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Here are some of the most common ways that people avoid getting sleepy while driving for long stretches of time:

Caffeine. Let's face it, there's a reason that gas stations along the highway always have plenty of coffee available for their customers. Many people rely on the caffeine boost from coffee - or the jolt from a soda or an energy drink - to give them the boost they need. If you're someone who feels more awake after drinking caffeine (not everyone does), then this could be a good trick for you. However, remember that the caffeine high is only going to last for a short time. After that, you'll crash and be even more tired than before. Therefore, you should only use this trick if you have a good sense of how long a caffeine rush lasts for you and you'll be able to reach your destination - or at least a good stopping point - within that time frame.

Healthy energy boost. Some people prefer avoiding the caffeine rush and going instead for a healthy snack that will boost their energy levels. This has an added benefit as well. When you get tired, your body sometimes mistakes the need for sleep with the need for food. Therefore, you're going to get hungry as you get tired. A healthy snack can take that hunger edge off while waking you up a bit. Foods that are rich in healthy carbs and proteins are the ones that you're going to get the most benefit from in terms of energy.

Cold air. Chilly air will help you wake up and stay more alert. Many people roll down the windows of their car in order to get fresh air because natural cold air is going to give you more of a burst than your AC (atmosphere control) will. However, if you need to use the AC, it can work as well. You might be slightly uncomfortable if you're cold but at least you'll be on your toes.

Create discomfort. Chilly air isn't the only thing that can make a car uncomfortable. Change up the way that you're sitting in the seat so that it's not quite as comfy as it usually is. Or focus on a situation in your life that is causing you frustration. If you're uncomfortable, you're not going to be so sleepy. This isn't fun but it can do the trick in a pinch when you're on the road and really need something to help you stay awake.

Sing along to loud music. Music on the radio can sometimes make you more sleepy if you don't choose it wisely. Make sure that you have a selection of CDs in your car that are all upbeat and filled with energy. Don't be afraid to turn it up and sing along. If you get yourself amped up like you would at a dance club then you won't feel so sleepy while you drive.

Talk radio or audio books. This one isn't right for everyone. Some people hear a book on tape and immediately start to get bored (and sleepy). However, there are some people who can get really engaged in talk radio or books on tape. Those people will benefit from turning their minds on to one of these items while driving. Spoken word poetry or comedy skits work better for others.

Pull over and exercise. Exercise will get your blood pumping and wake you up for a little while. When you get out of the car at a gas station or see a rest stop that looks safe, you can take a few moments to get yourself energized through ex-

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ercise. Don't overdo it; you want to add energy not sap yourself!

Buy a gadget that helps. There are several different gadgets on the market that are specifically designed to help sleepy drivers stay awake. For example, there's the Drive Alert Master which will emit a loud beep in your ear every time that it senses your head starting to drift into sleepiness. If you're someone who has a reason to regularly drive while tired and nothing else is working for you then you might want to try some of the gadgets out there that cost a little bit but could work to keep you safe.

Ask yourself why you're so tired. There are several different reasons that you might get tired when driving and they can help you determine methods of treating the problem. If you're tired because you haven't slept then you might need to pull over at a rest stop and take a catnap. If you're tired because you're bored from all of the hours on the road, you might benefit from playing a road game with yourself or calling a friend to talk for awhile while driving (hands-free of course). If you're tired because you took medication that may have made you drowsy, you need to pull over and wait for the effects to wear off. Assessing the true cause of what's making you tired goes a long way towards reducing the problem.

Make sure that you try out a bunch of different tricks to see what works for you to prevent sleepiness while you're on the road. If what you're trying isn't working and you're just too tired to keep going, pull off the road and get a motel room. You'd rather be late to wherever you're going than not to get there at all.

16.Answer the following questions on the text:

1.What are the ways that people avoid getting sleepy while driving?

2.What are the advantages and disadvantages of drinking caffeine before driving?

3.Which food can you get the most benefit from in terms of energy?

4.Can cold do more good than harm for a driver?

5.If you're uncomfortable, you're not going to be so sleepy, are you?

6.What kind of music or books can make you stay awake?

7.What are the tips for exercising while driving?

8.What gadgets are there on the market that are specifically designed to help sleepy drivers stay awake?

9.Assessing the true cause of what's making you tired goes a long way towards reducing the problem, does it? Why?

10.What other things can you suggest to avoid sleeplessness while driving?

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19. Read and translate the text.

