Wide context

Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)

/^t/We watch the colourful TV, we read the colourful magazines and suddenly we realise (or not) that we do not fit the model of the life they present, that we are not up-to-date having unfashionable clothes and haircut and driving an old Polish fiat. Thus we want to look like Cindy Crawford or Antonio Banderas (dependable on sex and liking), drive a snazzy new Ford, Toyota or Mercedes and live in a luxury penthouse flat. We do our best to reach the ideal. We get rid of the old car, worn out clothes and an old-fashioned haircut but, in spite of all those efforts, we are still far away from the perfect.