Wide context

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

/^t/About one in every five families has a dog and may be easily puzzled by a simple question: why did they get one? After a few seconds of hesitation they would answer that they thought it would be useful, it would guard the house, take care of the children, bring their slippers, come to comfort them at difficult times, etc., all the stuff that the books and films present. That is idealistic indeed but can be true if only the people would care do devote some time for the training the dog. Now they probably know that having a dog is rather falling over their bitten shoes, having rugs stained or being violently woken up from an afternoon nap by a vicious barking, etc.