Task 1. Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1.5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1.5 minutes to read it.

Scientists are certain that the art of writing was known to the Chinese as early as 2000 BC. It is not very easy to learn the Chinese writing system. This is so because the Chinese language doesn’t have any alphabet. Each word of the language is represented by a symbol or even a combination of several symbols. This means the language has to have as many symbols as the total number of words in it. It is enough to know about 25,000 symbols to use Chinese in the written form well. One may think it is a hopeless task to learn so many symbols. However, it is not like that because many symbols look like the corresponding real life objects. Considering the number of symbols in the Chinese language, it is especially interesting to know that the Chinese invented a kind of a printing press in the 10th century. It is much earlier than the printing press in Europe.