1) Установите соответствие между заголовками 1 — 8 и текстами A — G. Используйте каждую цифру только один раз. В задании один заголовок лишний. 1. Choice.
2. Their own duty.
3. Being a teenage mother.
4. A chance for the baby.
5. A great problem.
6. Ways out.
7. Factors of influence.
8. A bit of history.
A. In Victorian Britain any discussions of sex and sexuality were not allowed and considered immoral. Since then, Britain has seen the crazy sixties with their new ideas of ‘free love’ and ‘sexual revolution’. It has also seen the seventies, when British women began to see themselves as career-makers as well as mothers and wives. In the eighties it became normal to see nude images on TV and in the nineties nobody was any longer surprised at the great number of sexual images in the media.
B. All these social changes haven’t changed the British attitude towards sex. A lot of Britons still find it difficult to discuss sex. The UK has the highest proportion of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe. Each year 90,000 girls get pregnant. 2,200 of these are under 14 and 77,000 are under 16 years old. The British figure for this younger group is 10 times higher than in Japan and ten times higher than in Sweden and the Netherlands, where attitudes to sex are more open.
C. The dramatic situation with teenage pregnancies in the UK is due firstly to the lack of sex education, secondly, to the lack of general education and thirdly to the lack of necessary family support. It’s well known that most teenage mothers come from poorly educated and deprived families.
D. Being a teenage mother is not easy. Some pregnant teenage girls decide to have an abortion. However, some decide to go all the way. Quite often, keeping the baby means never continuing education and ending up unemployed and living on benefits from the state.
E. It’s clear that better and more open sex education can help prevent teenage pregnancies. Contraceptive advice and services can also have a positive influence on teenagers’ sexual behavior. Creating special support schools, where school-age mothers can combine school education with looking after the babies is a good idea. This gives the young mothers a chance to make their way in the world and not to depend on state benefits.
F. Before giving birth to their babies, young mothers mostly concentrate on their social life. Instead of studying or helping their families they would go out clubbing and drinking. They don’t realize that having a baby means a lot of personal responsibility and that very often members of their families can’t or even don’t want to share it.
G. In some countries single mothers are obliged by law to give the newspapers some details of their past if they want to give the baby up for adoption. The young women must give their name, height, weight, eye color, the names of their sexual partners and etc. This is done to give the baby’s father, who may or may not know about the baby, a chance to claim responsibility for the child before it can be adopted.