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Engelska 6


1. Out of the Zimbabwe teak forest a giant shadow is advancing. Sunlight gleams on two heavy tusks – it is Conan. Moments later he is looming over our Land Rover, flapping his big ears. I scatter a handful of acacia seedpods on the ground, and we watch as Conan swings round and lowers his trunk to sniff out the tasty pods.


2. Underwater devices which make a loud noise is the latest invention salmon farmers have introduced to keep seals away from their fish cages. However, seals are pretty smart, and once they have discovered the noise is associated with a salmon farm, it is a signal saying “It’s mealtime”.


3. Residents of a tiny Devon village hoaxed millions of radio listeners yesterday in an April Fool’s Day prank possibly unrivalled since the BBC screened its celebrated footage of “spaghetti trees” in 1957.


4. Hardly any attention has been paid in England to a great TV series on Scottish art.


5. Sir Winston was hard up for most of his life but had extremely extravagant tastes.


6. A year ago environmentalists cheered when Howard McCrindle, the last shark hunter to use harpoons in British waters, gave up his fishing boat. While his boat was scrapped, however, its two harpoon guns survived. McCrindle has now fitted one of them to a new boat and goes on fishing off the west coast of Scotland.


7. Before committing themselves to a holiday, many serious skiers scratch their heads raw over a shortlist of candidate resorts, agonising about the blackness of black runs, the length of lift queues and average snow depth.


Out of 7 you scored: __


For years, as a matter of habit, I have drawn the curtains of my bedroom on going to bed, until the other night when I forgot to do so. I shall never draw them again. The experience renewed my childhood interest in astronomy, the most exciting of all branches of science. It is also the most benign: the sky, for all its immensity, implies no
      There are many elementary things that I still do not understand. How can the earth be hurtling at an immense speed round the sun, and at the same time spin on its axis once every 24 hours without us being in any way aware of this violent Why does a comet, after being drawn towards the sun for hundreds of years, circle round it to begin its enormous journey once again, instead of crashing into it?
        To me gravity is the most mysterious of natural phenomena. One can understand how one object another when in direct contact with it, like the cogs of a clock’s mechanism or writing with a pen on a blank page, but how can the motion of a vast body the moon, separated from us by 240,000 miles, be governed by the “attraction” of the earth, and vice versa?

In one of his television series Stephen Hawking said, “The more we see, the less special our place in the Universe seems.” In one that is of course true, but in another, the more we see, the more special we become, for if there are equally brilliant scientists on the planets of neighbouring stars, they would have let us know long ago.
          Our discovery of our place in the universe has been achieved against all probability. It must have seemed to primitive man that because the sun and the moon appear to be of the same they must be the same distance away, and because all heavenly bodies seem to circle round the earth, we must be at the hub.
          These simple assumptions have been wrong by astounding feats of calculation. To laymen, the discoveries by men like Copernicus, Kepler and Newton are only just and the joy of attempting to retrace their steps is enhanced by the presence of their basic tools above us, the night sky seen on a slow between garage and house, or through a bedroom’s uncurtained window.

Out of 10 you scored: __


Air Quality
All new petrol and diesel cars and vans will have their exhaust emissions cut by half in 18 months in an attempt to improve city air quality following a new European directive on the quality of petrol and diesel fuels.

Outlook
Despite figures showing a drop in the number of people unemployed and claiming benefit, evidence from industry suggests a lot of problems in the pipeline.

Time is Money
Crossing the North Pole will become as routine as crossing the Atlantic when Russia opens its Arctic airspace to foreign flights, resulting in dramatic savings in time and money for travellers from Europe and North America to Asia.


Legal Dispute
After five years, legal bills of £110,000 and a lot of acrimony, a row between millionaire neighbours over ownership of a bramble patch worth a few hundred pounds has been settled in court. Even the judge delivering his decision yesterday confessed that it was difficult to understand why two men with extensive estates should get involved in such a dispute “considering the nature of the land involved”.

