Bài Tập Trắc Nghiệm Chuyên Đề: Nghĩa cụm từ trong bài đọc (Tiếng Anh Lớp 10, 11, 12)

When I saw her name on the screen, it took me right back to the moment she had moved away with her family ten years before. We had been such close friends at primary school. To begin with, she and I had not hit it off, perhaps because we were both timid. We had quickly got over that, though, and as time went on, we had become really good friends, until you almost never saw one of us without the other. And now after so much time apart, there was her name. She had sent me a friend request. I knew she had been living abroad, and her profile picture showed her on the beach. I had been expecting her to look different after ten years. The girl in the photo was the same old Lauren, though. Nowadays, it is easy to find old friends thanks to social networking sites. There are lots of stories about long lost friends getting back in touch after years apart. It was odd because I had been thinking about our friendship too and now here she was! She told me about the place where she had been living for the past ten years, and I told her about things that had happened to me. Before long, the years melted away and we were the same two girls who had spent so much time together. Of course, true friends are loyal and listen to you when you are down. And they are the people you have fun with. But deep down, I realised that the truest friends are those you are most yourself with. And that is something that never changes. That is what Lauren and I learned that day, the day we realised our friendship was so precious and had never really ended in the first place.

I have not paid a single electricity bill since the year 1970, says Richard Perez with noticeable glee. He can afford to be smug. He lives off-grid - unconnected to the power grid and the water, gas and sewerage supplies that most people in the world rely on. He generates his own electricity, sources his own water and deals with his own waste disposal - and he prefers it that way. There are times when the grid blacks out, he says. I really like the security of having my own electricity company. Perez is not alone. Once the preserve of mavericks, hippies and survivalists, there are now approximately 200,000 off-grid households in the United States of America, a figure that Perez says has been increasing by a third every year for the past decade. For all of the people who live off-grid, self-sufficiency means guilt-free energy consumption and peace of mind. It feels brilliant to make use of clean, free energy that is not from fossil fuels, says Suzanne Galant, a writer who lives off-grid in a rural area in Wales. And if something goes wrong, we can fix it ourselves. Now even urbanites are seeing the appeal of generating some if not all of their own power needs. So is energy freedom an eco pipe-dream or the ultimate good life? Well, there is only one way to find out: begin to explore the possibilities of solar, wind or hydro power. But unless you live on a sunny, south-facing hillside with access to a nearby river or stream, that might prove prohibitively expensive! There is no doubt that being off-grid has its problems, and it is not always the cheapest way to get the energy you need. Even so, pioneers like Perez have proved that it can be done, and without giving up a 21-century lifestyle: I have got five personal computers, two laser scanners, two fridge-freezers, a microwave, a convection oven, vacuum cleaners - you name it, says Perez There is an external beam antenna on the roof for the phone and a satellite dish for an Internet connection. I have got 70 kWh in batteries that could last me five days. I have too much electricity. Too much electricity and no more bills. That has got to be worth aiming for.