💡 Use full sentences with «I think…», «In my opinion…», «Personally, I…» — the same registers you need for Task 3 & 4.
First — read & flip — make sure you can use each word in a sentence:
1. Peter the Great Saint Petersburg in 1703.
2. Nicholas II in 1917 after the February Revolution.
3. In 1861, Alexander II serfdom in Russia.
4. Yuri Gagarin became the first person in April 1961.
5. Catherine the Great is often called an example of .
6. The Winter Palace was the official of Russian emperors.
7. Ivan IV was the first Russian tsar in 1547.
8. The Great Patriotic War lasted from 1941 to 1945 and cost millions of .
9. The Russian tricolor stands for .
10. The USSR was in 1991.
Right form = right ending. Watch for spelling (achieve → achievement), part of speech, positive/negative prefix. Six early items to warm up your suffix-radar.
Speaker A: I've been dancing ballet since I was six, and this September I finally passed the entrance exam to the Moscow State Academy of Choreography — one of only twelve girls chosen out of nearly two hundred applicants. My days are now split between academic subjects in the morning and four hours of pointe work in the afternoon, and by the time I get home I can barely feel my toes. My friends outside dance think I'm a bit crazy, but on stage every muscle finally makes sense, and I honestly can't picture my future without the smell of resin and the sound of a live orchestra.
Speaker B: Every August my family disappears from the city and heads out to a small settlement on the shores of Lake Baikal. We take the overnight train from Irkutsk, then a wooden boat piled with tents and cooking pots, and we live for a fortnight without electricity or reliable mobile signal. It sounds hard, but it's the only place on earth where the silence has a physical weight — no traffic, no notifications, just the wind, the ripple of freshwater against the rocks and, at dawn, the occasional call of a nerpa seal. Those two weeks reset something inside me that Moscow can't fix.
Speaker C: Almost every Sunday I catch the metro to the Tretyakov Gallery, where my mother has worked as a guide since before I was born. Growing up between Serov's portraits and Vasnetsov's fairy-tale panels, I learned to read a canvas before I learned to read a book, and by ten I already knew which brush strokes belonged to whom. I've decided to study art history at university and, if things go well, to train as a museum curator specialising in the Russian silver age. My mother pretends she isn't influencing me, but I know she's secretly thrilled.
Speaker D: After school I devote at least three hours a day to online chess — not just casual games but proper analysis with a coach in Saint Petersburg who follows my openings via video call. My Elo rating has just crossed 1930, which is high enough to qualify me for the junior regional championship in Kazan next month, and if I place in the top three I get a place at the national training camp. People still think chess isn't a sport, but after a five-hour tournament your back aches, your eyes burn and you sleep for twelve hours straight — believe me, it counts.
Speaker E: I've supported Spartak Moscow since I was seven, when my grandfather first took me to the old stadium on a freezing October evening — I still remember the smell of grilled sausages and the roar of forty thousand voices around us. Now we go together at least once a month, and even though he can hardly climb the stairs to our seats any more, he refuses to give up his season ticket. Some of my classmates prefer basketball or online games, but for us, football is really about the two of us: three generations of Spartak scarves in one family, and a hundred stories on the way home.
Speaker F: Baking has become the thing I turn to whenever school gets too much — my grandmother taught me the family recipes when I was still standing on a stool to reach the counter. We make kulich cake for Easter with candied fruit and saffron, tall stacks of blini for Maslenitsa served with sour cream and salted red caviar, honey cake soaked overnight for birthdays, and gingerbread pryaniki for New Year's Eve. There's something almost meditative about kneading dough and watching yeast come alive, and my kitchen slowly filling with the smell of vanilla is honestly better than any therapy I could afford.
Anna: Denis, guess what — my class is going to the Hermitage next Friday!
Denis: Lucky you! Is it a whole day?
Anna: Almost. We leave school at nine, and we're back around six. Our history teacher is coming with us and also our art teacher, Maria Ivanovna.
Denis: Have you booked a guide?
Anna: Yes, an English-speaking one — because we want to practise. It costs a bit more, but the school pays for the tickets.
Denis: Nice. What are you most excited about?
Anna: The Egyptian rooms. I've been to the Hermitage twice before, but always to the Winter Palace section — never to the ancient art.
Denis: I've never been at all. My parents keep saying we'll go «next summer», but next summer never comes.
Anna: Come with us! Actually no — my teacher said the group is full.
Denis: Fine. Take good photos then.
Host: Anna, thanks for joining us. You are only 24, but you already lead a small research team. Tell us how it all started.
Anna: Well, I grew up in Novosibirsk, in a family of engineers. My father worked at Akademgorodok, so science was our dinner-table conversation. But interestingly, I didn't want to be a scientist. I wanted to be a doctor. I only changed my mind at seventeen after a summer school in physics.
Host: Where did you study?
Anna: I did my bachelor's at Novosibirsk State University, then moved to Moscow for the master's programme at Skoltech. Now I'm finishing my PhD there. My topic is renewable energy — specifically, small solar panels for remote Siberian villages.
Host: Have you spent time abroad?
Anna: Yes, one exchange semester in Munich, and last summer I gave a talk in Tokyo. Both trips were useful, but I always want to come home. My problem is here — Russian villages, Russian climate.
Host: What's the biggest difficulty in your work?
Anna: Money is not the main issue — Skoltech supports us well. The real problem is time. A single test run in a Siberian village takes three weeks. And weather can ruin months of preparation.
Host: Any advice for young girls who want to enter science?
