a housewife with a baby (or toddlers) is quite different from that of a housewife with children of secondary school age. And when they’re home from school, it’s quite different from term-time… and so on, and so on.

Judy Brown is raising sons aged 15 and 13, a daughter of 12, and twins aged 8; her six-year-old niece also lives with the family. So early morning and breakfast time is the usual kind of rush known to most families. “I get up at 7.30 and get the older children up as they leave for school earlier than the younger ones,” she says.

As in most families, there is a certain amount of chaos while clothes are found, school things are lost and recovered, and bathroom arguments settled. (“It seems to me you have to hound the older ones to wash more than you do the smaller ones,” she says.) By the time these three are sitting down to breakfast she has cooked it’s time to get the other three up. And before the secondary-school children have left at 8.30 breakfast is on the table for the three primary-school children, for Mum and Dad, usually for an uncle who calls for Mr. Brown in the mornings and possibly for a friend of Mrs. Brown’s who has dropped in as well.

“I get rid of the lot of them about ten past nine – the younger ones go to school just round the corner – and then I plunge straight into the washing-up left by nine or ten breakfasts.”

When that’s done, it’s time for the daily cleaning up. The beds – all seven of them – are made first. There are four rooms plus a kitchen and a bathroom in the flat, so three of them are bedrooms. The children sleep three and three with two bunk beds and a single in each room.

“I’m glad to have the bunk beds because of the space, but they are very difficult to make. You can’t get over them properly, so you always end up with a backache!”

The general tidying up – dusting, sweeping and putting things straight – follows. (Remember Jerome K. Jerome’s description of this? – “a perpetual labour which solved the problem often in my mind, namely, how a woman with the work of only one house on her hands manages to pass the time.”) This is usually done by 11.30 barring too many interruptions, and then Mrs. Brown allocates about half an hour to a special daily job. It might be scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom out one day, cleaning the windows the next.

“Anyway, I reckon to finish all the housework by 12 o’clock. And then it’s time for the three younger ones to come home to lunch. They could stay at school for dinner, but they prefer to come home, and I won’t force them. They only have a snack – soup or egg or toast or something like that – because I cook in the evening.

When they’ve gone back to school I wash up again, and then I go out to do the shopping for the evening meal. I come straight back and get on with the cooking, because they all get home by 4.30 and we eat at half-past five. And by the time the washing-up is done after that, it’s time for me to start getting ready for work.”

Judy has been doing an evening job over six years, since the twins were babies. She used to work as a cashier in a London hotel, but didn’t finish until 3 a.m. Now she is a receptionist in a restaurant; the job finishes at about 10, and she is home by 10.30 for a proper night’s sleep.

“I wouldn’t go to work during the day,” she says. “The way things are now, the children get their proper meals, the place is clean and warm for them, and my husband is home when I am out. Actually, I did try shop work once, during the day, but it was murder – I only stuck it for a fortnight! I’ve never worked so hard in all my life, I found myself cooking a meal at about 9 at night and the children weren’t at all happy.”

“Now I enjoy doing my job. I like people and it gives me plenty of opportunities to meet them. If I didn’t go out to work, I think my life would be very monotonous, but as things are I never have time to be bored because I have to work a tight schedule. I think I am a more interesting person through doing this job and the children think of me more as a person instead of just Mum. I also believe that having to get yourself ready to go out to work is very good for housewives! You never fall into temptation of not bothering to change or put your make up on: if you have an interesting job, you want to make yourself look smart for it.”

Apart from that, of course, there’s the money side of it. Mr. Brown was until recently an engineer earning about 22 a week.

“But that meant he had to work seven days a week for this money, in bad conditions, so a few months ago he became a salesman. It seems a waste of his apprenticeship, his experience and his craftsmanship, but his health improved enormously. Anyway, we know what it’s like to struggle – when the children were small our meals were often soup made from a few bones and some herbs. Now my job keeps the children well dressed and better fed, it helps to pay for holidays (expensive for the eight of us), to buy the Christmas presents and extras.”

Mrs. Brown finds time during her week for some outside interests too – membership of a small amateur concert party.

“My sister plays the guitar and organizes musical evenings and it just developed from there. We decided we’d like to do something for other people, so we put on a concert party for the local old age pensioners, and now we are going to do a play. We rehearse every Sunday night – my only free night and my husband says I’m mad! − but it takes you out of yourself, it gives you self-confidence, and it gives you a tremendous satisfaction to see the audience enjoying themselves.”

Mrs. Brown is certainly the prototype of a happy housewife. She says: “I’ve only one thing to wish for – the bigger home so that the children could have more room for their hobbies, to invite their friends, or just to be alone. We can’t afford to buy a house and though we’ve been on the council list for years, I don’t know if or when we’ll get anything. If we had a bigger place to live in, I think I would be the happiest person in the world.”

(by Rosemary Small)

EXERCISES