City or country

What is better - the city or the countryside?

There are a lot of different opinions about living in the country. Most citizens even can`t imagine how people live in the country without heating, hot water, television. On the other hand there are many people who live there all their life and can`t imagine living in the city. In my opinion the village is the best place for living.

To begin with pollution. There are no factories or plants in the country, a few cars and domestic waste. What is more, there are big forests around the villages, which clean the air by absorbing carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen. As a consequence the sky is blue in the village, the water is clean and limpid, fruit and vegetables are ecologically clean. It influences people`s health in a friendly way, to say nothing of quietness. When you are in the village you can hear only birds singing and leaves rustling and see only green and blue. There are no car`s horns or loud music from the clubs and people can enjoy the nature.

On the other hand there aren`t any entertainments in the country. In most villages people even don`t have a television. Young people can`t go anywhere for dancing, there is nothing to do in the evening. Moreover there is often no light and people have to go to bed very early. There is often the only school for several villages and children have to get up very early and go very far. And the roads in the country leave much to be desired.

But I think this isn`t very serious. Going to bed early is useful for health. If children go to bed early they can get up early and not to be late to school. Young people can organize the club and dance there. If there isn`t light they can use candles. And the most important fact, from my point of view, is that for lack of television and other entertainments people in the village have much more time for talking to each other than citizens do. I`m not sure about other people, but as for me I`d like to live in the country.

It’s common knowledge that tastes differ. Nowadays there are a lot of peo­ple who prefer to live in big cities, and, at the same time, there are others, who dream of living in small towns. As for me, I prefer big cities to small towns.

It goes without saying that life in a big city has a lot of disadvantages. The first and foremost is an air- and noise-pollution. The car exhaust contains several pollutants and one of them is lead, which is particularly harmful to children, be­cause their brains and nervous systems are more vulnerable than those of adults are. Besides, life in a big city is much more stressful and expensive than that in the country or in a small town.

Living in a big city gives you a lot of advantages nowadays. Firstly, life in big cities is more anonymous. You can be what you want to be and do what you want to do without anybody getting upset about it, whereas in a small town al­most everybody knows you and expects you to live and behave in a certain way.

Secondly, there is so much going on in the city. You have access to a huge range of concerts of different types of music - pop, classical, jazz, whatever you are looking for. There are a lot of theatres, cinemas, museums, art galleries, li­braries to visit as well as big shopping centres where you can buy any goods you need.

To my mind, schoolchildren in big cities are more advanced in education. They have museum classes and excursions, they can attend lectures and prepara­tory courses and therefore they have more chances to enter university.

City dwellers are sociable and communicative. I find the city an easy place to make friends in. In fact, in a big city you have a much wider range of people to choose from and to make friends with.

Big cities are beautiful. They look modem with their tall buildings, interest­ing architecture and design.