Girls Stick With Traditional View of Jobs for The Boys

All the best effort of equality-conscious teachers, anti-sexist librarians,

spanning-wielding mothers, have come to nothing – small girls still wanto to be
nurses and hairdressers, not engineers.

A market research survey asked 579 children, aged seven to eleven , what
they wanted to be when they grew up. The answers were overwhelmingly
traditional. Seventeen per cent of the girls wanted to be hairdressers and
nineper cent teachers. Other aspired to be vest, air – hostesses, secretaries,
shop assistants and pop singers. Only one girl want to be an engineer and none
hoped to go into the space industry or the armed forced.

Sport was the most popular career for boys-chosen by seventeen per cent.
Fourteen per cent wanted to go into the police force, againts five per cent of the
girls. Others wanted to be pilots, builders, carpenters, mechanics and lorry
drives. None would contemplate nursing or hairdressing and only two wanted to
be teachers.

Nearly one in ten of the girls liked the idea of working with children or
babies, but none of the boys. More than one in eight boys wanted to work with
cars, bikes or other vehicles but only one in a hundred girls.

True to their stereotypes , boys were twice as likely as girls to give money
or fame as the main reason for their career choice. Girls were three times as
likely to quote ‘caring for people'.

It’s a New World of Shopping

People are buying things in new ways these days. Many people are busy,
and they don’t want to go to crowded stores. They shop from mail-order catalogs
(books with pictures of things to buy). Tired shoppers in some cities can even
buy groceries (things in a supermarket) by phone!

Most people are shopping differently in stores too. They are taking
groceries home in a different way. People in the supermarket ask, “Plastic or
paper?” many people like plastic bags but plastic is terrible for the environment
(tha air, land, and water around us). Paper bags also are bad because we use too
many trees to make them. Only five hundreds bags come from each tree. Some
people understand this. They aren’t using plastic or paper bags. They are taking
cloth bags to the store. This cloth bags are reuseable. (people can use them
again and again for many years.) the bags are washable too. (people can wash
them.)

Today many people are thinking about the environment. They want to
have a safe world for their children. People are changing to different products
(things in a store). Some mail-order companies are now selling special products
too. Cloth shopping bags, cloth diapers (for babies to wear), and soap without
chemical help the environment. The mail-order companies help the environment
and make a lot of money!

A Shelter For The Homeless

Last summer i was volunteer at a shelter for the homeless, a place for
homeless people to sleep at night. I wan;t working that summer. I was taking
only classes in summer school, so I had some free time.

Three nights a week, I helped in the kitchen of the the shelter. With four
other volunteers, I planned and cooked a hot dinner for forty-five people. We
cooked meals with vegetables, chicken, fish and fruit. The holmess people
needed this good food because many of them usually didn’t eat well.

I enjoyed this volunteer work. The other volunteers in the kitchen were
interisting people. We became friends. One was a very nice elderly housewife.
One was a movie actor. Another was young teacher. And the other was a college
student , like me.

I talked to a lot of the holmess people at the shelter. Some of them told
me about their lives. Some had problems with alcohol or drugs. But others only
had bad luck. One woman worked for almost twenty a small company. Then she
lost her job. She loked and looked for a new job, but she couldn’t fine one. She
was too old. She needed money for food, so she sold her furniture – sofas, chairs
and tables. The woman still couldn’t find a job. She had money for her
apartment. She had to sleep in her car. Then she had to sell her car. She was
alone , afraid and homeless. Finally, she came to the shelter.

The Great Depression

Black Thursday is a famous day in U.S. history. It was October 24, 1929,
the beginning of the Great Depression. Before that day, business in America was
growing fast. Between 1914 and 1929, it grew abaout 62 percent. On Black
Thursday everything changed. That day, American business suddenly stopped
growing. In fact, many businesses stopped completely. The next few years of
American history are called the Great Depression. These were terrible years for
business and for the people. Five thousand banks and 85.000 businesses failed.
Many people lost all their money. About 12 million Americans lost their jobs.

What Science Tells Us About The Earth

The earth is always changing. One way it changes by erosion. Some

erosion is caused by weather. For example, the wind causes erosion. In a desert,
the wind blows the sand aorund. Rain also causes erosion. It washes away earth
and even changes the shape of some rocks. Another kind of erosion is caused by
rivers. When a river goes through a mountain, it cuts into the mountain. After a
long time, the mountain is lower and the land is flatter.