READING Exam b1 Level

TEXT 1
Read the following text about a different type of au pairs and complete each
blank with the best option from the box. Each option can be used only ONCE.
There are five extra options that you will not need. Item 0 is an example.
ACTUALLY CUSTOMS HEALTH LACK

ATTENTION EXCHANGE HISTORY LONG
CASH EXHAUSTED INCREASING PHYSICALLY
CHILDCARE FEE INTEREST WHETHER
GRANNY AU PAIRS
Are you a family looking for an alternative form of (0) childcare or are you over
50 and keen to travel and meet new people? If either applies to you, then the Granny Au
Pair agency may be what you need.
Granny au pairs move in with families and help out with childcare in (1)
for bed and board and the chance to explore new countries.
The grannies do not have to be actual grandmothers, but they do have to have an (2)
in caring for young people, traveling and meeting newpeople. There is no age limit,
but they have to say if they feel (3) and mentally capable of doing a placement.
There are around 90 grannies on the agency’s books at any one time. The grannies
pay a membership (4) to post their detailed profiles online and families pay the
same to access profiles. It is around 60 euros a month for a three-month membership.
Families can then search the database for a granny and arrange Skype calls, etc, to
find out (5) ______theyare a good match or not.
Spokesperson Grania Groezinger says the agency has not had any major problems
over the years. The main challenges have been sandwich generation issues – for
instance, some grannies have had to return home to look after elderly parents – and a
(6) ___of chemistry betweenfamily and granny.
One of the problems they have, though, is that there is an age limit on au pair visas.
That means grannies can only stay for between three to six months. “In the EU
you can stay for as (7) ___as you want and people can just hop on a plane if a
family needs them”.
“It may take longer to organize things with Brexit,” says Grania. Another
issue is (8)___ insurance. “Many people haven’t perhaps realized the full impact
of Brexit when itcomes to traveling,” she adds.
The agency has had a lot of feedback over the years and some grannies have been
placed with over 10 different families or have returned to the same place several
times over. In addition to teaching their language to the families they stay with,
grannies also pass on some of their culture and (9) _____, for instance, many like
baking food from their country with the children.
This year the agency is refreshing its website to make it more user friendly and
introducing more community elements so grannies can share tips. It is also (10) its
use of socialmedia, including Instagram. For the 10th anniversary, there will be a big
reunion.
TEXT 2
Read the following text about writer Agatha Christie, and choose the correct answer
(a, b or c) according to the text.
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Spending most of her time with imaginary friends, Agatha Clarissa Miller’s
unconventional childhood fostered an extraordinary imagination. Against her mother’s
wishes, she taught herself to read and had little or no formal education until the age of
fifteen or sixteen when she was sent to a school in Paris.
Agatha Christie always said that she had no ambition to be a writer although she made
her debut in print at the age of eleven with a poem printed in a local London
newspaper. Finding herself in bed with influenza, her mother suggested she write
down the stories she was so fond of telling. And so a lifelong passion began. By her
late teens she had had several poems published in The Poetry Review and had written
a number of short stories.
Agatha Christie wrote about the world she knew and saw the military gentlemen, lords
and ladies, widows and doctors of her family’s circle of friends. She was a natural
observer and her descriptions of village politics and family jealousies are often
accurate. Mathew Prichard describes her as a “person who listened more than she
talked, who saw more than she was seen.”
Everyday events and casual observations could be the idea for a new plot. Her second
book The Secret Adversary came from a conversation overheard in a tea shop: “Two
people were talking at a table nearby, discussing somebody called Jane Fish… That, I
thought, would make a good beginning to a story — a name overheard at a tea shop
— an unusual name, so that whoever heard it remembered it. A name like Jane Fish,
or perhaps Jane Finn would be even better.”
And how were these ideas turned into novels? She made endless notes in dozens of
notebooks,ideas and potential plots and characters as they came to her “I usually have
about half a dozen (notebooks) on hand and I used to make notes in them of ideas, or
about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit that I had read about in the paper”. Of
the more than one hundred notebooks that must have existed, 73 have survived. The
notebooks themselves include previously unpublished material and are an intriguing
look into her mind.
She spent the majority of time with each book working out all the plot details in her
head or her notebooks before she actually started writing. Her son-in-law Anthony
Hicks once said: “You never sawher writing”, she never “shut herself away, like other
writers do.”
As grandson Mathew Prichard explains, “She then used to dictate her stories into a
machine called a Dictaphone and then a secretary typed this up into a typescript,
which my grandmother would correct by hand. I think that, before the war, before
Dictaphones were invented, she probably used to write the stories out in longhand
and then somebody used to type them. She wasn’t very mechanical, she wrote in a
very natural way and she wrote very quickly. I think a book used to take her, in the
1950s, just a couple of months to write and then a month to revise before it was sent
off to the publishers. Once the whole process of writing the book had finished then
sometimes she used to read the stories to us after dinner, one chapter or two chapters
at a time, to find out what the reaction of the general public would be. Of course,
apart from my family, there were usually some other guests here and reactions were
very different. Only my mother always knew who the murderer was, the rest of us
were sometimes successful and sometimes not. My grandfather was usually asleep for
most of the time that these stories were read but the rest of us were usually very
attentive. It was a lovely family occasion and then a couple of months later we would
see these stories in the bookshops.”
1. Agatha Christie
a. had few friends.
b. learnt to read on her own.
c. never went to school.
2. Agatha Christie
a. had always wanted to be a famous writer.
b. started writing stories when she was ill.
c. won a poetry competition at eleven.
3. Agatha wrote about

a. everything that surrounded her.
b. her imaginary friends.
c. the people she met at the doctor’s.
4. Her book, The Secret Adversary

a. reproduced a conversation she had heard.
b. started in a coffee shop.
c. was inspired by two strangers talking.
5. Agatha Christie used lots of notebooks

a. for her first version of a novel.
b. to draw her characters.
c. to write anything that inspired her.
6. Christie’s notebooks
a. allow us to understand her better.
b. contain some unpublished stories.
c. were published after her death.
7. Agatha Christie
a. planned her books in detail.
b. set out to write as soon as she had an idea.
c. was a typical methodical writer.
8. Matthew Prichard, Agatha’s grandson, says she

a. always dictated her stories to a machine.
b. could write a story in a fortnight.
c. never typed her stories.
9. When Agatha read some chapters after dinner,

a. all the family paid attention silently.
b. nobody was able to discover who the murderer was.
c. she wanted to observe her audience’s response.
TEXT 1: GRANNY AUPAIRS
ANSWERS
0 CHILDCARE
1 EXCHANGE
2 INTEREST
3 PHYSICALLY
4 FEE
5 WHETHER
6 LACK
7 LONG
8 HEALT
H
9 CUSTOMS
10 INCREASING
TEXT 2: AGATHA CHRISTIE
ANSWER
S
0 B
1 B
2 A
3 C
4 C
5 A
6 A
7 C
8 C

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TEXT 1

ACTUALLY CUSTOMS HEALTH LACK

3. Agatha wrote about

4. Her book, The Secret Adversary

5. Agatha Christie used lots of notebooks

8. Matthew Prichard, Agatha’s grandson, says she

9. When Agatha read some chapters after dinner,

TEXT 2: AGATHA CHRISTIE

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