Homes and Housing – maturitná téma

Homes and Housing

Home means a lot of different things to everyone. Home’s a place where you can return any time you need some help or encouragement and you’re always welcome there. It’s a place where we grew up and spent our childhood years. Home isn’t only a building. Our parents made it for us to feel safe, loved and to have nothing to miss.

SLOVAKIA & GREAT BRITAIN, THE USA

Living in Slovakia, Great Britain and the USA is quite different. 

In Slovakia people usually live in a house or in a block of flats. People usually own houses in villages and most blocks of flats are situated in towns and cities and their suburbs. Most of the flats are 2-, 3-, or 4-room flats.

 Houses are usually big and they have a garden. Most of the young people in Slovakia live with their parents because it is too expensive for them to buy their own house or flat. They usually leave home and buy a house/flat when they get married. They often borrow money from the bank to build or buy a house/flat. It is called a mortgage.

 However, sometimes more generations live in the same house – parents, children and grandchildren. 

In Great Britain people prefer to live in houses rather than flats. There are several types of houses:

- terraced houses /radovka, radová výstavba/ - they are houses joined with a common wall in a row

- semi-detached houses – two houses are joined together with one wall

- detached houses– they are not joined with another house, they have upstairs and downstirs

- bungalows – houses on one floor

- cottage – a small traditional country house

Houses in Britain usually have a small garden or a yard /dvor, nádvorie/. The British like gardening very much and they are usually very proud of their gardens and homes. 

In London we can often see old Victorian houses.

Blocks of flats are no very common in Great Britain.
Young people in Britain leave home much sooner than young people do in Slovakia.

The USA: The living conditions in the USA depend on how much money you have. Rich people have big houses with many rooms, tennis courts and swimming pools but many poor people are homeless. The standard of living is generally very high in the USA. In cities people live in flats /or apartments/ situated in large apartment buildings. Some people live in houses which have a big garden. Most of American people don’t stay in one house or apartment for their entire life but very often they move - they sell their house and buy a new one in a different city or in a different state because of work, because they like warmer weather etc.

 Homeless people – homeless people are people who have nowhere to live. They live in the streets for several reasons:
- some of them lost the job and they have no money to pay for a flat or for food
- some had problems in their relationship – for example they got divorced and after that they had nowhere to go
- they have problems with alcohol or drugs and their family don’t want to or doesn’t know how to help them
- sometimes children who are orphansend up living in the street because when they are 18 years old they have to leave the children’s home.
- there are people who like to live in the street because they like freedom. 

Advantages and disadvantages of living in a town or in the country

Living in a town:

Pros/Advantages: rich cultural life, sports facilities life, shopping facilities, cinemas, theatres, better possibilities to find a job, more privacy in a big city, more schools, universities.

Cons/Disadvantages: factories, smog, noise because of the traffic, pollution, street crime

Living in a village:

PROS: fresh air, big garden, possibility to plant your own trees, vegetables, to have pets, more space to live in a detached house, calmer place than city, not such traffic, more place to play for children, growing up in nature.

CONS:people know each other – less privacy, bad transport, not so many shops, no hospitals, and people must travel to work/school.