Přečtěte si pět krátkých textů. Na základě informací v textech vyberte k úlohám 24-28 vždy jednu správnou odpověd’ A-D

A romantic wedding proposal’ in London went wrong

Many men plan marriage proposals. London resident Hafli wanted to give his girlfriend Leanne the best. Hafli hid an 218,000 diamond ring inside a balloon. He planned to give Leanne the balloon and ask her to marry him. However, when he was about to give it to her, a strong wind blew the balloon from his hand. He couldn’t believe it. He watched It go into the air, but there was nothing he could do about it. He hopes that someone will find it soon.

(mtwonlino.skofacz upetwono)

‘ proposal: nabídka

24 . According to the article, what happened to Hafli?

Origins of the ice cream sundae1

In 1881 Ed Berners, a shop owner, started to sell a new ice cream dessert, later known as an “ice cream sundae”. It happened when a customer asked Berners to serve him a dish of ice cream topped with syrup normally used for sodas. Berners liked the customer’s wonderful idea and added the dessert to his daily menu, charging only fi ve cents. George Giff y, the owner of the shop next door, felt he had to serve the same dish as Berners at the same price. However, Giff y decided to only serve this ice-cream dessert on Sundays. The name of the day soon became a part of the name of the dish – “the ice cream Sunday”. When Giff y realised that he was making good money from the “ice cream Sunday”, he changed the name to the “ice cream sundae” and served it every day.

(www.inventors.about.com, upraveno)

1 ice cream sundae: zmrzlinový pohár

25 What does the text say about the ice cream dessert?

Date: 13-Apr-2011
From: Lora Parker. University of Texas at El Paso
Email: [email protected]

Hi! I’m a graduate student at the University of Texas at El Paso in the United States of America and I need to interview (via chat) a learner of English as a second (or 3d) language for my research. It will be a good chance for you to practice English and talk about how you feel about learning it. I will also be happy to answer any questions in exchange :). Please email me if you are interested. Thank you very much!
Lora Parker

(www.anglighfolum.com. upraveno)

26. What does Lora want?
She wants to:

The Traveller’s Hotel

Reserve a room directly with The Travellers Hotel by phone, and for 24 hours after making your reservation, we guarantee there will be no better offer available. If you find a cheaper price within that period, we will match it. Plus, we will give you an additional 10% discount off the lower rate for the first 3 nights. Just show us the details of where you found the cheaper price. It’s that easy!
(CERMAT)

27.  What do we find out about the hotel from this announcement?

On average, each household in the United Kingdom Is home to at least four unused mobile phones – over 50 million phones all over the country. Most of them are in good working order and could help people in developing nations. Don’t worry even if your phone isn’t in working order, it can still be recycled safely. Do you want to help the environment and earn some money? Give us your old mobile phone today and receive up to £18. We also accept damaged or broken mobile phones and pay you up to 90% for them.

( telegraph.com. upraveno)

28. What is the best title for the text?

The Great Wall of China

Walls and wall building have played a very important role in Chinese culture. These people, from the dim mists of prehistory have been wall-conscious; from the Neolithic period – when ramparts of pounded earth were used – to the Communist Revolution, walls were an essential part of any village. Not only towns and villages; the houses and the temples within them were somehow walled, and the houses also had no windows overlooking the street, thus giving the feeling of wandering around a huge maze. The name for “city” in Chinese (ch’eng) means wall, and over these walled cities, villages, houses and temples presides the god of walls and mounts, whose duties were, and still are, to protect and be responsible for the welfare of the inhabitants. Thus a great and extremely laborious task such as constructing a wall, which was supposed to run throughout the country, must not have seemed such an absurdity.

However, it is indeed a common mistake to perceive the Great Wall as a single architectural structure, and it would also be erroneous to assume that it was built during a single dynasty. For the building of the wall spanned the various dynasties, and each of these dynasties somehow contributed to the refurbishing and the construction of a wall, whose foundations had been laid many centuries ago. It was during the fourth and third century B.C. that each warring state started building walls to protect their kingdoms, both against one another and against the northern nomads. Especially three of these states: the Ch’in, the Chao and the Yen, corresponding respectively to the modern provinces of Shensi, Shanzi and Hopei, over and above building walls that surrounded their kingdoms, also laid the foundations on which Ch’in Shih Huang Di would build his first continuous Great Wall.

The role that the Great Wall played in the growth of Chinese economy was an important one. Throughout the centuries many settlements were established along the new border. The garrison troops were instructed to reclaim wasteland and to plant crops on it, roads and canals were built, to mention just a few of the works carried out. All these undertakings greatly helped to increase the country’s trade and cultural exchanges with many remote areas and also with the southern, central and western parts of Asia – the formation of the Silk Route. Builders, garrisons, artisans, farmers and peasants left behind a trail of objects, including inscribed tablets, household articles, and written work, which have become extremely valuable archaeological evidence to the study of defense institutions of the Great Wall and the everyday life of these people who lived and died along the wall.

