Arakin 4 kurs new 001 176. indd

a) After reading the text, render the following phrases into English using the 
words from the text:
построить длительные отношения; найти спутника жизни через сайт 
знакомств; избегать знакомств через интернет из-за боязни стать добычей 
Интернет-хищников; значительные усилия со стороны администраторов 
служб Интернет-знакомств по блокировке злостных нарушителей этикета 

---

129
сетевого общения (netiquette); быть достаточно осведомленным для того, 
чтобы обойти подводные камни романтических знакомств через интернет; 
сайты знакомств с бесплатной регистрацией, но чрезвычайно высокой пла-
той за отправку сообщений; доверчивые пользователи виртуальных служб 
знакомств; болезненное осознание фиктивности виртуальных отношений 
с безликим незнакомцем
b) After reading the text, answer the following questions:
1) What are the three major pitfalls of the Internet dating? Can 
you come up with any other obvious shortcomings of this phenom-
enon? 2) What advantages (if any) can the online dating boast of? 
3) What is the author’s opinion of the described phenomenon? 
4) Where do you personally stand on this issue?
9. A soaring divorce rate is an issue about which newlyweds and their parents 
are naturally very concerned. Read the following article (by Belinda Luscombe) 
summarizing the results of an array of marital data studies. After reading the 
article do the task following it
Are Marriage Statistics Divorced from Reality?
Do half of all marriages really end in divorce? It’s probably the 
most often quoted statistic about modern love and it is coming under 
scrutiny — and not just because of its unromanticity.
“It’s a very murky statistic,” says Jennifer Baker, director of the 
marriage- and family-therapy programs at Forest Institute, a post-
graduate psychology school in Springfield, Mo. She’s often errone-
ously credited with arriving at the 50% figure; it was around long 
before she used it. Figuring out divorce rates is tricky. Not all states 
collect marital data, and the numbers change dramatically depending 
on the methods and sources that are used. In the end, the best that 
researchers can do is look for trends within a specific group or cohort 
(say, all people who married in the 1980s) and project what will hap-
pen. As Baker says, “It’s very difficult to know, if a couple gets married 
today, whether they’ll still be married in 40 years.”
But in an upbeat new guide to marriage, 
For Better
, Tara Parker-
Pope, a New York 
Times
reporter (and divorcйe), devotes a chapter 
to debunking the 50% stat, at least among the subset of the population 
that reads books like hers. Since the 1970s, when more women 
started going to college and delaying marriage, “marital stability ap-

---

130
pears to be improving each decade,” she writes. For example, about 
23% of college graduates who married in the ‘70s split within 10 years. 
For those who wed in the ‘90s, the rate dropped to 16%.
According to research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Whar-
ton School, one of the clearest predictors of whether wedding vows 
will stick is the age of the people saying them. Take the ‘80s: a full 
81% of college graduates who got hitched in that decade at age 26 or 
older were still married 20 years later. Only 65% of college grads who 
said I do before their 26th birthday made it that far.
But just 49% of those who married young and did so without a 
degree lasted 20 years, a cohort that Parker-Pope spends little time 
discussing. Instead she contends that the 50% stat is a myth that 
persists because it’s something of a political Swiss Army knife, handy 
for any number of agendas. Social conservatives use it to call for more 
marriage-friendly policies, while liberals find it handy to press for 
funding for programs that help single moms.
Moreover, Parker-Pope argues, all the talk about grim marriage 
stats becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. “It makes us ambivalent and 
more vulnerable to giving up when problems occur,” she writes.
Perhaps, but there may still be truth to it. Penn State sociologist 
Paul Amato, in a thorough new report on interpreting divorce data, 
writes that the half-of-all-marriages-end-badly figure still “appears 
to be reasonably accurate.”
What seems most clear is that less-educated, lower-income couples 
split up more often than college grads and may be doing so in higher 
numbers than before. “The people who are most likely to get divorced 
have the least resources to deal with its impact, particularly on chil-
dren,” says Amato. (Originally published on May 24, 2010 in the 
American weekly news magazine “TIME”.)