Чтение

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My Day

My name is Aidana. I am nineteen years old. I live in Osh with my family. I get up at seven o'clock. I wash my face and I have breakfast. I eat bread and eggs, and I drink green tea. I am a student. I go to college by bus. My classes start at nine. I like English and maths. I don't like history. At one o'clock I have lunch with my friends. We eat plov or lagman. It is very tasty. In the evening I help my mother in the kitchen. Then I watch videos on YouTube or I read a book. I go to bed at eleven. I am tired, but I am happy.

A1~3 мин

A New Friend

It is Saturday. Bakyt is in the park. It is sunny and warm. A young woman sits next to him. She has a big map and a camera. She looks at the map. She looks confused. "Excuse me," she says. "Do you speak English?" "Yes, a little," Bakyt says. "Where is the bazaar? I want to buy a hat." "The bazaar is not far. Go straight, then turn left. It is ten minutes on foot." "Thank you! My name is Lena. I'm from Germany." "I'm Bakyt. Nice to meet you. Is this your first time in Osh?" "Yes, it is. Osh is beautiful!" Bakyt smiles. "Come with me. I can show you the bazaar." They walk together. Lena buys a white kalpak. Bakyt buys a coffee for two. Now they are friends.

A1~3 мин

The Lost Phone

Timur has a new phone. It is black and very expensive. He loves it. On Monday, Timur takes a taxi to work. He talks on the phone with his boss. Then he gets out of the taxi and goes into the office. At ten o'clock he wants to call his mother. But where is his phone? It is not in his bag. It is not in his pocket. It is not on his desk. "Oh no!" he says. "My phone is in the taxi!" His friend Asel says, "Don't worry. Call your phone from my phone." Timur calls. Ring, ring. A man answers. "Hello? Is this your phone? I'm the taxi driver. I am near your office." Five minutes later, the driver comes to the office with the phone. Timur is very happy. "Thank you so much!" he says. He gives the driver a big tip.

A2~4 мин

A Trip to Issyk-Kul

Last summer, my friends and I went to Lake Issyk-Kul. We wanted to relax after a long year of work. We left Bishkek early in the morning. The road was long, but the views were amazing — green hills, horses, and snowy mountains far away. We stopped in a small village and bought fresh apricots from an old woman. They were the sweetest apricots I have ever eaten. We arrived in the afternoon. The water was very clear and blue, but it was cold! My friend Nurlan jumped in first and screamed. We all laughed. In the evening, we made a fire on the beach and cooked shashlik. We talked, sang songs, and looked at the stars. I have never seen so many stars in my life. On the last day, it rained, so we stayed in a café and played cards. Even the rain didn't spoil our trip. When I came home, I was tired but happy. I'm going to go back next year — maybe this time I'll stay for two weeks.

A2~4 мин

The Night Bus

Aibek missed the last bus home. It was eleven o'clock, and the street was dark and quiet. His phone battery was almost dead. He sat down at the bus stop and thought about his options. He could walk, but his house was six kilometres away. He could call his brother, but his brother was probably asleep. Then an old man sat down next to him. The man had a small bag of apples and a newspaper. "Waiting for the bus?" the man asked. "Yes, but I think it has already gone," Aibek said. The man smiled. "There is a night bus. Not many people know about it. It comes at half past eleven." Aibek did not believe him. He had lived in this city all his life, and he had never heard of a night bus. But at exactly half past eleven, a small blue bus stopped in front of them. The driver opened the door and waved. The old man stood up and gave Aibek an apple. "Sometimes the thing you need is already there," he said. "You just have to wait long enough to see it." Aibek got on the bus. When he turned around to say thank you, the bench was empty.

B1~5 мин

One Word a Day

When Dina decided to learn English, she made a plan that seemed almost too small to matter. She would learn one new word every day. Not ten, not fifty. Just one. Her friends laughed. "One word? You'll need a hundred years," said her cousin. But Dina had tried big plans before. Every January she bought a thick grammar book, studied for three hours a day, and gave up by February. This time, she wanted something she could not fail. So every morning, before checking her phone, she opened a notebook and wrote one word, its meaning, and a sentence about her own life. On the first day, the word was "reluctant". She wrote: "I am reluctant to wake up at six." After a month, something strange happened. One word a day did not feel like enough anymore. She started reading short articles to find interesting words. Then she began watching videos without subtitles, just to see how many words she recognised. By the end of the year, her notebook contained three hundred and sixty-five words. But her real vocabulary was much larger, because each word had pulled others along with it, like a fisherman pulling a net. Her cousin asked her what the secret was. "There isn't one," Dina said. "I just made it impossible to skip. The size of the step doesn't matter. What matters is that you never stop walking."

