C1 Advanced Gapped Text – test 9. Tekst opowiada o parze, która odnowiła zapuszczony sad i odkryła w nim odmianę jabłoni uznaną za wymarłą. Luki łączą opis prac w sadzie, wiedzę o odmianach i historię lokalnej społeczności.
C1 Advanced Gapped Text – stary sad
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.
Przedostatni test z serii C1 Advanced Gapped Text. Zbędny akapit często pasuje tematycznie do tekstu, ale nie łączy się z żadną konkretną luką – sprawdzaj oba końce.
The lost apples
The orchard had been abandoned for at least thirty years when we bought the cottage next to it. From the lane, it looked like a patch of wild woodland: a tangle of brambles and nettles, with a few twisted trees just visible above the undergrowth.
It was only when we pushed our way inside, on a cold afternoon in February, that we realised what it had once been. The trees were planted in neat rows, and although many had fallen, perhaps forty were still standing.
An elderly neighbour told us the orchard had belonged to a family who grew apples for cider until the 1970s. When the last of them died, the land was left to nature, and nobody had touched it since.
[ 1 ] …………
We decided to try to bring the orchard back to life. Neither of us knew anything about fruit trees, so we joined a local orchard group and spent our first winter learning how to prune.
Pruning an old, neglected tree is a delicate business. Cut too much at once and the tree may respond with a mass of weak, vertical shoots, or simply give up. The advice we were given was to work slowly, removing no more than a quarter of the growth each year.
It was frustrating advice to follow. We wanted to see results, and progress was painfully slow. In the first summer, the trees produced almost nothing, and we began to wonder whether we had made a mistake.
[ 2 ] …………
We had no idea what most of the apples were. Some were small and bitter; others were sweet, with a flavour quite unlike anything we had bought in a shop. One tree produced fruit with a strange, pinkish flesh.
[ 3 ] …………
When they did, one result stood out. The tree with the pink-fleshed apples belonged to a variety thought to have died out entirely. The last recorded specimen had been cut down in the 1950s.
The news caused a small stir. A journalist from the regional newspaper came to take photographs, and we received letters from people across the country asking whether they could have cuttings of the tree.
We were happy to oblige, but we also realised that one tree was a fragile foundation for a variety’s survival. If it fell in a storm or succumbed to disease, the variety would be lost again, perhaps this time for good.
[ 4 ] …………
Our first attempts mostly failed. Of the twenty grafts we made in that first spring, only three survived. But the following year the success rate improved, and we now have more than fifty young trees growing in a nursery bed behind the cottage.
[ 5 ] …………
The orchard itself has become something of a community project. Every October we hold an apple day, when neighbours come to help with the harvest, children press juice and older residents share memories of the orchard in its working days.
Those memories have been a revelation. We have learned the names of the families who once worked here, the songs they sang during the harvest and the particular uses they found for each variety of apple.
We have started to write them down, because we realise that this kind of knowledge disappears even more easily than trees do. When the last person who remembers something dies, there is no cutting to take.
[ 6 ] …………
It has been hard work, and there is still a great deal to do. But on a still evening in autumn, with the smell of ripe fruit in the air, it is difficult to imagine anything we would rather be doing.
Missing paragraphs
A Some of them will be planted in the orchard to replace trees that have died. Others have been sent to gardens and collections around the country, so that the variety will survive even if something happens to our orchard.
B Commercial apple growing, by contrast, relies on intensive methods. Trees are kept small, planted close together and sprayed regularly, which produces high yields but offers little habitat for wildlife.
C To identify them, we sent samples to a national fruit collection, where experts compare the shape, colour, taste and internal structure of apples with records going back centuries. It is painstaking work, and the answers took months to arrive.
D In a sense, that is what the whole project has been about. We set out to save some old apple trees. We have ended up helping to preserve a small part of the history of the place where we live.
E With help from the orchard group, we began grafting cuttings onto young rootstocks. Grafting is an ancient technique that allows a new tree to be grown with exactly the same characteristics as its parent, and it is the only reliable way to preserve a particular variety.
F She also told us that some of the trees were varieties that had almost disappeared. In the past, she explained, every region had its own apples, adapted to local soils and climate. Most had been lost when commercial growers switched to a handful of reliable types.
G The second summer was different. As the light reached the lower branches for the first time in decades, the trees responded with an astonishing display of blossom. By September, the branches were bending under the weight of fruit.