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The president of the United States
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Do you want to be president of the United States of America? Maybe you can apply for the job. Answer these three questions. Are you a U.S. citizen? Are you thirty-five years old or older? Have you been a resident of the United States for fourteen years or longer? Did you say “yes” to all three questions? Then you can take the first steps to the White House.
You become president for a term. A term is four years. You can only serve two terms. This means that you can only be president twice. This became law in 1951. Before that, the law was different. In fact, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933. He was still president when he died in 1945. He was president for twelve years. No one was president longer than he was.
As president of the United States, you earn $200,000 a year. You also get an extra $50,000 for expenses, tax free. You have your own limousine, jet, and housekeepers, all free. You also live rent free, in the White House in Washington, D.C. And you are head of the richest country in the world.
Presidents of the United States are very different people. Twenty-two were lawyers, four soldiers, four farmers, four teachers, two writers, two businessmen, one engineer, one tailor, and one actor. Eight of them did not have a college education!
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The Pentagon
The Pentagon is a building in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. It has the offices of the U.S. Department of Defense. The Department of Defense includes the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard.
The word pentagon comes from the Greek penta, which means “five”. A pentagon is a figure with five sides. The Pentagon has five rings. The rings are inside each other. Each ring has five sides. How tall do you think the Pentagon is? The answer is easy. Each ring is five stories tall.
The Pentagon is the largest office building in the world. It has seventeen miles of halls. People can get lost in the Pentagon. So the walls on each floor are a different color (brown, green, red, gray, and blue). This helps people to know where they are. There are also many maps in the halls!
The Pentagon is so big that it is like a city[1]. Almost 30,000 people work there. The Pentagon has its own doctors, dentists, and nurses. It has its own banks and stores. It has a post office, a fire department, and a police department. It also has an important center for communications. This center guards the country. It is hundreds of feet under the ground. The Pentagon even has its own radio and TV stations.
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George Washington
The first US President known to all Americans as “The Father of the Nation” was George Washington. George was born in Virginia in a planter’s family. When the boy was eleven his father died. The family had a lot of land but not enough money to send George to school in England as rich families used to do[2] at that time.
G. Washington began his career in the service of his country as a major in the Virginia militia and later became Commander in Chief of the Colonial Army during the Revolutionary War. He was among those who wrote the US Constitution in Philadelphia. People respected him for his courage, honesty and wisdom.
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After the Revolutionary War Washington wanted to retire and live at Mount Vernon where he had a beautiful house and a big plantation. But he knew that his duty was to serve his country. He hurried off to New York City which was the capital then. On April 30, 1789, before a large crowd Washington promised to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”. So, George Washington became the first President of the country and served two terms. He refused the third term and in 1797 he retired to Mount Vernon where he died two years later.
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Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the USA. Like* George Washington, he takes a special place in the list of American presidents.
Abe grew up in the Middle West. His first home was a small, one-room house in the woods. His family was pioneers who helped to fight Indians and push the borders of the United States farther west. The family lived in poverty. His parents moved from Kentucky to Indiana when Abe was 7, and this was his home for 14 years. Thomas Lincoln, Abe’s father, hoped to make a better living there. Although Abe had little chance to go to school, he liked to read. Everyone liked him. But no one could say that this shy young man with a quiet voice would become one of the greatest American presidents.
In 1861 he became 16th American President. In the same year the Civil War began, so Lincoln had to lead the country through the four terrible years of war. He wanted the northern and southern states to stay together and he hated slavery. In 1863 he signed the Emancipation Proclamation – the document that made all the slaves free. This was a great event in the history of the United States. In 1865 the North won the Civil War. Five years after the war ended, president Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre, Washington.
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White house
The White House is the residence of the president of the United States of America. It is situated in Washington. The White House was the first public building which was built in the capital of the USA. They laid the cornerstone in 1792.
In 1800 President John Adams and his wife moved into the building. At the beginning of the 19th century it was a light-grey structure made of sandstone. There were no conveniences in the house. There were no bathrooms and people brought water by hand into the house from a spring which was five blocks away.
Work continued on the structure when Thomas Jefferson became President. In 1814 the building got on fire. The fire burnt the interior to ashes, it destroyed a part of outer walls and the remaining walls got black. In 1818 they reconstructed and reopened the building. Its light-grey sandstone exterior became (turned) white to cover the effects of fire. Some people think it was from its white walls that the home of the president of the U.S.A. got its name. Other people believe that it got its name even before the fire when it was still grey. Nevertheless officially the president’s home got its name the White House in 1902.
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The statue of liberty
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One of the most famous statues in the world stands on the island in New York Harbor. This statue is, of course, the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty is a woman who holds a torch up high. Visitors can go inside the statue. The statue is so large that as many as twelve people can stand inside the torch. Many more people can stand in other parts of the statue. The statue weighs 225 tons and is 301 feet tall.
The Statue of Liberty was a gift to the United States from the people of France in 1886. Over the years France and the United States had a special relationship. In 1776 France helped the American colonies gain independence from England. The French wanted to do something special for the U.S. centennial, its 100th birthday.
The French people gave money for the statue. Americans designed and built the pedestal for the statue to stand on. The American people raised money to pay for the pedestal. The French engineer Alexander Eiffel, who was famous for his Eiffel Tower in Paris, figured out how to make the heavy statue stand.
In the years after the statue was put up, many immigrants came to the United States through New York. As they entered New York Harbor, they saw the Statue of Liberty holding up her torch. She symbolized a welcome to a land of freedom.
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Modern Babylon
Some people call New York a poem in steel and stone, others a monster. It doesn’t look like any other city in the world.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century only the wigwams of the Iroquois stood where the sky-scrapers of New York now touch the clouds. In 1626 the Dutch Governor, Peter Minuit, bought a large island from Indians. Later the Indians named this island Manhatta (today Manhattan, one of the famous parts of New York).
Beginning from the end of the 18th century the city’s real growth began. As it is situated at the mouth of the Hudson River, which is open to ocean-going ships all the year round, New York quickly became one of the largest ports in the world.
After the war of Independence in 1776, New York City became the first capital of the new country. After only one year, however, the capital was moved to Philadelphia, where they built a new city as the capital of the U.S.A., Washington D.C.
At the beginning of the 19th century millions of poor people came to the United States from different countries of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of them settled down in New York. That is why people call it the “Modern Babylon”. At present more Irish live in New York than in Dublin, more Italians than in Rome. Emigrants from 70 countries and all the continents of the world, all speaking their own languages, make up this “Modern Babylon”.
[1] like a city – похож на город.
[2] used to do – обычно делали.
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