Winter driving

Well the winter blast of snow and ice we got before Xmas has melted away with the recent warm weather we've had. Now you can see all the ugly stuff that was hiding in the snow piles. There is a good size chunk of concrete that the snowplow left at the bottom of my driveway, looking down the road from my house I don't see anything missing so I have no idea where he got it. I just hope the city picks it up.

When the snow first arrives each year, it seems like all the fools want to go play in the snow. There are so many accidents and cars in the ditches, you wonder how it can happen when traffic is just creeping along. Does everyone forget how to drive in the snow?

SLOW DOWN, KEEP YOUR DISTANCE! and maybe you'll stay out of the ditch. It's too bad the authorities can't come up with a way to test drivers in winter conditions before issuing their license, it would be a lot safer out there.

Now that the snow and ice are gone, speeds have gone back to normal on the roads and highways. Unfortunately with the increased speeds come increased damage and injuries if there is an accident. With higher speeds, you need to increase your following distance to allow room for safety.

Remember that anything can happen anywhere and anytime so be aware of what is behind you and what is beside you as well as traffic ahead of you. Keep a mental picture of where vehicles are in your blind spots, they may be there for a while and if you forget that they are there and change lanes, you may just end up as another statistic.

Car insurance is expensive.....no doubt about it! But it can be helpful!

20. Give the English for:

снегопад, таять, Рождество, недавний, прятаться, сугроб, цемент, шоссе, поиграть на снегу, аварии, ров, ползти, сохраняй дистанцию, зимние условия, выдавать водительское удостоверение, намного безопаснее, снег сошёл, увеличение скорости, увеличить травмоопасность, оставить место для безопасности, транспорт, транспортное средство, «слепые зоны», автомобильная страховка, без сомнения.

21. Give your opinion on the following points, use the prompts:

1. When the snow has melted down you can see all the ugly stuff that was hiding in the snow piles.

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2.When the snow first arrives each year, it seems like all the fools want to go play in the snow.

3.With the increased speeds come increased damage and injuries if there is an accident.

4.With higher speeds, you need to increase your following distance to allow room for safety.

5.You should be aware of what is behind you and what is beside you as well as traffic ahead of you.

6.Car insurance is expensive.

III.Train crashes

1.Put the parts of the text in the right order.

The Great Texas Train Crash at Crush

a)Perhaps he was inspired by a similar spectacle done several months before near Cleveland, Ohio. Maybe the idea occurred to him just because his company couldn’t figure out how to get rid of some obsolete locomotives.

Crush worked as a passenger agent for the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, commonly referred to as the “Katy” line.

b)Crush’s proposal was to take two of the obsolete locomotives and put them on a track facing each other a couple of miles apart. The crews would then fire the engines up, get them moving and jump off. The trains would race toward each other, picking up speed, until they met in a fiery and spectacular crash. The railroad would charge nothing to view the man-made disaster, but would profit from tickets sold for special excursion trains running to the site.

c)In the 1890’s the Katy started to replace their 30-ton steam engines with larger, more advanced 60-ton units. This left almost 50 locomotives for which the railroad had no use. Some were sold to logging camps. Others found their way to gravel companies. Still there were plenty left.

d)It was to be a spectacular 19th Century publicity stunt with a carefree carnival mood. It ended in explosions, flying metal and death.

Nobody will ever know what inspired that idea in William G. Crush’s mind. By all accounts he was a conservative man and a solid citizen not given to crazy ideas.

e)The company accepted his recommendation and put Crush in charge of the project. Three engines were chosen to be prepared for the crash. Number 999 was repainted green with red trim and number 1001 was painted red with green trim.

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f)The organizers expected between 20,000 and 25,000 people and built a special railway station at the site for the arriving passengers. A sign there proclaimed the station as “Crush, Texas.” On the day of the event, September 15, 1896, people started arriving in droves.

g)Each was gone over carefully so that there would be no mechanical failures on crash day. “I’ll tell you we really worked on those engines. Firemen in those days had to keep their engines in condition,” recalled Frank Barnes who was a member of one of the locomotive crews. The third engine was to be held in reserve should one of the other two fail.

e)The special trains taking people to the event were so full that some brave souls rode on the roofs of the cars. The crowd swelled to between 30,000 and 40,000 people and Crush – for a few hours – became the second largest town in the state.

2. Can you predict the result of the idea described in the text “The Great Texas Train Crash at Crush”? Read the rest information of the event.

