Read the text, answer the questions, fulfil the tasks and write down an essay on the topic.

To the best of my knowledge, all my aunts, uncles and grandparents spent most of their lives within thirty miles of Troy, Pennsylvania. They were farmers, horse traders, merchants, mailmen. As a boy I believe I knew everyone living within four miles of our farm. And I guess Dad knew just about every one in the country. He enjoyed talking. We met people as families at suppers on Saturday nights. We met at church festivities, at cattle auctions, at the milk station, at the icehouse pond, and at the contests on the steep road leading to Granville Summit on Sunday afternoons. The contest was to see who could drive his car the farthest up the hill in high gear.

Today a number of my relatives still live near Troy, but several of my cousins, my brother and my sister are scattered in many states. The nearest relative to my home in New Canaan, Connecticut, is a niece who lives about a hundred and ten miles away. My two sons live in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; my mother-in-law, until her recent death, lived much of the time in Florida.

When my wife Virginia and I moved to New Canaan twenty-four years ago it was a semi-rural town and I soon knew most of the people living within a mile of us. In recent years almost all the old neighbors have moved and many dozens of new houses have sprung up near us, many of them occupied by highly-mobile managerial and professional families. One house very close by, for example, has been occupied by four families in five years. Today I wouldn’t even recognize half of the people living within five hundred yards of our house. Virginia and I feel increasingly isolated.

Personal isolation is becoming a major social fact of our time. A great many people are disturbed by the feeling that they are rootless or increasingly anonymous, that they are living in a continually changing environment where there is little sense of community. The phrase “home town” may well fade from our language in this century. Already half of all US heads of families live more than a hundred miles from where they were born – and one out of every five lives more than a thousand miles from his birthplace.

Task 1 Here are three summaries of the text. Which one do you feel is the most accurate?

1. Life used to be more fun when I was a child: I lived in a happy family and had lots of friends. Now there are fewer opportunities for enjoying the company of other people, because we are all becoming rootless and anonymous.

2. My family used to live close together, but now we are scattered. We used to know most of our neighbours, but this is no longer the case. People move around more now, and the old kind of close community is disappearing.

3. The population is growing and towns are getting bigger. People are more mobile, and they don’t know each other so well as they used to. Personal isolation is a big problem nowadays.

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