Reading C1 (2)

28.05.2024

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Джерела використаної інформації:

Focus 5 SB Pearson

Вміст тесту:

6 з 21 бала

Read the article. Complete gaps 1–6 in the text with paragraphs A–E. There is one extra paragraph.

Namibia’s Desert Express

Gavin Bell crosses Namibia on the Desert Express

Waking up on my second day on the overnight Desert Express train from Windhoek, I see what at first I think is a mirage. A lone figure, shimmering in the heat, loping through the emptiness of the Namib Desert. In the distance, it is a dark spectre, diminishing as it jogs towards a towering sand dune. I rub my eyes. Is it an illusion, a trick of heat and dust or the spirit of a long-dead San Bushman returned to his hunting grounds?

1 ___

Like most sightseeing trains, it is not actually an express service. On weekends, it trundles between the Namibian capital of Windhoek and its final destination, the old German colonial seaside resort of Swakopmund on the Atlantic Ocean, passing through the Namib, and stopping along the way for game drives, dune excursions and lion-feeding. On the face of it, the Namib is not the most inviting place to build a railway. The San hunter-gatherers who once roamed its bone-dry gravel plains and shifting sands called it ‘the land God made in anger’. Then along came German soldiers and settlers, who decided in 1897 it would be a good idea to lay a railway across it.

The desert is two billion years old and its stillness exerts an almost spiritual influence on travellers who take the time to stand and stare. This is nature in all its primeval magnificence, where troubles of the modern world become utterly insignificant. It is also a place of fun. Running down a dune is easier than trekking up it, especially when you bound in great leaps and fly through the air.

2 ___

An hour into the journey, we spot a troop of baboons preening each other on a hillock. Then we see a flock of vultures, wheeling in the sky like scraps of burned paper above a carcass in the bush. Next there are springbok and kudu, then wildebeest and zebra, grazing in a private game reserve. The highlight is a giraffe, barely twenty yards from the train, regarding us with polite interest. But we’re hoping to get a closer look at the animals soon.

Okahandja, a country town of dusty roads and weather-beaten stores, appears suddenly and is quickly left behind. The hills recede into the distance and now we are in vast grasslands dotted with termite mounds, skyscraper sandcastles of the insect world.

3 ___

Back on the train after our road trip, we tuck into freshly prepared game of the kind we have been admiring and then, full of food, stagger off to our beds. Sleeping on a moving train can be tricky, but in a quiet siding outside a desert town it isn’t. When I wake, we appear to have passed through a space-time continuum and landed on Mars. The hills, the savannah, the camel thorns are gone.

In fact, they had little choice. At the time, there were no roads worthy of the name and the only way of travelling through it was by ox wagon. The railway station in Windhoek, where we start our journey, is in fact a survivor from these past days. With thirty-five passengers on this trip, the public coaches are never crowded and a troop of high-spirited but well-behaved Afrikaner children adds to the sense of fun. There is a bell that clangs to announce our departure, and soon, we are out of Windhoek and chugging through low green hills. As if glad to be free of the city, the train slackens speed and proceeds at a pace an arthritic giraffe could match. A yellow butterfly flutters by, faster than us.

4 ___

This is the land the Nama people call Namib, meaning ‘plain without end’. It stretches for more than 800 kilometres from north to south, and 120 kilometres from the Skeleton Coast to the grasslands of the Kalahari. There is no shade because there are no trees, and no rivers because there is no rain to speak of. Giant dunes driven by wind march across the desert, swallowing settlements that become ghost towns choked to death by sand. It is a strangely disturbing landscape to wake up to.

Neither: it’s Cedric, a steward on the train and a keen footballer, who is running up the dune to make sure it is safe for passengers to trek up after him and view the Atlantic Ocean from its summit. Journeys on the Desert Express tend to be a bit out of the ordinary and this one is no exception, starting with the train’s wildly inaccurate name.

5 ___

This strange place is now a tourist playground. Led by the train staff, we climb a massive dune. From the crest, there is a view to the ocean, three miles distant, shrouded in fog created by the convergence of desert heat and the icy Benguela Current. In days gone by, this was a place of death for mariners, their ships impaled on reefs. Now close to shore, a vessel hovers in the gloom like a ghost ship suspended in midair. Behind us lies a panorama of haunting beauty as we look back from the top of the dune over the Namib Desert.

Still half awake, I look out at the dunes. Beside the train, the monotony is broken by two lines of wooden telegraph poles, marching into infinity, that deepen a sense of loneliness. But this is where we stop for breakfast and the dune sprinter appears, ready to guide us to the top.

6 ___

The excitement of running down a vast mountain of sand over, we approach the end of our journey and discover that the yellow lights we saw in the distance at dawn were the outskirts of Swakopmund. The ghosts of Schutztruppe cavalry who trotted through its streets are long gone but happily the railway they left behind survives in the land God made in anger.