Safety Concerns

While the crowds gathered the engine crews started checking their trains over. Speed tests were conducted on each to help predict the exact point of collision. To avoid having one of engines get away and run wild onto the mainline, the rails connecting the collision spur track with the mainline were removed. Since the couplers used in those days were of the unreliable link and pin variety, the cars were chained together so they would not come apart during impact.

One concern was whether each of the engine’s boilers would hold up under the stress of the crash. Steam engines use a large, heavy metal pressure tank called a boiler to contain water heated to the boiling point by a fire fueled by coal, wood or oil. At the boiling point some of the water turns to steam. Since steam takes up 1675 times as much volume as the water it came from this expansion creates a tremendous pressure inside the boiler. The high pressure steam is transferred through pipes to the cylinders and pistons connected to the engine’s driving wheels. The high pressure steam can then move the pistons, making the locomotive go.

Should a boiler rupture under pressure the result would be almost exactly like a large bomb being set off. In 1865 the steamship The Sultana suffered a boiler explosion while traveling north on the Mississippi. The ship was packed with an unknown number of union soldiers returning from the war and an estimated 1,700 people died, either directly from the explosion or from drowning as the ship sank. Up until that time it was the largest loss of life in the history of the United States as the result of a maritime accident.

In 1912 a steam locomotive being readied for a run at the Southern Pacific Roundhouse in San Antonio had its boiler rupture for unknown reasons. The re-

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sulting explosion leveled most of the buildings in the railroad yard and much of the surrounding neighborhood. A house and its owner seven blocks away were crushed by the front end of the locomotive as it fell from the sky. An estimated 40 people were killed and another 50 injured.

It was clear that if one or both of the boilers were to explode during the collision the event might be too dangerous to stage. Crush had gone to the Katy’s engineers and was assured that the boilers on the engines were designed to resist ruptures even in the event of a high-speed crash and it would be virtually impossible for them to explode. Reassured, Crush went ahead with the event, though except for reporters and honored guests, spectators were to be kept back a minimum of 100 yards from the track.

The Crash

The crowed grew and grew all day and some three hundred policemen were brought in to keep them in order. At 5 PM, one hour late, the two trains were brought together at the expected point of collision so that photographs could be taken. Then they were slowly backed up the track to their starting locations. When all in readiness Crush, who had been overseeing the event from the back of a white horse, waved his hat and the crews in the locomotives threw the throttles to full. “We cut the reverse lever back to the second notch, stayed with the engine for 16 exhausts – that’s four turns of the drivers – and jumped,” recalled Barnes. “Those were good engines. They really got up speed.”

The engines, pulling only six cars each, raced toward each other. By the time they closed the distance, which took just two minutes, they were going at an estimated 45 miles per hour. “The smoke was pouring from their funnels in a great black streak and the popping of the steam could be distinctly heard for the distance of a mile,” reported The Dallas Morning News. “The rumble of the two trains, faint and far off at first, but growing nearer and more distinct with each fleeting second, was like the gathering force of a cyclone. Nearer and nearer they came, the whistles of each blowing repeatedly and the torpedoes which had been placed on the track exploding in almost a continuous round like the rattle of musketry.”

The Deadly Explosion

The trains hit very near to the expected spot. What was unexpected was that the boilers on both locomotives exploded like twin bombs. “There was just a swift instance of silence, and then as if controlled by a single impulse both boilers exploded simultaneously and the air was filled with flying missiles of iron and steel varying in size from a postage stamp to half of a driving wheel…” reported The News. The flying metal had a deadly effect. People ran in terror. Two young men and a woman were killed. Six other people were seriously injured. One of the official photographers lost an eye. The trains themselves were completely destroyed, except for their last cars, which remained virtually untouched. After the crowd recovered from the blast, it swarmed over the wreckage to find souvenirs.

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Nobody knows why the boilers exploded. Afterward, railroad officials speculated that each train traveling 45 miles per hour and hitting head on was the same effect as if a single train traveling 90 miles per hour had hit a solid wall. They suggested this was a much greater impact than they had expected, causing the explosion. Physics shows that this is faulty reasoning, however. The real effect was no more than a single train hitting a wall at 45 miles per hour, perhaps even less. In any case the stunt, expected to generate good will for the railroad, backfired. William Crush was fired that very evening. Proving that, at least in the 19th century, there is no such thing as bad publicity; he was rehired the next day and worked for the company until he retired. The railroad quickly paid any claims against it and the memory of the Crash at Crush slowly faded.