Question 1 – Chinese cities resembled a maze

Question 2 – Constructing a wall that ran the length of the country

Question 3 – The Great Wall of China

Question 4 – Crops were planted

Question 5 – The Great Wall

PART TWO – READING COMPREHENSION.

Read the two texts carefully and answer the questions that follow.

TEXT ONE
Read the article “Could you survive on just one food?” and choose the answer which best fits the text.

Could you survive on just one food?
(Adapted from an article by Veronique Greenwood, BBC NEWS, 27 February 2017)

Man cannot live on bread alone – not least because man would develop scurvy about a month or so into that little experiment. The best diets have plenty of variety in them, making sure you get everything from vitamin C to iron to linoleic acid without even having to think. Even fad diets that focus on just a few foods or on eliminating certain things are usually varied enough to be reasonably nutritious. Still, in the extremely unlikely scenario that you had to live on just one food, are some nutritionally more complete than others?
One thing is for sure, the candidates would not include meat or most fruits and vegetables. Meat doesn’t have fibre, nor does it have key vitamins and nutrients. Fruits and vegetables may have vitamins, but they don’t have anywhere close to enough fat or protein, even eaten in quantity. The body does not need as much as you might think to stay alive, but you omit them at your peril.
Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote about a phenomenon among the peoples of northern Canada called rabbit starvation, in which those who eat only very lean meat, such as rabbit, “develop diarrhoea in about a week, with headache, lassitude, a vague discomfort.” To avoid death from malnutrition, rabbit starvation sufferers must consume some fat, he writes. Jon Krakauer, in his book Into the Wild, suggests at first that ill-fated free spirit Chris McCandless died from rabbit starvation. It’s thought that getting almost all one’s calories from protein, and almost none from fat or carbohydrates, may overwhelm the liver’s ability to process protein.
Still, if meat and most vegetables are off the table, somewhat surprisingly, potatoes are not as bad an option as you might think, says dietician Jennie Jackson of Glasgow Caledonian University. She wrote last year about Australian Andrew Taylor, who spent a year eating just potatoes as a well-publicised effort to lose weight and build healthier habits.
Potatoes also don’t have the recommended amount of fat, and though Taylor included sweet potatoes, garnering him vitamins A and E, iron, and calcium, Jackson noted that B vitamins and zinc and other minerals would be in short supply. But he seems to have gotten through his year relatively unscathed. In fact, he lost quite a bit of weight.
Furthermore, the logic that it must be possible to eat a single-item diet rather than a varied one, and suffer no ill effects, as long as all the vitamin, mineral, and calorie boxes are checked, doesn’t quite work out. To understand why, consider how we got our modern grasp of nutrition. Researchers in the early 20th Century deprived rats of certain nutrients and kept track of whether they got sick or died. This is how we learned about the existence of vitamins, for instance. It tells you what rats will die without, at least in the short term.
However, it’s likely that some of the health benefits of a varied diet — which play out in the long term — can’t be picked up in reductive experiments like this, says Jackson.
Cutting down your daily diet to just one ingredient might save time and hassle, but it’d be a quick way to get ill as well as bored.

Choose only one answer for each question.

6. The word “them” in paragraph 1 refers to

7. What is meant by the phrase “you omit them at your peril”?

8. According to the text, who is likely to be affected by “rabbit starvation”?

9. According to the text, who consumed one type of food for a certain period of time?

10. The overall aim of the text is to

This reading comprehension task focuses on the overview of social networks.

The maximum score of the exercise is 1 point. All questions in the exercise should be answered correctly to get the maximum score.

Max. bodů – 1. Pro zisk bodu je potřeba odpovědět na všechny otázky správně.

I. Část. Čtení.

Planning a Bike Tour Across Europe

So you want to ride a bike across Europe. While such a plan is certainly ambitious, it is not outrageous, and there are lots of good reasons to try it. First off, cycling is much cheaper than taking trains or buying gasoline for your car. Secondly, you’ll see diverse areas of each country you choose to visit and thus get a richer experience of each country and its culture. Never mind that you’ll get in shape really quickly and be able to tell better stories about your adventure than most of your friends. However, if you hate physical exercise, haven’t been on a bike for years, have a very limited amount of time, only want to see big cities, get discouraged easily or are traveling in winter, then the bike route may not be for you.

There are many companies that offer biking tours across Europe or parts of Europe, but for the most part they are expensive, use awful bikes, and won’t go exactly where you want to go. Making your own way is definitely the recommended way to travel. A successfully planned tour must be planned 12-24 weeks in advance of departure. Aside from equipping your bike and budgeting your time and money, you’ll need to think about language, landscape and weather. If you only speak English, the British Isles are your best bet, although some of the accents can make interpreting speech almost as difficult as with a foreign language. Some European countries have a much higher percentage of citizens speaking English than others. High on this list are Holland and the Scandinavian countries. Generally, not speaking the native language is more of a problem in the country than in cities, but this is where cycle tourists frequently find themselves.