Air Safety
The average airline passenger travelling in the United States is nearly 10 kilograms heavier than eight years ago, a survey by the US aviation watchdog has found. The findings prompted the US Federal Aviation Administration to order all US-based airlines to add extra kilograms for each traveller to passenger weight standards, plus an extra kilogram for heavier luggage.


Not to be Sniffed at
In spring, most people are filled with joy at the knowledge that the summer months stretch before us, but some face the prospect of endless suffering due to hay fever. A new study offers hope in the form of a herbal extract which seems to be as effective as the drugs containing antihistamines, but does not have any sedative effects.


Miró’s Art
Miró approached painting with a bard’s sensibility. His tableaux consisted of simple symbols and shapes on earthy backgrounds. The Gendarme, for instance, depicts an abstract policeman with a thin moustache and scarlet mitt on a tea-colored canvas, his white horse rearing up next to him. Miró sought to return painting to prehistoric cave art. The result was a spare graphism that he dubbed “painting-poems.”



Out of 7 you scored: __



The autumn wasps are lounging around Mr Foster’s bunches of grapes and piles of lychee plums as he says, “I wouldn’t like any of my children to go into this line of business.” He is 62 and has a fruit and vegetables stall at one end of the market. His brother is helping out at the flower stall at the other end. Their family has been busy at Tachbrook Street, five minutes from Victoria Station in London, ever since a market was set up there in the middle of the 19th century. “They treat us like second-class citizens,” he says, referring to Westminster Council. “You’re immediately in the wrong.”
        This is a common complaint among the market men and women. Market barrows left in the street overnight have been put onto low-loaders and taken away, and the council demands £200 for their return. Apparently they are a firerisk, or something, although the street is a cul-de-sac. Health and Safety officers have been inspecting stalls. “If you’re one inch over the size of your pitch, you get a letter from the council saying your licence will be revoked,” says another trader. It is a picture of persecution from the marketfolks’ point of view.
        It is all very puzzling. Fruit and veg and meat and fish are often cheaper and better in the market than in the supermarket. Why should the council be so unhelpful? Surely everyone prefers a colourful market to an empty, dead-end street.
        Yes, there does seem to be an ideological prejudice against Tachbrook Street and the other markets, such as Berwick Street in Soho, where stalls are now permitted only along one side of the road. “Political motivations come into it a lot,” said one source at Westminster Council. “Basically there are too many already. They cause a nuisance. There is a firm policy of not granting new pitches, and the council now has the power to reduce the number of them.”
        This seems to be true. There are six designated street markets in Westminster, and, in a helpful hand-out for hopeful traders, the council says that it is “now pursuing a policy which prevents any growth in the present number of licensed street trading pitches”. What this seems to mean is that if you trade without a licence you will be prosecuted; if you apply for a licence, you will be refused.
        There never was a golden era of street trade. Why, for example, did the picturesque flower girls of Piccadilly and the City die out? Lack of interest? Not at all. In 1930, when the Corporation of the City of London exercised a policy to grant no new licences for five years, Mary Anne was said to be the last flower girl in the City. At the time the demand for flowers was growing. Two years later Miss Lydia Jordan, another old flower girl, was fined half a crown for obstruction (a favourite charge) outside the Stock Exchange.
1 How long has John Foster’s family been street traders?


