Чтение: запрашиваемая информация (18)

When Anna moved to a small town three years ago, she was sure there would be nothing to do there. The local library looked closed: the windows were dusty and the door was heavy. But inside she found a young librarian who asked her what she liked reading. A week later Anna came back for a book club, and by the end of the month she was helping to organise it. Today the library has a reading club, a film evening and a small studio where pupils record short podcasts about local history. Anna says the town has not changed at all — only her idea of it has.

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The Sokolovs bought one bicycle for four people. It sounds strange, but they had a plan. Every member of the family uses it on certain days: the father rides to work on Mondays and Wednesdays, the mother on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the children share the weekend. On Friday the bicycle rests, and somebody cleans and checks it. In the first month there were arguments about the timetable, so they wrote it down and hung it in the hall. Since then nobody has broken the rules. The family says the main result is not saved money but the habit of planning the week together.

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Two years ago the residents of a nine-storey block in Kazan asked for permission to use the roof. The idea was to grow vegetables there. The city agreed on one condition: the roof had to be checked by engineers first. The check took four months and cost the residents a considerable sum, but the answer was positive. Now there are thirty boxes of soil on the roof, and eighteen families take care of them. Tomatoes grow best; cucumbers, surprisingly, do not. Children water the plants after school, and the oldest resident, a former biology teacher, gives advice to everybody. Last August the garden produced more than a hundred kilograms of vegetables.

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Every July a camp near the river collects phones on the first day and returns them on the last. Parents are told about the rule in advance, and some of them refuse to send their children there. Those who come usually spend two difficult days looking for something to do. Then they discover volleyball, card games and long conversations after supper. The staff say the hardest group is not the children but the parents, who write anxious letters during the first week. At the end of the shift the children get their phones back, and most of them do not switch them on until the bus arrives.

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The market in our square works only on Sunday mornings. Farmers arrive at six, and by seven the first customers appear. My grandmother says that thirty years ago there were twice as many sellers, but the goods were much the same: potatoes, honey, milk and apples. Now there is also a stall with bread baked in a village twelve kilometres away. The bread is sold out by nine, so those who want it come early. Prices at the market are usually lower than in the supermarket, but not always: in winter vegetables cost more because they have to be kept warm during the journey.

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Making a film at school turned out to be much harder than we expected. The script was written in September by four pupils, and everybody in the class liked it. Then we discovered that we had no camera, no lights and nobody who could edit video. The physics teacher lent us two lamps, a parent gave us an old camera, and one pupil learned editing from online lessons during the autumn holidays. Filming took the whole winter because we could work only after lessons. The premiere was held in March. Twenty minutes of film cost us six months of work, but nobody in the class regrets it.

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The animal shelter outside our town keeps about sixty dogs. It is run by three employees, but the real work is done by volunteers: about forty people come regularly at the weekend. Their main task is walking, because a dog that is never walked becomes difficult and nobody wants to take it home. Photographs of the dogs are published every Monday, and each photograph is taken by a volunteer who knows the animal. The shelter says this is important: a good photograph doubles the chance that a dog will find a family. Last year one hundred and twelve dogs left the shelter for new homes.

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Last summer our family travelled across the country by train instead of flying. We spent ten days on the road and covered about four thousand kilometres. My father had calculated everything in advance: tickets, food and two nights in hotels. In the end the trip cost less than a week at a seaside hotel would have cost. The best part, my sister says, was not the landscape but the people: in ten days we shared a compartment with a geologist, a violinist and a family with three small children. My mother disagrees — for her the best moment was the morning when we crossed the Volga.

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On the second Saturday of every month a workshop opens in the community centre. Anybody can bring a broken kettle, lamp or toaster, and volunteers will try to repair it together with the owner. The rule is strict: the owner must stay and help, because the aim is not free repair but learning. About seven items out of ten leave the workshop working. The rest are usually beyond repair, and the volunteers explain why. The idea came from a retired engineer who was tired of seeing working machines thrown away because of a broken wire.

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Orienteering looks like an ordinary run through a forest, but it is not. Each runner gets a map with several points that must be found in the right order. The distance is the same for everybody, yet the routes are different, because between two points there is always more than one way. A fast runner who chooses a bad route often finishes behind a slower one who read the map better. Beginners are usually advised to walk the first competition instead of running: it is easier to think when you are not out of breath. In our region competitions are held from April to October.

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Our class exchanges paper letters with a school from another region. The idea belongs to our English teacher, who said that writing on paper makes you think before you write. A letter takes about a week to arrive, and the answer takes another week. At first everybody complained that it was too slow. Now most pupils agree that waiting is the best part: you remember what you asked and you really want to read the answer. Last month we received a photograph of the school garden, and our class sent back a drawing of the river. The teacher keeps all the letters in a box on her desk.

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Our school decided to find out how much water it wasted. Two pupils from the ninth form walked round the building with a notebook and checked every tap. Eleven of them were dripping. The caretaker repaired all eleven in three days, and the next monthly bill was noticeably lower. The physics teacher helped the pupils calculate that a single dripping tap wastes up to a hundred litres a week. After that the class made a poster and put it above every washbasin. Now the pupils check the taps once a month themselves, and the caretaker says he has much less work.

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