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Прочитайте текст и выполните задания 12—18. В каждом задании запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
It’s best to be here early, especially on Saturdays. The rising pitch of the kettle is whistle joined with the faint hiss from the little blue camping stove. Twenty years old, that stove, found the receipt in a drawer just the other day – a bargain at four pounds fifty – but it always pays to hang onto the receipts. It’s Saturday today. By eight-thirty the staff have all arrived, I can’t hear them directly, but the soft, distant voices of the lifts rising and falling give them away.
Of course, there is routine that measures time doesn’t it? Even the period before Christmas and during the sales that follow, routine is still there, although the time stretches and contracts as the public ebb and flow through the building like an unpredictable tide – routine will still be there, disguised, beneath the surface, an undertow. As the management ritually pull out their hair, thicken their arteries, bark at their coworkers and re-prioritise their priorities – behind it all routine will be waiting. Everyone here is a slave to it.. even if they move on, get married, die.. there will always be others to master, to enslave. I too am a slave to routine.. but I don’t mind.
I look at the long white envelope with my name printed neatly in the centre, its edges slightly curled as though to fend off the surrounding army of clutter on the desk. An intruder. A foreign object.
I go down the stairs and open the main doors. Can’t keep the public waiting. Today is much like any other day. In amongst the structure of routine women drift like ghosts amid the lingerie, touching here, feeling there while husbands linger on the periphery of their erratic orbits, faces masked with bored indifference; in the homeware section, tweed-skirted ladies lift the lids on teapots; sniff, like careful poodles at bowls of Pot Porri, turn everything upside down to check the price and replace it quickly at the approach of an eager assistant. The sun streams through the plate glass windows in great broad beams, igniting every chrome fitting, while tired and wayward children are narrowly missed by my trolley’s wheels.