2 How is the policy of Westminster Council described?


3 What is said about the advantage of street markets?


4 What does the Council regard as a problem with street markets?


5 What was Miss Lydia Jordan accused of?


The Fosters are a respectable Catholic family. The clergy from Westminster Cathedral shop here, as does The Spectator cook, Jennifer Paterson, and Country Life editor, Clive Aslet. The talk in Victoria is of the elderly, who come along for their chat each day. “Go to a supermarket and there are no friendly faces, and no one to ask about the produce. They have young kids stacking the shelves who don’t know an avocado pear from a conference pear.” That is what Fred Ray, secretary of the market committee, thinks.
        But Fred, like Bryn and his wife at the greetings card stall on the other side of the street, are glum about the market’s future. Among the reasons the market traders give are: Sunday trading, lack of parking for customers and deliveries, rain, shopping malls and plastic. Go to Tesco’s and you can pay with a card— “and then you can ask for £20 or £30 cash at the checkout”. What else? “Shoppers haven’t got much time, they like to find everything under one roof.”
        All this is true. There is also the problem of the barrows. The council says they have to stow them away at night. That might be no trouble in Church Street or Chapel Street, but in upwardly-mobile Victoria it has become a headache. “I can see if you’ve paid money for a nice mews house you don’t want barrows rumbling out early in the morning,” says John Foster, philosophically. “There’s a car park here owned by the council where we could put barrows at night, but they lock it up,” says another stallholder. “The council’s just a pain in the backside.”
        Now Sainsbury’s wants to build a big supermarket on the site of the old bus garage around the corner. “I think we’ll fizzle out,” says a dejected Mr Foster. Perhaps they will.
6 What does Fred Ray say about supermarkets?


7 What is implied about house owners?


8 What does John Foster think about the future?



Out of 8 you scored: __


On Sunday morning, 2 September, 1666, the destruction of medieval London began. Within five days the city which Shakespeare had known was almost completely by fire.
        The fire started in the house and shop of Thomas Farynor, a baker in Pudding Lane. Farynor had forgotten to put out the fire in his oven on the previous night and some embers set light to the nearby stacked firewood. By one o’clock in the morning, three hours after Farynor had to bed, the house and shop were well alight. Farynor’s assistant woke and, finding the house full of smoke, roused the household. Farynor, his wife and daughter being caught in the flames by climbing through an upstairs window and along the rooftops. The maid was too frightened to climb along the roof and stayed in the house—becoming the first of the fire.
        Sparks from the burning house fell on hay and straw of the Star Inn and in the strong winds blew that morning, the sparks spread rapidly, fire to roofs and houses as they fell.
       The fires burned all that day and on through the next. The stones of St Paul’s cathedral reported to be exploding with the heat, and molten lead from the roof ran down the streets in a stream. The strong easterly winds the flames to advance.
        There was little that could be to stop the fire from spreading. Various laws had been enacted, obliging the parishes to provide buckets, ladders, squirts and fire hooks, but much of the equipment was in a rotten through years of neglect, and water supplies away from the banks of the river were scarce.
    By now, with few other alternatives, thoughts turned to demolishing houses to create fire breaks. In desperation, gunpowder was used to up houses—and often with excessive success! For three more days the fire raged through the City—before finally burning out near Holborn Bridge.
    As relief began to set in after the previous days’ panic, the dying fire flared up again. More buildings were down on the orders of the King and the fire was finally brought under . But by the end of the fire some four fifths of the City had been destroyed, approximately 13,20000 houses, 87 churches and 50 Livery Halls over an of 436 acres. What is amazing is that the fire is said to have very few lives—only six people are definitely known to have been killed—but it may actually have saved many more people. The rats that had helped to transmit the bubonic plague (Black Death) the previous year mostly perished in the fire. The number of plague victims rapidly after the fire.




1. I had been working hard and the doctor told me I had to take it for a while.

2. The first act was so boring that I could hardly my eyes open.

3. We had planned to send our son abroad for a year but now we’re having second about it.

4. We tried hard to reach an agreement, but all our efforts were in

5. The service at the store was bad so we wrote a letter of to the management.

6. Many people avoid saving money in banks because of the low rate of

7. The manager said he won’t employ me because I experience.

8. The train had gone and there was no bus. So there was nothing for it to take a taxi.

9. The writers of the report stressed that hard core criminal offenders should be severely with.

10 and 11. The survey found that 75 per cent were in favour of national ID cards while 17 per cent said they were them. Eight per cent expressed no