Устная часть - Чтение текста

Task 1. Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1.5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1.5 minutes to read it.

It is said that most people have no more than 30 friends at any given time, and 400 over the whole of their lives. However, on social networking sites, most users have about 150 friends. If these numbers are correct, then friendship means different things in different situations. One of the reasons people have more online friends than real friends at any particular point in time is that online friendships do not require much time and energy: it is easy to make Internet friends and keep them forever.

Another possibility is that it is difficult to say ‘no’ when somebody asks us to be their friend online, even if we feel we don’t really know them. The fact that they ask us suggests that they do consider us a friend, which is a nice feeling. Alternatively, they may be ‘collectors’ of online friends and simply want to use us to get a higher number of friends and appear to be popular.