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4. Read and translate the text:

A little less than 500 years ago, North America was a vast
wilderness inhabited by Indians who, perhaps 20,000 years earlier,
travelled across a land bridge from Asia to America where the Bering
Strait is today. Icelandic Viking Leif Ericson sailed to America around
the year 1000. Then in 1492, Christopher Columbus, an Italian sailing
under the Spanish flag, set out for Asia and discovered a "New
World." For the next 100 years, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch
and French explorers sailed forth looking for the New World, for gold
and riches, for honor and glory.
But the North American wilderness yielded little glory and less
gold, so most explorers did not stay. The individuals who did settle the
New World arrived later and they came in search of different goals -
economic opportunity and religious and political freedom. In 1607 a
daring band of English settlers built the first permanent village, which
they called Jamestown in commemoration of their charter from King
James I of England. Bleak, hard and lonely as life was in this wilder-
ness, more and more people began to make the difficult ocean
journey, and immigrants soon founded colonies all along the Atlantic
Coast from Massachusetts to Georgia.
Adventurers and rogues, religious believers and practical builders
-all came. America promised, as the poet Robert Frost said, "a fresh
start for the human race." The colonies took on the political, religious
and cultural views of those who settled them. Puritans from England,
for example, established several settlements in Massachusetts. These
colonists, who were escaping religious persecution, wanted to
establish "a city upon a hill" - an ideal community. Yet their
community was based narrowly on their own religious ideals; heretics
and other nonconformists were strictly punished. By contrast, the
Providence, Rhode Island, colony promised religious freedom; it was
founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Puritan forced out of Massa-
chusetts. Maryland was established in 1634 as a refuge for Roman
Catholics, and Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by Quaker leader
William Penn.
Overtime, settlers from many other nations joined the English in
America. German farmers settled in Pennsylvania and Swedish
settlers founded the colony of Delaware. Dutch settlers purchased
Manhattan Island from local Indians in 1626. The French settled
Canada and Spanish explorers established missions and settlements in