Текст на английском про друга

My best friend is Artem. He is thirteen. We are in the same class.

Artem is tall and thin. He has got short dark hair and brown eyes. He is funny and friendly.

Artem likes football and computer games. He can play the guitar too.

We often go to the park after school. We play football there. At the weekend we watch films at my house.

Artem is a good friend. He always helps me.

I met my friend Lev four years ago at a summer camp. On the first day I didn't know anybody, and I felt lonely. Lev sat next to me at lunch and asked me about my favourite books. We talked for an hour.

Lev is a year older than me, but he is shorter. He wears glasses and he is the cleverest boy I know. He is very good at maths and chemistry, and he often explains difficult tasks to me.

We are quite different. I am noisy and active, but Lev is calm and quiet. He prefers chess, and I prefer basketball. However, we both love science fiction.

Now Lev is studying at a different school, but we see each other every weekend. This summer we are going to the same camp again, because we want to remember how our friendship started.

People say that a friend in need is a friend indeed, and I have found this to be true. My friend Denis and I have known each other since we were six, when our families moved into the same block of flats in Nizhny Novgorod. Since then we have been through a lot together.

Denis is the kind of person who notices when something is wrong, even if you say everything is fine. Last year I broke my leg while skiing and had to stay at home for almost two months. Most of my classmates sent a message or two and then forgot about me. Denis, however, came round almost every day, brought the homework and told me all the school news.

Our friendship is not perfect, of course. We once argued so badly about a computer game that we didn't speak for a whole week. In the end it was Denis who apologised first, although I think it was mostly my fault.

We have different plans for the future. Denis wants to become a programmer, while I am interested in medicine, which means that we will probably study in different cities.

Even so, I am sure that if we really need each other, we will always find time.

Never before have teenagers had so many 'friends'. A typical profile on a social network lists hundreds of them, yet surveys regularly suggest that young people feel lonelier than previous generations did. This paradox makes me wonder what we actually mean when we call someone a friend.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle distinguished between friendships based on usefulness, on pleasure and on virtue. The first two, he argued, are fragile: once the benefit or the fun disappears, so does the relationship. Only the third kind, in which people value each other's character, tends to last. Reading this for a school project, I realised that many of my online contacts belong firmly to the first two categories.

None of this means that the internet is the enemy of friendship. My closest friend, Gleb, moved to Vladivostok three years ago, and had it not been for long evening calls across a seven-hour time difference, we would almost certainly have drifted apart. Technology, used thoughtfully, can keep a genuine bond alive.

The danger lies elsewhere. Constantly comparing ourselves with polished images of other people's lives, we may start to treat friends as an audience rather than as companions. Real friendship, by contrast, requires vulnerability: admitting failure, asking for help, being seen at our worst.

If I were to give advice to a younger student, I would say this: count your friends not by the number of likes they leave, but by the number of people who would answer the phone at two in the morning. For most of us, that number is small, and that is perfectly normal.