YOU CAN′T LIVE WITHOUT IT 1.It is in our bodies. It is in living things around us. It is used in some church services and in social customs. We have superstitions and sayings about it. It has thousands of uses in the world today. One of these is to flavour the egg you have for breakfast. Can you guess what it is? Common table salt. 2.Salt is necessary for the life and health of people, plants and animals. Blood, sweat and tears are all salt. Body cells must have just the right amount of salt to function properly. Too much salt can be dangerous for your heart and blood vessels. But if you work or play hard enough to respire heavily, you must replace the salt lost from your system or you could suffer from heat exhaustion. 3.Salt is made up of two elements, sodium and chlorine, its chemical name is “sodium chloride”. Ordinarily these two work together in proper balance in the body. 4.Today we take salt for granted, but many years ago salt was scarce, it was used as money. African traders exchanged it for twice its weight in gold. The soldiers in Julius Caesar's army received common salt, called solarium, as part of their pay. From this came the word salary. 5.From the earliest times, salt has been a symbol of lasting friendship and honor. When the Arabs say, “There is salt between us,” they mean, “We have eaten together and are friends.” 6.When salt was scarce, it was considered bad luck to spill any of it. Many people still believe this. To prevent bad luck, they say, you must take a pinch of the spilled salt between the thumb and first finger of your right hand and throw it over left shoulder. 7.Today, almost 40 000 000 tons of salt are produced in the United States alone, taken from mines, wells, and the sea. Some salt deposits are thousands of years. In Poland, 900 feet underground, miners have cut out whole rooms and have carved statues out of pure salt crystals. In another old mine in Columbia, 345 feet down, there is an excavation large enough to hold 10 000 people. 8.Only a small amount of all the salt produced seasons our food. The rest of it is used in other ways – to preserve food, to cool refrigerated railroad cars, to cure animal hides, to melt winter snow and ice. Chemical compounds made from table salt are also used in manufactured things like glass, soap, paper, and rayon, in heat-treating, smelting, and refining metals, and in water-softening. Common table salt is necessary in many ways we take for granted – our very lives depend upon it. 1. Найдите в тексте синонимы к следующим словам, запомните их значения.
application, usual, essential, common rule, quality, proper, substitute, constitute, deficient, merchant, get, think
5.Письменно ответьте на вопросы по содержанию текста.
a) Why must body cells have just the right amount of salt?
b) Can too little salt be dangerous for our body? Why?
c) What is the chemical name of common table salt? Why is it called so?
d) When and why was salt used as money?
e) Where is salt taken from nowadays?
f) What are the ways of using salt in the modern world?
