C1 Advanced Gapped Text – test 10. Finałowy test serii. Tekst to relacja z samotnej, trzytygodniowej wędrówki przez bezludny interior Islandii – od przygotowań, przez burzę piaskową i kontuzję, po refleksję po powrocie.
C1 Advanced Gapped Text – pieszo przez Islandię
Z tekstu poniżej usunięto 6 akapitów. Znajdziesz je pod tekstem jako akapity A–G – jeden z nich jest zbędny i nie pasuje do żadnej luki. Przy każdym pytaniu wybierz z listy literę akapitu, który pasuje do danej luki. Format jest taki sam jak w egzaminie Reading and Use of English Part 7: 6 luk i 7 akapitów do wyboru. Jak szukać powiązań:
- zaimki i określenia (this, those, it, the latter) muszą mieć wyraźny odpowiednik w poprzednim akapicie,
- sprawdzaj oba końce luki: brakujący akapit musi pasować do tekstu przed nim i po nim,
- zwracaj uwagę na chronologię, kontrast (however, yet) i powtórzone słowa kluczowe.
To ostatni test z serii C1 Advanced Gapped Text. Wynik powyżej 80% oznacza, że Reading Part 7 na egzaminie Cambridge C1 Advanced nie powinien cię zaskoczyć.
Across the empty island
The plan, as I explained it to friends, was simple: to walk across Iceland from north to south, a distance of around four hundred kilometres, through the uninhabited highlands at the heart of the island. I would carry everything I needed and expected to take about three weeks.
Most of them assumed I was exaggerating the difficulty. Iceland, after all, is a popular tourist destination, with good roads and plenty of guesthouses. What they did not realise was how empty the interior is. Once you leave the coast, there are no villages, no shops and, for long stretches, no roads.
That emptiness was precisely what attracted me. I had spent years walking in the mountains of Europe, where there is always a hut or a farm within a day’s walk. I wanted to experience a landscape where I was genuinely on my own.
[ 1 ] …………
I set off from the northern coast on a bright morning in July, with a rucksack weighing twenty-six kilograms. For the first two days, the walking was easy, along farm tracks through green valleys dotted with sheep.
Then the green ended. On the third day, I climbed onto the plateau and entered a landscape unlike anything I had seen before: a vast plain of black volcanic sand and grey stones, stretching to the horizon in every direction, almost without a single plant.
I had read that astronauts trained in parts of this region before the Moon landings, and I could see why. The silence was total. There were no birds, no insects, no sound at all except the crunch of my boots and, occasionally, the wind.
[ 2 ] …………
When it finally passed, I emerged to find that my tent poles were bent and one of my water bottles had been blown away. More worrying, I had lost a whole day, and my food supplies were planned with very little margin.
[ 3 ] …………
I reached the first supply box limping badly. It was waiting for me in a small mountain hut, exactly where it was supposed to be, and I remember almost weeping at the sight of a packet of biscuits.
The hut was occupied by a group of Icelandic researchers studying the glaciers nearby. They took one look at my knee and insisted I rest for two days. It was advice I did not want to hear, but I knew they were right.
Those two days turned out to be among the best of the journey. The researchers showed me the edge of the ice cap, explained how quickly the glaciers were retreating and fed me far better than I could have fed myself.
[ 4 ] …………
The southern half of the route was more varied. I crossed rivers of glacial meltwater, so cold that my feet ached for minutes afterwards, and walked past hot springs where steam rose from the ground among bright yellow sulphur deposits.
[ 5 ] …………
On the nineteenth day, I climbed a final ridge and saw, far below me, a thin grey line on the horizon. It took me a moment to realise that it was the sea.
I had imagined that moment many times, and in my imagination I had always felt triumphant. In reality, the feeling was closer to sadness. The emptiness I had found so difficult at first had become, without my noticing, something I did not want to leave.
I reached the southern coast two days later and caught a bus back to Reykjavik. The noise and traffic of the city felt overwhelming after three weeks of silence.
[ 6 ] …………
That feeling has faded, as such feelings do. But I still think of the black plain on quiet evenings, and I know that one day I will go back.
Missing paragraphs
A When I finally set off again, my knee was much improved, and so was my mood. I had stopped thinking of the journey as a race against the calendar and started, for the first time, to enjoy it.
B I decided to push on harder to make up the time. It was a mistake. Over the next two days I walked more than forty kilometres a day, and by the end of the second I had developed painful blisters and a sharp pain in my left knee.
C Iceland sits on the boundary between two tectonic plates, which are slowly moving apart. This is why the island has so many volcanoes, and why earthquakes are a regular part of life there.
D Preparing for that experience took months. The biggest challenge was food. I would be passing only two places where I could resupply, so I had to plan my meals to the gram and arrange for boxes of supplies to be left for me at each of them.
E The wind, when it came, was ferocious. On the sixth day, a storm swept across the plateau, driving sand into my eyes and making it almost impossible to stand. I spent fourteen hours in my tent, listening to the fabric crack like gunfire.
F The river crossings were the most dangerous part of the whole trip. The water levels rise during the day as the sun melts the glaciers, so the safest time to cross is early in the morning. I learned to set my alarm for four o’clock.
G Friends asked me what I had learned. I found it hard to answer. It was not so much a lesson as a change in scale: after weeks in a landscape that made me feel very small, my ordinary worries seemed much smaller too.