It is unknown if famed ragtime composer Scott Joplin was in the crowd that day, but we do know he was so impressed by the events there that in the early 20th century he wrote Great Crush Collision, immortalizing the man-made disaster in music.

3. Use the previous text to give English equivalents for:

Подъездной путь (ж.-д.); магистраль; рельсы; разрыв бойлера; взрыв; инсценировать; начальное расположение; рычаг реверса; на предполагаемой скорости 45 миль в час; практически нетронутый; толпиться; неожиданно привести к обратным результатам; уволить; уходить на пенсию.

4. Work in pairs. Make up a dialogue between a journalist and an eyewitness of the train crash at Crush.

IV. Disasters at sea

1. Insert the missing words.

The ship that couldn’t sink

The Titanic, with 2,300 ... aboard, was on its first ... from Southampton to New York. It was 11.40 p.m. on 14th April 191 and sea was calm. Suddenly the look-out man saw the enormous ... «...ahead! » he shouted.

Immediately ... turned, but not soon enough. The iceberg tore a 300 foot ...

in the hull and water began to pour in. At first the captain didn't worry because ...

was unsinkable. Then the ship began to lean. At 12.05 the captain gave the order

«Uncover the ...!»

The wireless operator sent out an SOS ... . Six ships began to race towards the Titanic. But the two ... who were closest did not hear the desperate ... for help.

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At 2 the captain gave... «Abandon ship!». In one of the ... was young woman, Emily Richards, and her baby. She said later: «It was the most ... sight I have ever seen». The sea … … of bodies. The water was so ... that nobody could survive for more than a few ...

A few minutes later the Titanic began ... beneath the surface. One by one the last ... jumped into the sea. Then ... rose up in the air and the Titanic ... quickly out of sight. At dawn the next morning a rescue ... picked up survivors from ...

2. Read some more information about the Titanic, fill in the gaps with parts of the sentences. There is one extra part.

A.more that one hundred meters long.

B.enough to save the lives of about half the people on board.

C.asking for full refund or free holiday.

D.on her maiden voyage on Saturday, 14th April, 1912.

E.including ten millionaires.

F.seven hundred and five passengers in the lifeboats.

G.in less than two hours.

Tragedy at sea

The Titanic, the biggest, fastest and most luxurious ship in the world sank

(1)___. There were more than 2.000 people on board. Among the passengers there were some of the richest, most famous and important people in the world,

(2)___. Just before midnight most of the passengers were sleeping or getting ready for bed. Suddenly the night watch saw a huge iceberg ahead. The crew tried to turn the ship but she was too huge to turn quickly, and the speed was too great. The coming iceberg hit the Titanic on the side which made a hole in the side of the ship (3)____. Water started pouring in at once… Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, was sure the ship was going to sink (4)___. What’s worse, he as well as Captain Smith knew that the liner had only 20 lifeboats, (5)___. The two radio officers started sending SOS in the ether, asking everyone who got it to come immediately. But the nearest ship, the Carpathia was four hours away. The captain ordered to abandon the ship, filling the boats with women and children first. The Carpathia arrived an hour and ten minutes after the Titanic had sunk, and rescued (6)___. Fifteen hundred persons had drowned, including Thomas Andrews and Captain Smith.

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3. Read the text and choose the correct answer.

Water Safety

When you have children who like ______(1), if you live near a body of water like a pond or lake, if you live near a river or a stream or if you ______(2) a swimming pool, water safety is ______(3) important to think about. Basic water safety can ______(4) by constant supervision over your small children. You can of course take ______(5) water safety precautions by fencing off your pool or fencing off your yard so your small child can not get to any nearby natural

______(6) of water. You can also increase water safety with the help of swimming pool alarms that are easy to set up and will alert you if your child is near the pool or ______(7) in the pool. You can also increase water safety by buying a swimming pool safety cover for your swimming pool. A swimming pool water safety cover prevents ______ (8) if your small child or pet falls into the pool. When your child is swimming you can ensure water safety by ______ (9) sure your small children have floatation devices like life jackets. You can find these water safety accessories at various pool supply stores and from many different online vendors. You can also ______(10) water safety by teaching your children how to swim.

4. Read the text. Make a list of ways we can use to increase water safety.

Water park safety

Overview. The water park industry has produced an excellent track record of delivering safe family recreation. In fact, a visit to a water park is the safest way for families to play together in the water. Achieving these results is not as effortless as floating down a lazy river attraction, however – it takes a great amount of dedication and teamwork each day.

Annual attendance at America’s approximately 1,000 commercial and mu-

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