Form 11 test on reading (контроль читання 11 клас 1 семестр)

During the baking hot months of the summer holidays my mother and I used to escape to one of the scattered lakes north of Prince Albert. In its magic surroundings we used to spend the long summer days in the open air, swimming and canoeing or just lying dreaming in the sun. In the evening the lake was always a bright, luminous grey after the unbelievable sunset colors had faded.

The last summer before we returned to England was particularly enchanted. For one thing, I was in love for the first time. No one will ever convince me that one cannot be in love at fifteen. I loved then as never since, with all my heart and without doubts or reservations or pretence.

My boyfriend Don worked in Saskatoon, but the lake was ''his place'' – the strange and beautiful wilderness drew him with an obsessive urgency, so I suspected it was not to see me that he got on his motor-cycle as many Fridays as he possibly could, and drove three hundred-odd miles along the pitted prairie roads to spend the weekends at our place.

Sometimes he couldn't come, and the joy would go out of everything until Monday, when I could start looking forward to Friday again. He could never let us know in advance, as we were too far from civilization to have a phone or even a telegraph service. Three hundred miles in those conditions is quite a journey. Besides, Don was hard up, and sometimes worked overtime at weekends.

One Friday night a storm broke out. I lay in bed and listened to the thunder and the rain beating on the roof. Once I got up and stood looking out over the treetops, shivering. I tried not to expect Don that night hoping he would have enough sense to wait until the storm ended. Yet in my frightened thoughts I couldn't help imagining Don fighting the storm. His motorbike, which had always looked to me so heavy and solid, seemed in my thoughts frail enough to be blown onto its side by the first gust that struck it. I thought of Don pinned under it, his face pressed into the mud.

I crawled back into bed, trying to close my throat against the tears. But when my mother, prompted by the deep sympathy and understanding between us, came in to me, she kissed my cheek and found it wet.

"Don't get upset, Jane,'' she said softly. ''He may still come.''

When she had tucked me in and gone, I lay thinking about Don, about the danger of the roads. You couldn't ride or walk along them safely after heavy rain; your feet would slip from under you. The roads in Northern Canada are not like the friendly well-populated English ones, where there are always farmhouses within walking distance and cars driving along them day and night.

It was hours later, that I suddenly realized the sound of the roaring engine were real. The storm was dying.

Text 2 

I lived in Port Stewart, one of the small villages on the coast. I rented a small room at the top of an old damp two-storey Victorian terrace house. The house was the last one in the terrace and from its window I could look out on the grey, ever-restless ocean.

       8__________ The weather in that part of the North of Ireland was never the kindest, though when the summer came the landscape around us, the easy access to Donegal and to the remoter parts of the North gave the area its own particular delight.

       An old retired couple who owned the house lived in two rooms on the ground floor. 9_______His bent figure would brave even Port Stewart’s weather as he walked along the sea front.

       I never saw the old man at any other time apart from these walks. 10_________His wife, his second, would sit quietly in the kitchen beside the fire constantly knitting and offering us cups of tea as we came in from the pub or back from studying. She never bothered us much, was always friendly and enjoyed a cup of tea with those of us who would sit and chat with her.

       11_________ We were not surprised, aware even then that age can be cruel. But what moved me most was his rapid worsening, the fact that I never again saw him walking bent double against the wind, and the sight of his walking stick always lying in the hall. It became a strange kind of symbol.

       12_________ The fact that we were only aware of this old man's illness through his rasping cough and his wife's nursing him gave the house an air of heavy sadness.

       One evening, I came in from the cold and went I straight to the kitchen to heat myself at the fire. Mrs. Paul sat alone. There was a silence I couldn't understand. I recall now that her knitting needles were for once not in evidence. 13________ Her face was very still.

It took her some time to acknowledge me coming into the room. 14________ She looked up slowly and I remember her old, lined but still quite beautiful face as she said calmly and without emotion: ‘My husband is dead’.