And sure enough, later on that first day the train halts in the middle of nowhere. Beside the tracks there are two safari trucks waiting. We all pile in and bounce along dirt roads for a couple of hours. This is a disappointment. Supposedly there are white rhino and giraffe in the bush, but all we see are a few buck, two ostrich and a family of donkeys. The latter serve as guards against leopards – apparently their braying scares the daylights out of the big cats and keeps them from preying on game on the reserve.

In their place is an endless flat nothingness of sand and rock, and in the grey half-light of dawn, it has a reddish tinge. The sense of an extraterrestrial experience is heightened by a line of yellow lights twinkling on the horizon, like a lone settlement on a hostile planet.

1 з 21 бала

Read the article. For questions 1–6, choose the correct answer.

THE IRRESISTIBLE RISE OF KATE TEMPEST

1 Kate Tempest is a poet from Brockley, south London, and the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, recognising excellence and innovation for her 2012 piece Brand New Ancients. But there’s more to Kate than meets the eye. On the one hand, she’s the soul of modernity: she began her career as a rapper and is still vastly popular on the rap circuit. She had a ‘wayward youth’, living in squats and getting tattoos, and her voice is hardly upper class: her London drawl is full of street slang and glottal stops. By the standards of the poetry world, she seems practically science fiction. Then there is the other hand. After leaving school with no A levels, she ended up gaining a degree from Goldsmiths*. In her straight poetry, Tempest’s focus is firmly classical. She bases her subjects on the lives of the gods and monsters of Greek mythology – not, perhaps, what you would expect from an urban rapper who cites Roots Manuva and the Wu-Tang Clan among her other key influences.

2 Born Kate Calvert in 1985, Tempest is one of the rising stars of a young performance community that might be viewed with suspicion by some old-fashioned members of the poetry establishment. Brand New Ancients is an hour-long spoken word performance set over a live orchestral score. Through a combination of storytelling, lyricism and music, Tempest tells the epic story of two south London families as their respective generations grow and intertwine. On hearing her shortlisting for the award announced, Kate tweeted: ‘Brand New Ancients been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for poetry!! And people love to say “performance” poets aren’t proper. Yes, mate.’ She spent the afternoon before the awards performing her work for inmates in Holloway prison.

3 Tempest is a lyricist first and foremost. She ‘fell into poetry’ after attending a poetry slam. In 2014, her debut album Everybody Down was nominated for the annual Mercury music prize along with Damon Albarn and FKA twigs among others. In the very same week, she found herself named as one of 2014’s Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Society for Brand New Ancients, joining a once-a-decade list of the brightest talents in the UK and Ireland. Then there is her novel, which more fully explores the plotline of Everybody Down, the three plays she staged over the years, and her phenomenal reputation as a spoken word poet. ‘I feel extremely lucky to be in a situation where I can indulge all the different parts of my creative personality,’ she says.

4 When it comes to poetry, Tempest is fascinated by the distant past. Stories from the classical world were part of her childhood. ‘These are the sort of stories that really infiltrate – about families, and archetypal human tendencies and raw, dark emotions. They never seemed dead stories to me, they always lived and were real.’ But Tempest’s poems aren’t simply routine retellings of time-worn tales; rather, she picks up the fabulous, familiar characters, dusts them down and hauls them into the present. In Brand New Ancients, the gods are recast as two warring families whose lives highlight the immortal and very real truths of love and loss. Her full-length poetry collection, Hold Your Own, is based on the mythological figure of Tiresias, the blind Greek prophet who spent seven years transformed into a woman. In both works, Kate holds up a mirror to contemporary life in a direct and provocative way.

5 Brand New Ancients has been performed to packed concert halls on both sides of the Atlantic. On stage, Tempest has a genuinely mesmerising presence and is acutely responsive to her audience. Her physical presence is charming, disarming: both child-like and mature, with a confidence in how her body uses space but also maintaining the innocent wide-openness of a very young girl. Audiences are captivated by her spell, calling out encouragement. In her work, Tempest handles empathy for the marginalised, the powerless and the dispossessed as well as gender. Her voice raw, her posture vulnerable, she pleads with the audience to be empathetic towards our fellow human beings.

6 Tempest has helped to popularise spoken word poetry, reaching a whole new audience. According to Poetry Society director Judith Palmer, it’s thriving among younger people. ‘There’s a lot of poets trying it but it relies on festivals having the nerve to commission new work.’ Festival Republic, which organises festivals around the UK, first booked Tempest to perform in 2008, and she has appeared at their Latitude Festival several times since. ‘She was a strong voice and is quite unique. There are page poets and there are live poets and she’s very much a live performance poet. Once you’ve seen her perform you’re quite mesmerised,’ the organisers say. However, some would argue that Hold Your Own turned her from a performance poet to a page poet. ‘Her ability to defy categorisation is a strength,’ Palmer adds. ‘A good writer can do different things,’ she says. Whither now for Kate Tempest? I can’t wait to find out.

In Paragraph 1, the writer’s aim is to contrast

Kate’s age and that of most award-winning poets.

Kate’s accent and an upper class accent.

the range of experiences and interests Kate has had.

Kate and other urban rappers.