1. установите соответствие между заголовками 1–8 и текстами a– g. занесите свои ответы в таблицу. используйте каждую цифру только один раз. в один заголовок лишний. 1. a way out for cold times 2. too remote to be noticed 3. visited by travellers 4. old st kildans’ lifestyle 5. city outlived its inhabitants 6. species are endangered 7. home for living creatures 8. colonies of all the nations a. there are few places left in the world – particularly in britain – that remain so isolated, so inaccessible, that your journey plans can be completely thrown by the wind or weather. st kilda is one of those rare places. located 40 miles west over open atlantic waters from the next inhabited piece of land, the archipelago marks the outermost edge of scotland’s outer hebrides and the most far-flung part of the british isles. it’s so distant, it’s often not shown on maps of britain; so small, it’s usually left off of maps of europe or the world, too. b. it’s also the home of a ghost town. hirta, st kilda’s main island and the only one of the four to ever be inhabited, was abandoned by its last residents in 1930. it was the end of an era, one that recently closed even more definitively: the last of the st kildans died in april of this year. the village is now maintained by the national trust for scotland as a heritage site. c. the archipelago’s remote location has never stopped visitors. people passed through st kilda as early as 7,000 years ago; excavations have turned up neolithic stone tools and a potential bronze age tools. the vikings passed through in the 9th and 10th centuries, leaving behind brooches and a sword. язык – егэ d. the archipelago’s location has also helped make it the largest seabird colony in the northeast atlantic, home to about a million birds, including the world’s largest colony of gannets and the eu’s largest colonies of both puffins and fulmars. e. sadly, the birds are in danger. thanks to food shortages and other results of climate change, their numbers have dropped up to 90% in 15 years. that devastation makes it even harder to imagine just how many there would have been in the time of the st kildans. as you circle hirta and the nearby isle of soay, the cliffs are lined with so many birds that the rock ledges look frosted. f. although the ruins may seem romantic, life here would have been anything but. working the land – which lacks so much as a tree – was difficult. winter brought bitter cold and lashing storms. even seabird hunting, the staple of st kildan life, was challenging: the birds only stayed on the archipelago half the year, during which the locals hunted them by dangling over sheer cliff edges by a rope, reaching out with snares or their bare hands. g. but the st kildans devised ingenious ways of surviving. the stone huts built in the 1830s, known as “blackhouses” like similar structures built elsewhere in the scottish highlands, were each dug a metre deep into the ground for insulation. the roofs were thatched, then waterproofed with tar and turf. and livestock – often a cow and a couple of sheep – were brought indoors, a smart, if smelly, way to keep the house warm.
