1 Each season in Britain is connected with various colourful traditions, customs and festivals. 2 On March 1st, the Welsh celebrate St. David’s Day and wear daffodils in the buttonholes of their coats or jackets. 3 May 1st is May Day ,the celebration of summer’s beginning. 4 For that day people decorate houses and streets with branches of trees and flowers and put up a striped maypole decorated with flowers and danced round it. 5 The Queen has an ‘official’ birthday on the second Saturday in June. 6 There is a traditional ceremony called the Trooping of the Colour. 7 It’s a big parade with brass bands and hundreds of soldiers at Horse Guards’ Parade in London. 8 In summer, Scottish people traditionally meet together for competitions called Highland Games. 9 Today thousands of visitors come to see sports like tossing the caber or throwing the hammer. 10 The State Opening of Parliament.Traditionally the Queen opens Parliament every autumn. 11 At the Houses of Parliament the Queen sits on a throne in the House of Lords and reads the Queen’s Speech. 12 November 5th is Guy Fawkes Day when people build wood fires, or ‘bonfires’, with a straw man on top of each in their gardens. 13 That is a figure of Guy Fawkes who wanted to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill King James I and his ministers. 14 On Up-Helly-Aa night in January people of Zerwick, the capital of the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland , make a model of a Viking longship with the head of a dragon at the front and dress up in Viking clothes carrying the ship through the town to the sea and burn it there. 15 Originally, carols were songs performed with dancing at Christmast celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.
At the beginning of this century in Asia and Africa, 10 or more thousand leopards were killed each year, and since the 1950s, the hunt for a superman has assumed monstrous proportions: more than a hundred thousand of these beautiful animals have been destroyed per year. By now, in many parts of Africa, leopards have been almost completely destroyed. In this regard, it turned out that they played a big role in maintaining the balance in nature. When leopards were many, they killed tens of thousands of baboons every year. After a sharp decline in the number of leopards baboons so proliferated and grew bolder that on the plantations and in the kitchen gardens with them there was no slaude. They began to attack newborn antelopes and domestic goats. There are even known cases of attacks of these monkeys on people. And again, another evil joke played fashion: for a mantle of exotic skins of large felines began to pay a huge amount - a fortune! Now the world community has become on the protection of the beast: the leopard among other representatives of the glorious and long-suffering family of felines is taken under the protection of the law, the trade in skins is strictly prohibited. You probably noticed that in circuses trainers are much more likely to work with bears, lions, than with leopards. And this is not an accident, they are very difficult to train and almost never become as tame as, for example, a lion, cheetah, puma, lynx. The leopard is freedom-loving, he does not tolerate violence and does not forgive offense. Nevertheless, a super-cat is worthy of respect and, if you like, admiration. It's sad that she is listed in the Red Book of rare and endangered animals. And this means that without special care of a person, it can not survive on the ground.