B1~6 мин

The Interview

Timur had practised his answers for weeks. He knew exactly what he would say about his strengths, his weaknesses, and where he saw himself in five years. He had even recorded himself on video and watched it until he could no longer stand the sound of his own voice. On the morning of the interview, he arrived twenty minutes early. The office was on the fourteenth floor of a glass building, and the receptionist asked him to wait in a room with a large window overlooking the mountains. The interviewer was a woman in her forties named Mrs Harris. She shook his hand, sat down, and said something Timur had not expected. "I'm not going to ask you any of the usual questions. Instead, tell me about something you failed at." For a moment, his mind went completely blank. All his prepared answers disappeared. Then he remembered the online shop he had built at seventeen. It had taken him four months. He had spent all his savings on advertising. In the end, it sold exactly nine products, and three of them were bought by his mother. He told Mrs Harris the whole story, including the part about his mother. She laughed, and he found himself laughing too. "And what did you learn?" she asked. "That building something is the easy part," Timur said. "Finding out whether anyone actually needs it is the hard part. Now I ask that question first." Mrs Harris wrote something in her notebook. A week later, he received an email offering him the job. In the feedback section, there was only one line: "Honest about failure. Learned from it."

B2~7 мин

The Cartographer's Daughter

Her father had spent forty years drawing maps of places he had never visited. He worked from satellite photographs, old travel diaries, and the descriptions of sailors who passed through the port where they lived. His maps were famously accurate, and governments paid him well for them. But when Leila was twelve, she discovered his secret. On every map he had ever drawn, somewhere in an empty corner of the desert or the sea, there was a tiny island that did not exist. It was never larger than a grain of rice, and it always had the same name, written in letters so small that you needed a magnifying glass to read them: Amira. Amira had been her mother's name. Leila never mentioned it to him. She understood, even then, that some things are not meant to be discussed. Grief, she realised, is not always loud. Sometimes it is a private habit, repeated carefully for decades, invisible to almost everyone. When her father died, the national archive asked whether they could acquire his collection. Leila agreed, on one condition. She insisted that the catalogue should include a note explaining the island. The archivist was reluctant. "It might damage his reputation," he said. "Mapmakers are supposed to be precise." "He was precise," Leila replied. "He knew exactly where she was. Every single time." The note was added. Today, visitors to the archive often spend longer looking for the tiny island than they spend looking at the maps themselves. Some of them leave flowers by the display case. Nobody is entirely sure who started that tradition, but the staff have decided not to stop it.

C1~6 мин

The Price of Attention

It has become something of a cliché to observe that, if you are not paying for a product, you are the product. Yet the phrase persists because it captures an uncomfortable truth about the modern internet: the most valuable resource many companies compete for is not money but attention. Attention, unlike money, cannot be saved or borrowed. Each person has a fixed amount of it every day, and once it has been spent, it is gone. This scarcity is precisely what makes it so valuable to advertisers, and so profitable for the platforms that capture it. Critics argue that this business model creates a fundamental conflict of interest. A platform that earns more when users stay longer has little incentive to help them leave, even when leaving would be better for their wellbeing. Features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, and unpredictable notifications are not accidents of design; they are deliberate mechanisms that exploit well-documented features of human psychology. Defenders of the industry counter that users are not passive victims. People choose which apps to install, how long to use them, and what content to follow. Furthermore, the advertising model has made an enormous range of services freely available to billions of people who could never afford to pay for them. Perhaps the more useful question is not whether the attention economy is good or bad, but whether individuals are equipped to navigate it. Just as previous generations had to learn to read critically in an age of mass print media, ours may need to develop a new kind of literacy: the ability to notice where our attention is going, and to decide deliberately whether that is where we want it to be.

Настоящие книги по уровням

A1–A2: Oxford Bookworms Starter/Stage 1–2, Penguin Readers Level 1–2
B1: «Holes» — L. Sachar, «Wonder» — R.J. Palacio, «Diary of a Wimpy Kid»
B2: «The Martian» — A. Weir, «Harry Potter», «Animal Farm» — G. Orwell
C1: «Atomic Habits», «Sapiens», статьи BBC Future и The Guardian

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