Exercise 44. There is part A given to you. Make up part B by your own. Listen to the Student A and react in an adequate way as Student B. You must fit in the pause left for you

Part B
Reading and Comprehension

Text
London – The city of Contrasts.

First there was a primitive settlement in a clearing on the north bank of the river; it was approached on foot and by small boats. Even when the Romans came, two thousand years ago, it was by no means the most important place in southern England. They built a city wall and — most important — a bridge, and made Londinium the capital of their British colony. The city became and remained for nearly two thousand years a significant port, indeed, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the world's largest.

Until the eighteenth-century development of the stage coach the river was also a main artery for passenger traffic — quicker, safer and more comfortable than riding on muddy, robber-infested roads or tracks. Then came the railway age, with London at the hub of half a dozen national or regional systems — each run by a separate company wanting its own prestigious terminal in the capital. Local railways developed in and around London, in this century all becoming publicly owned. So the transport network evolved: coaches into horse buses into petrol-driven omnibuses; hansom cabs into taxis; surface railways augmented by an underground system to penetrate every part of an already vast metropolis.

Although London, like most of the world's great cities, grew up on the banks of the river — with trade largely water-borne — its architecture has tended to turn away from the stream.

Until the later nineteenth century the river was wide and dirty, being the main receptacle of the city's wastes; muddy banks smelled of refuse and were littered with debris. Much of the south bank was not even built over, apart from Southwark at the south end of London Bridge.

Most of the population was crammed into the walled city and yet, even when that 'great wen' was at its peak of noise, dirt, smoke and squalor, the Thames was a symbol of spaciousness. Several times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it froze over, the river was the setting for huge fairs; oxen were roasted on the thick ice.

Teeming with shipping for centuries, the Thames - which is now cleaner and well embanked, with good access along much of its waterfront — is comparatively uncrowded. The port has moved downstream, labour resistance to new technology having hastened London Pool's decline.

A centre of wealth, power and culture for a thousand years, London has — despite fires, bombs and developers — preserved a heritage of architecture unique in its scope and variety. This is partly because London 'just grew'; its vested interests successfully resisting any attempts to replan extensive parts of the city on formal lines. Charm resides in the small scale, sometimes higgledy-piggledy character of a place often said to consist of an amalgam of villages. Even the great buildings tend to arrest the attention of the onlooker more by their rich detail than their breathtaking grandeur.

St Paul's Cathedral

St Paul's Cathedral was always an exception to the small scale of the capital; Old St Paul's was one of the outstanding (синонимы) churches in Christendom, with a spire 450 feet high. Itself a successor to several churches on the site since AD 604, it was destroyed with most of the rest of the City in the Great Fire of 1666. Another more modest cathedral across the river at Southwark started life as a priory. Westminster was an abbey, only a little more prominent than several others in or near London such as those at Bermondsey and Waltham; it became England's most famous church because many monarchs are buried at Westminster and almost all were crowned there. There were hundreds of parish churches before the Fire and scores afterwards. Of the several London castles, only the Norman Tower of London survives. Spencer House stands as one of the few surviving examples of the great town houses of the nobility — Apsley House is another. These private palaces once dominated the capital, alongside the churches their owners helped to build. They lined the banks of the Thames and were later the raison d'etre of Piccadilly, St James's Square and Park Lane. Their richness can be guessed from the surviving handful and from such royal residences as St James's Palace, Hampton Court, Kew and Kensington palaces. Many of Sir Christopher Wren's post-fire churches were restored after World War II.

The Westminster Abbey

Extensive urban improvements were carried out, for the Prince Regent — at the beginning of the nineteenth century — by architect John Nash. Painted stucco palace-style fronts lined Regents Park, Portland Place, Regent Street and the Mall to Buckingham Palace itself.

Developments in this century have been, by international standards, small scale — for much the same reasons as in the past. Despite much unnecessary demolition, London remains a gracious town of brick, stucco and stone — with concrete, steel and glass only dominant in enclaves such as the South Bank Arts Centre and the City.

The English have always had a sentimental attraction to nature. Unbuilt land dedicated to recreation does not occur in a city in any automatic way. There was no significant park in either of the old cities of London or Westminster. Until the nineteenth century the built-up area was small enough to allow access to nearby country. The essential 'lungs' of the later metropolis have been created largely by means of the gift by the sovereign of what had been gardens and grounds of various palaces and residences - on the urban fringe until engulfed by the sprawl.

So Hyde Park was a royal manor and deer park, having once been an ecclesiastical one. St James's Park had also been attached to a royal property, having been detached from a church one. Kensington Gardens had been the pleasure ground of that palace. Regent's Park had also been Crown land. So all of London's chief places of open-air recreation remain 'royal parks', with the large and notable exception of Hampstead Heath. This was sold by the lord of the manor to the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1871, and has been extended since by the the kind of municipal enterprise responsible for creating other large tracts of recreational land further into the suburbs.

A capital city is also a place to have fun. Theatres, cinemas, hotels, shops, museums, street markets and pubs provide focuses for leisure. The marketing and distribution of food and other essentials have always been a crucial city function; now even shopping for pleasure cannot be regarded as entirely frivolous, since tourism rivals commerce and finance as a source of national income.

London's museums, like its theatres largely nineteenth-century in origin and appearance, are incomparable. The collections of the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum can scarcely be rivalled in quality, and certainly not in quantity, elsewhere. But these are only the 'flagships'; dozens of other major collections and shows are there to be explored and experienced, mostly without the inconvenience of being charged for admission.

The theatres, both subsidized and commercial, such as the National and Royal Shakespeare on the one hand and most of the West End and the ever-growing 'fringe' on the other, are also excellent by international standards. London has more permanent symphony orchestras than any other city, it also has two major opera and ballet houses, Covent Garden and the Coliseum.

Of course there is also pop music, in which London plays a leading world role. Recording studios, discos and jazz clubs abound. And as for shopping, it only need be said that the English are still happy to be referred to as a nation of shop-keepers — the label first given by Napoleon as an intended insult.