The Great Depression

Wall Street is the home of the New York Stock Exchange. Here dealers called stockbrokers buy and sell shares.

Owning shares in a business gives you the right to a share of its profits. But you can make money from share in another way. You can buy them at one price and then, if the company does well, sell them later at a higher one.

More and more people were eager to get some of this easy money. By 1929, buying and selling shares had become almost a national hobby.

Like most other things in the United States in the 1920, you could buy shares on credit. Many people borrowed large sums of money from the banks to buy shares in this way. By the autumn of 1929 the urge to buy shares had become a sort of fever.

Yet some people began to have doubts. The true value of shares in a business firm depends upon its profits. But the profits of many American firms had been falling for some time. If profits were falling, thought more cautious investors, then share prices, too, would soon fall. Slowly such people began to sell their shares. Day by day their number grew. Soon so many people were selling shares that prices did start to fall.

A panic began. On Thursday, October 24, 1929 – Black Thursday – 13 million shares were sold. On the following Tuesday, October 29 – Terrifying Tuesday – 16.5 million were sold.

By the end of the year the value of all shares had dropped by 40, 000 million dollars. Thousands of people were ruined. Some committed suicide.

This collapse of American share prices was known as the Wall Street Crash. It marked the end of the prosperity of the 1920s.

2. Дайте відповідь на запитання:

1) What is the home of the New York Stock Exchange?

2) What do dealers do there?

3) How can you make money from shares?

4) What was known as the Wall Street Crash?

3. Заповніть пропуски відповідною формою дієслова to be: am, is або are. Перекладіть речення на українську мову:

1) I … hot. Open the window, please.

2) What … the weather like today?

3) I …(not) interested in football at all.

.4) … Tom and Bob good football players?

5)… you hungry?

4. Перекладіть речення українською мовою. Пам’ятайте про те, що в сталих виразах дієслово to have втрачає своє основне значення “ мати (щось)»:

1) Would you like to have a rest?

2) Taras is very busy at school. He doesn’t have time to write to his pen-friend very often.

3) On Sundays we always have dinner together. Mum usually cooks very tasty food on Sundays.

4) I don’t have time even to have a walk in the evening.

5) Rita has got a terrible headache at the moment.

5. Заповніть пропуски одним із поданих у дужках дієслів. Перекладіть речення українською мовою:

1) She …(does help, helps, helped) her mother about the house every Saturday.

2) My grandparents …(has got, have, having) a nice house in a village.

3) She …(caught, catch, catches) a cold last Monday.

4) We … (read, reads, shall read) a lot of interesting stories last year.

5) They say, it … (will rains, rain, will rain) heavily next night.

6. Перекладіть наступні речення:

1) Він телефонував тобі минулого тижня?

2) Ви нагодували собаку?

3) Навіщо ти туди підеш?

4) Мені закрити вікно?

5) Улітку ми часто відпочиваємо за містом.

7. Оберіть правильну відповідь:

1) The teacher made me … the exercise again.

A) to do

B) do

C) doing

D) that I’ll do

2) When we arrived in Sochi, it was very hot and the sun …

A) was shining

B) shone

C) shined

D) shining

3) He said that he … to Egypt.

A) never had been

B) never was

C) has never been

D) had never been

4) As far as I know he speaks neither Spanish … Italian.

A) or

B) either

C) not

D) nor

5) Tom Sawyer … by Mark Twain.

A) has written

B) was wrote

C) was written

D) is being written

6) Charles Dickens is still … popular today as when his first work appeared, over 150 years ago.

A) as

B) so

C) such

D) much