Harry Potter: The Complete Collection (комплект из 7 книг)

History of Magic was by common consent the most boring subject ever devised by Wizard-kind. Professor Binns, their ghost teacher, had a <…> droning voice that was almost guaranteed to cause severe drowsiness within ten minutes, five in warm weather. He <…> lectured them without pausing while they took notes, or rather, gazed sleepily into space. Harry and Ron had so far managed to scrape passes in this subject only by copying Hermione’s notes before exams; she alone seemed able to resist the soporific power of Binns’s voice.

“If you care about exam results anyway. Fred and I managed to keep our spirits up somehow.”
“Yeah . . . you got, what was it, three O.W.L.s each?” said Ron.
“Yep,” said Fred unconcernedly. “But we feel our futures lie outside the world of academic achievement.”
“We seriously debated whether we were going to bother coming back for our seventh year,” said George brightly, “now that we’ve got —”
He broke off at a warning look from Harry,<…>
“— now that we’ve got our O.W.L.s,” George said hastily. “I mean, do we really need N.E.W.T.s? But we didn’t think Mum could take us leaving school early, not on top of Percy turning out to be the world’s biggest prat.”

“You’ll be singing a different tune soon enough, Hermione,” said Fred, thickly buttering a crumpet. “You’re starting your fifth year, you’ll be begging us for a Snackbox before long.”
“And why would starting fifth year mean I want a Skiving Snackbox?” asked Hermione.
“Fifth year’s O.W.L. year,” said George.
“So?”
“So you’ve got your exams coming up, haven’t you?
<…>“Half our year had minor breakdowns coming up to O.W.L.s,” said George happily. “Tears and tantrums . . . Patricia Stimpson kept coming over faint . . .”
<…>
“Anyway, it’s a nightmare of a year, the fifth,” said George.