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My name is Thomas, and I live ______ (13) Norway. In my country, there is a celebration called Russ when students finish high school. I participated in the Russ celebration this year. It _______ (14) on May 1 and ended on May 17. We wore clothes that represented our studies in school; for example, I wore blue. All students who studied business wore blue. We wore blue clothes for 17 days. On the last day, we _______ (15) hats and walked in a parade. At the end of the celebration, I _______ (16) not a child anymore. I was an adult.

In the U.S., the customer is really important. When you walk into a shop, the shop assistants greet you with a smile and ask ‘How are you?’. The customer is always right too. If you have a problem with something, you take it back and they solve the problem quickly. You don’t need to complain. You don’t even need to have the receipt.I love real American coffee shops where the waitresses come to your table and call you ‘honey’. You pay a dollar for coffee, and you can drink as much as you like. You can also stay as long as you like. You can sit there all day and read a book for the price of a cup of coffee.Eating out here in the U.S. isn’t as expensive as in the U.K., so we go out quite a lot. People are very friendly here too. When you go to a bar or a restaurant, you often have a conversation with the people at the next table. It’s really nice.

A2 SEVİYESİ

The building company Hong Kong Housing is building a new suburb in Shanghai, a city with a population of more than 15 million people, ______ (13) this suburb is not like other parts of Shanghai. It is a little piece of England. The name of the new area is "English Town". The manager of Hong Kong Housing, Shi Guangsheng, says _______ (14) people in this area of China want to buy an English house and live in an English town. "This town is like Bristol or Chester. There is an English square and there are pigeons to feed like in Trafalgar Square, London. There are four English-style pubs and you _______ (15) buy English beer to drink. There is a canal and you can row a boat there like in Cambridge."Are there any cricket fields? "No, there aren't any places to play cricket because nobody in Shanghai can play this game. But there is a football stadium like those in England. And the thing we are very _______ (16) is our shopping street. There are several shops where you can buy traditional English food like fish and chips or Christmas Pudding."

Many people dream of going on a great travel adventure. Most of us keep dreaming; others make it happen. Gregg Bleakney’s dream was to travel the Americas from top to bottom. He got the idea after he finished a 1,600-kilometer (1,000-mile) bike ride. Gregg’s friend, Brooks Allen, was also a cyclist. The two friends talked and decided their goal: they would travel from Alaska to Argentina – by bike.To pay for the journey, Gregg and Brooks worked and saved money for years. Once they were on the road, they often camped outdoors and stayed in hostels. In many places along their route, local people opened their homes to the two friends and gave them food. During their trip, Gregg and Brooks cycled through deserts, rainforests and mountains. They visited modern cities and explored ancient ruins such as Tikal in Guatemala. In many places, they met other cyclists from all over the world.In May 2007-two years, twelve countries, and over 30, 500 km (19,000 miles) later- Greg eventually reached Ushuaia, Argentina, at the tip of South America. (Near Guatemala, Brooks had to return to the U.S. and Greg continued without him.)Gregg and Brooks kept a record of their adventures in an online blog. The trip taught both men a lot about travelling. Here is some of Gregg’s advice:Travel light. The less baggage you have, the less you will worry about.Be flexible. Don’t plan everything. Then you will be more relaxed and happy, even when there are challenges along the way.Be polite. As one traveller told Gregg, “Always remember that nobody wants to fight, cheat or rob a nice guy.”

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The diseases connected to smoking are a big problem. Doctors think that the annual medical _______ (13) for lung cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses connected to smoking is between 12 and 35 million pounds. And smoking costs society money in other ways. A great deal of money ______ (14) each year on sick days when people don't go to work, on wages that you don't get when you don't go to work, and on work lost at the company when you are sick. This sum of money includes the wages from people _______ (15) die of cancer at a young age and stop paying taxes. However, it does not include fires started by cigarettes, which kill fifteen hundred people yearly and injure another four thousand. Smoking costs every man, woman and child in the UK from one hundred and ten to two hundred and fifty pounds each year in the lost work and wages. When you add another fifty to one hundred and fifty pounds yearly in insurance cost, that comes to one hundred and sixty to four hundred and ten pounds. If everyone stopped _______ (16), a family of four could have up to one thousand six hundred and forty pounds more each year. Creating a society of non-smokers will also help to eradicate other problems. People who don't smoke will live longer, and they will take money from the government when they are old. But they will also work for more years and pay more taxes. In the end, the value of a non-smoking nation is not in pounds. The good health of people is the true value for us all.

GUIDE DOGS FOR THE BLIND -  A guide dog is a dog that is trained to assist the blind. We have evidence of dogs’ helping the blind going as far back as the Middle Ages (between the fifth and fifteenth centuries). But the idea of formally training dogs for this purpose is a relatively new one. One of the first guide dog training schools began in Potsdam, Germany, in 1916. At first, the dogs were trained to help the thousands of World War 1 soldiers blinded by poison gas. Soon, people outside of Germany heard about the school, including an American dog trainer named Dorothy Eustis. Mrs. Eustis visited the school and learnt about the techniques for training guide dogs. She also wrote an article about the school for a popular American magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. A young blind man named Morris Frank read the article. He contacted Mrs. Eustis and convinced her to train one of her dogs for him. Eventually, Mr. Frank would open the first guide dog training school in the United States, the Seeing Eye. Training a dog to work with the blind calls for great patience and skill. Not every dog possesses the qualities necessary to become a guide dog. Key traits include intelligence, a calm personality and the ability to form a close bond with people. Guide dogs must be able to make sense of new and unfamiliar places and situations. They must be able to follow commands quickly, but they must also be intelligent enough to know when to disobey a command that might put their owner in danger. The training process has several stages. The dogs must be fully socialized before they can live with a blind person, so the first step for immature dogs is to live with a family until they are about a year old. Then, the dogs are sent to a training school. Many dogs are sent off from the training program when it becomes clear that they do not possess the characteristics that a guide dog must have. Dogs that successfully complete the training period are placed with a blind person. Usually, the two develop a deep, lifelong bond. In fact, many blind people see their relationship with their dogs as one of the most meaningful relationships in their lives.