Text 12. YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT

It's in our bodies. It's in living things around us. It's 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 flavor the egg you have for breakfast. Can you guess what it is? Common table salt.

Salt is necessary for the life and health of people, plants and animals. Blood, sweat and tears are all salty. 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 perspire heavily, you must replace the salt lost from your system or you could suffer from heat exhaustion. Wild animals replace the salt in their systems by licking natural salt deposits. To keep domestic animals healthy, farmers put out salt blocks for their livestock to lick.

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. However, if something disturbs this balance, the sodium can collect in large amounts and attract and hold water in the tissues.

This can cause swelling in parts of the body, kidney trouble, and high blood pressure. To help correct these problems, the diet must be changed so that the salt needs of the body are still taken care of, but extra amounts of salt cannot collect and cause trouble. Such special diets must be prescribed by a doctor.

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 salarium, as part of their pay. From this came the word “salary.” In Great Britain four or five hundred years ago, at the great feasts of the ruling families, the saler, or salt container, was placed in the middle of the long dining tables. Those who were seated above the saler, closest to the host, were the honored guests. Those who sat below the saler were the common people. Our name for a salt container, “salt cellar,” comes from the word “saler.”

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.” Hebrews have a custom of taking bread and salt to the home of a friend. By this they mean. "May you always have everything you need — and some added flavor as well." As part of a religious ceremony, the Hebrews also used to rub salt on newborn babies to insure their good health. Catholics use salt as a symbol of purity in their baptismal service and for the preparation of holy water.

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 your left shoulder.

Have you ever heard someone say, “That man isn’t worth his salt”? This means he hasn't earned his salary. If they say, “She's the salt of the earth,” they mean she's the finest kind of person. When someone tells you a story that you know is only partly true, you "take it with a grain of salt." This means you will have to look hard to find the tiny part of the story that is true. If you “salt something away,” you are storing it or putting it away for future use.

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 feet thick and have been mined for hundreds of years. In Poland, 900 feet underground, miners have cut out whole rooms and have carved statues and alters cut of pure salt crystals. In another old mine in Colombia, 345 feet down, there is an excavation large enough to hold 10,000 people.

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 manufacturing 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.

Margaret Gramatky

From "Cricket"

American English

I. Read the text ‘You Can’t Live without It’. Note both the order in which the ideas come in the text and the important details.

II. Read the text again and find the answers to the questions below.

1. What are extra amounts of salt dangerous for?

2. Why must you replace the salt lost from your system?

3. What do farmers do to keep domestic animals healthy?

4. What elements does salt consist of?

5. Many years ago salt was used as money, wasn’t it?

6. What idiomatic expressions with the word ‘salt’ are given in the text?

7. What do they mean?

8. What was salt a symbol of?

9. What ways is salt used in?

III. Write the summary of the text in English.

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