C1 Advanced Multiple Matching – test 7. Five reviews of festivals: folk in Ireland, literary, electronic music in Croatia, street food festival, and theater festival. The questions check the understanding of the advantages and disadvantages described by the reviewers.

C1 Advanced Multiple Matching – festivals

Below you will find a text divided into five parts (A–E). For each question, choose the part where the given information is provided. You can choose each letter more than once. This task corresponds to the format of Reading and Use of English Part 8: 10 questions for several shorter texts. How to work:

• first read all 10 questions and underline the keywords in them,
• look for paraphrase in the text – the same words as in the question rarely appear,
• be careful of similar information in several parts – the question usually concerns a specific detail.

Test 7 from the C1 Advanced Multiple Matching series. In the reviews, advantages and disadvantages are often in the same paragraph – read to the end of each part.

Festival season

A – Riverside Folk Weekend, Ireland

This small festival in the west of Ireland has a devoted following, and it is easy to see why. With only two thousand tickets available, it feels more like a large family gathering than a commercial event. The weather, it must be said, was dreadful: it rained for most of Saturday, and by the evening the campsite was a sea of mud. Nobody seemed to mind. The best music, in any case, was not on the main stage but in the town’s three pubs, where musicians who had finished their official sets carried on playing with anyone who cared to join them, often until well after sunrise.

B – Harbourside Book Festival

What makes this literary festival special is how approachable the writers are. After their talks, most of them wander into the festival café, and I found myself chatting to a prize-winning novelist over a cup of tea, something that would be unthinkable at larger events. The programme was intelligent and varied, and a heated debate on the future of the printed book was the highlight of my weekend. My only real complaint concerns the cost. At over twenty pounds per event, a full day of talks becomes an expensive business, and I noticed that the audiences were not exactly diverse as a result.

C – Sunset Beats, Croatia

The location is breathtaking. The stages are set among pine trees on a peninsula overlooking the Adriatic, and dancing as the sun sinks into the sea is an experience I will not forget. Unfortunately, the organisers appear to have sold far more tickets than the site can comfortably hold. Moving from one stage to another took up to half an hour, and the queues for water were worrying in the afternoon heat. I will also admit that, at forty-three, I was one of the oldest people there by some distance, and I spent much of the weekend feeling like a visiting teacher at a school disco.

D – City Street Food Festival

Entry to this annual celebration of street food is free, which explains the enormous crowds. More than a hundred stalls lined the streets of the old town, offering everything from Korean pancakes to Brazilian barbecue. The downside was the queues: I waited forty minutes for a plate of dumplings, and some of the more popular stalls had lines stretching around the block. The food, however, was generally excellent. My favourite dish was also the simplest – a traditional local stew served by an elderly couple who have been cooking it at the festival every year since it began.

E – Castle Fringe Theatre Festival

Z ponad trzystoma przedstawieniami w ciągu dwóch tygodni, Fringe jest mniej festiwalem niż loterią. Widziałem czternaście produkcji, i szczerze mówiąc, opisałbym około połowy z nich jako słabe, a dwie jako jedne z najgorszych rzeczy, które kiedykolwiek widziałem. Ale taka jest natura wydarzenia: na każdą katastrofę przypada odkrycie. Moim odkryciem była mała grupa trzech aktorów wystawiających sztukę o swoich babciach w przerobionym garażu. Było to zabawne, poruszające i znakomicie zagrane. Mówiono mi, że od tego czasu zostało zarezerwowane na krajową trasę. Pamiętaj, że przeczytałeś o nich tutaj jako pierwszy.