Anna: Two things. First — don't listen to people who say «girls don't do physics». They're wrong. Second — start small, but start early. A school project counts. A blog counts. Show your curiosity, don't just talk about it.
Even Russians who live in big cities and rarely open a history textbook usually know a set of traditions that hold their year together. Most of them come from village life, and today they survive as small rituals inside otherwise very modern lives.
The best example is Maslenitsa, the pancake week before Lent. Cities close streets for open-air fairs, people burn a straw doll to «say goodbye to winter», .
Then there is the banya. Not just a hot room with a stove — a whole social event. Friends spend three or four hours together, alternating heat with cold water, . Business deals are still sometimes agreed inside a banya rather than at a desk.
The samovar has almost disappeared from everyday kitchens, . Tea from a samovar tastes different, older people insist, and long conversations become somehow easier around it.
Matryoshka dolls, the wooden nesting figures, look like a tourist souvenir, but they were only invented in 1890 — surprisingly recent. What is genuinely old, though, is the black bread, .
Finally, there is the dacha — a small wooden summer house, usually outside the city, where families grow their own tomatoes and cucumbers . For many Russians, that is where real childhood memories are kept.
Dmitri Mendeleev was born in 1834 in the small Siberian town of Tobolsk, the youngest of seventeen children. When he was thirteen, his father died and his mother took him thousands of kilometres by horse to Moscow, and then to Saint Petersburg, so that he could receive a proper education. Later Mendeleev would say that everything he became, he owed to that single stubborn journey.
At university he specialised in chemistry, but he was equally interested in agriculture, oil refining and even balloon flight. In 1869, at the age of thirty-five, he did the work that made him world-famous: he arranged all sixty-three known chemical elements into a single table, ordered by atomic weight. What impressed the scientific world most was not the table itself — several other chemists had tried something similar — but the fact that Mendeleev left empty squares, predicting elements that had not yet been discovered. Within twenty years, gallium, scandium and germanium had appeared, exactly where he said they would.
Mendeleev's public life was not always easy. He argued with government ministers, he was refused a professorship in Saint Petersburg for being «too democratic», and his second marriage created a scandal because the Church had not yet approved the divorce from his first wife. But he stayed a working scientist to the end. His last big project was to modernise the Russian system of weights and measures — a boring administrative job that ordinary chemists would have avoided.
Today, more than one hundred and fifty years after his table, it hangs in every chemistry classroom in the world. And curiously, in Russia itself, Mendeleev is remembered not only for chemistry but for his belief that a scientist has a duty to improve everyday life — from the size of a school desk to the quality of vodka.
Read each text and put the word in CAPITALS at the end of the line into the correct form so that it fits the text grammatically. Only one word goes in each gap.
Choose the best option in each drop-down.
These 7 items use Dana's active vocabulary from the year (education, personality, environment, linking). Choose carefully.
Write a reply. In your reply: answer his 3 questions, then ask 3 questions about his favourite subject at school.
| Activity | % of students |
|---|---|
| Online games and streaming | 34 % |
| Sport (fitness, football, dance) | 26 % |
| Reading books and articles | 12 % |
| Meeting friends offline | 18 % |
| Family activities (dacha, walks, cooking) | 10 % |
Watch the highlighted words — they carry the meaning & the phonetic traps.
On the twelfth of April 1961, a twenty-seven-year-old test pilot with a peasant childhood in a small village near Smolensk climbed into a tiny spherical capsule called Vostok One. His name was Yuri Gagarin, and although he had been carefully rehearsed for every possible emergency, the whole flight itself lasted only one hundred and eight minutes — just one full orbit around our planet.
Everything Gagarin observed during that single lap was completely unprecedented. He was the first human being to see the round horizon of Earth, the thin blue line of the atmosphere and the deep black of open space. His radio commentary was calm, almost poetic: he described the continents as they slid beneath him, and famously exclaimed «Poyekhali!» — «Let's go!» — the moment the boosters ignited.
After his return, Gagarin was transformed overnight into a global celebrity, meeting Queen Elizabeth the Second and travelling to more than thirty countries as the symbol of the Soviet space programme. Yet he never lost his interest in flying and, tragically, died just seven years later during a routine training exercise. Today, every Russian schoolchild can quote his opening word, and the twelfth of April is still marked as Cosmonautics Day — a national moment of pride and remembrance.
💡 Traps: twelfth /twɛlfθ/ (double consonant cluster), peasant /ˈpɛzənt/ (silent «-a-»), spherical /ˈsfɛrɪkəl/ (stress on 1st), Vostok /ˈvɒstɒk/, rehearsed /rɪˈhɜːst/ (stress on 2nd), unprecedented /ʌnˈprɛsɪdɛntɪd/ (long word, don't rush), horizon /həˈraɪzən/ (stress on 2nd), atmosphere /ˈætməsfɪə/, Poyekhali /pəˈjɛxəlɪ/, Elizabeth /ɪˈlɪzəbɛθ/, Cosmonautics /ˌkɒzməˈnɔːtɪks/.
You are planning a visit with your class. Ask 4 direct questions about the 4 key-words shown on the advertisement above:
Topic: «A young Russian's view of history, culture and their country.»
Imagine that you and your friend are doing a school project «Ways of Exploring Russian Cities». You have found some photos to illustrate it, but for technical reasons you cannot send them now. Leave a voice message to your friend explaining your choice of the photos and sharing some ideas about the project.
Tap Start recording and answer the project task aloud. As you speak, the system checks the ФИПИ criteria in real time. Re-record as many times as you want. Nothing leaves your browser.
🎤 Writing (37, 38) & Speaking (1, 3, 4) are self-scored — check the self-check list below.
