Задания для олимпиады по английскому языку

Задания для олимпиады по английскому языку

1. Integrated reading

Read the text about the cinema.

THE CINEMA

When the 19^th century was coming to an end, the portable camera of the Lumière brothers opened the era of motion pictures. Their first film presented to the audience was the arrival of the express train. Other scenes included workers leaving the factory, a child being fed by his parents, people enjoying a picnic. The making and showing of motion pictures became a source of profit almost as soon as the process was invented. In early 1896 the Lumière brothers opened Cinematographe theatres in London, Brussels and New York. After making more than 40 films that year, mostly scenes of everyday French life, they set about touring the Continent to exhibit the first films – privately to royalty and publicly to the masses. In each country they added new local scenes and found people who would buy their equipment and screen additional product commercially.

The Oberammergau Passion Play of 1898 was the first commercial film ever produced. Other pictures soon followed and motion pictures became a separate industry while actors became major celebrities and commanded huge fees for their performances. In 1917 Charlie Chaplin had a contract that called for an annual salary of one million dollars!

Early in the 20^th century the growing popularity of film began to threaten the prosperity of theatre. The relationship between theatre and cinema was largely viewed as competitive since moving pictures were soon to become the most prominent of cultural attractions. In 1916 the Technicolour Corporation company succeeded in turning black and white films into colour and in 1927 the film in which sounds accompanied the images arrived.

Two decades after these technological revolutions, film itself came face to face with its biggest competitor – Television. The cinema was undergoing difficult times when Fox developed a new imaging system to counteract the popularity of TV. With this technological advance he launched a new era in the cinema. The audiences began to return.

In the 1980s home video on video cassette recorders gave the film industry a severe blow. Film-makers saw the VCR as a new threat. In response multiplexes and megaplexes began to replace the old cinemas in North America and Europe. The first megaplex opened in Brussels in 1988 and had 25 screens and a seating capacity of 7500! These multi-cinemas offered the latest audio technology and comfortable seats, and promised that the audience would get a totally different film experience. Besides, huge shopping centres welcomed cinema complexes of a new format and put them on the list of good fun entertainment both for adults and children.

Today new digital technologies and the Internet are quickly changing the world of moving images. People can have access to cinema effects without leaving their homes.

And yet, despite all this, the cinema will live forever. Film has always been dying and is always being reborn. Again, a technology shift will end “movies as we know them” but not the cinema itself.

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