Landscape figures into two factors – ease of cycling and attractiveness of the landscape. Unless you crave mountainous terrain, Holland is at or near the top of the list in both categories. Most of the other European countries have diverse regions, from mostly flat or rolling farming regions to mountain regions. Although mountains can be very dramatic to cycle through, the terrain means there are few roads – which puts you on the same roads as all the cars and trucks. If you’re craving ‘guaranteed’ clear skies and hot sun, the closer to the Mediterranean you are, the happier you’ll be. Although northern Europe is known for ‘less valued’ weather, there can always be surprises.

You’re best off if you’ve had your bike for a while before you go, and ridden it on a full-day ride with your anticipated load. If you’ve done this several times, or on a weekend mini-tour, you should have a good idea of how far you like to ride each day. There are many factors which can impact this, even for a given rider. Weight of the load, state of conditioning, terrain, weather, attractions along the route, and to a surprising degree: psychology. Even if you’re not used to touring and have done little training, after a few days you will start getting used to riding all day with a load, and after a week it should feel totally comfortable. The weight of your bike goes hand in hand with the terrain. In Holland, a heavy bike (over 60 kilograms. is only a minor hindrance. If you are touring in the Alps you will be one sad puppy. Rain and headwinds can make you dispirited and just want to find a dry and warm room for the night in the next town you come to. On the other hand, an unexpected downhill or sudden sunshine can get you psyched to cover more miles in one hour than you’ve gone in the prior two or three. Each of these components should be an element in your final itinerary planning. After you put the whole trip together, ‘walk’ through your route to make sure everything works. Make sure you haven’t bitten off too much mileage for a day early in the tour when you aren’t in touring form yet. Have you allowed enough time for attractions that you want to visit in an area? Try to plan in at least one non-cycling activity every day: a major museum, a hike, a boat trip, perhaps a leisurely two-hour lunch in a good but economical restaurant. Have you considered elevation changes for each day to ensure you can cover the necessary miles in the allotted daylight? If you’re not a ‘map person’, consider asking a friend who is to go over your planned route with you to help make sure it will work.

1. In Holland

2. A bike tour across Europe is not a good idea if

3. The terrain in Holland

4. Bike tour companies

5. Before departure you need to take a few practice rides with your … load.

6. A European bike tour will not

7. An unplanned descent or surprise of sunshine might … you to ride much … than you had previously been on pace for.

I. Část. Čtení.

The Ancient Olympics

The Olympic Games are an international sports festival that began in ancient Greece. The original Greek games were staged every fourth year for several hundred years, until they were abolished in the early Christian era. The revival of the Olympic Games took place in 1896, and since then they have been staged every fourth year, except during World War I and World War II (1916, 1940, 1944).

Perhaps the basic difference between the ancient and modern Olympics is that the former was the ancient Greeks’ way of saluting their gods, whereas the modern Games are a manner of saluting the athletic talents of citizens of all nations. The original Olympics featured competition in music, oratory, and theater performances as well. The modern Games have a more expansive athletic agenda, and for 2 and a half weeks they are supposed to replace the rancor of international conflict with friendly competition. In recent times, however, that lofty ideal has not always been attained.

The earliest reliable date that recorded history gives for the first Olympics is 776 B.C., although virtually all historians presume that the Games began well before then.

It is certain that during the midsummer of 776 B.C. a festival was held at Olympia on the highly civilized eastern coast of the Peloponnesian peninsula. That festival remained a regularly scheduled event, taking place during the pre-Christian golden age of Greece. As a testimony to the religious nature of the Games (which were held in honor of Zeus, the most important god in the ancient Greek pantheon), all wars would cease during the contests. According to the earliest records, only one athletic event was held in the ancient Olympics — a footrace of about 183 m (200 yd), or the length of the stadium. A cook, Coroibus of Elis, was the first recorded winner. The first few Olympics had only local appeal and were limited to one race on one day; only men were allowed to compete or attend. A second race — twice the length of the stadium — was added in the 14th Olympics, and a still longer race was added to the next competition, four years later.

When the powerful, warlike Spartans began to compete, they influenced the agenda. The 18th Olympiad included wrestling and a pentathlon consisting of running, jumping, spear throwing (the javelin), discus throwing, and wrestling. Boxing was added at the 23rd Olympiad, and the Games continued to expand, with the addition of chariot racing and other sports. In the 37th Olympiad (632 B.C.) the format was extended to five days of competition.

The growth of the Games fostered “professionalism” among the competitors, and the Olympic ideals waned as royalty began to compete for personal gain, particularly in the chariot events. Human beings were being glorified as well as the gods; many winners erected statues to deify themselves. In A.D. 394 the Games were officially ended by the Roman emperor Theodosius I, who felt that they had pagan connotations.
The source: The History of the Olympic Games By Jim Benagh
https://www.scholastic.com/

1. After being in the early Chritian period the Olympic games restarted in … .

2. Is it true that earlier ancient Olympic games were devoted to compition in music, oratory and theater performance?

3. All historians believe that … .

4. The main feature to stop wars during the Olympic games appeared … .

5. According to the earliest records the only athletic competition during ancient Olympic games was … .

6. Due to Spartans the list of athletic copmetitions was expanded to wrestling and a pentathlon consisting of running, jumping, spear throwing. 

7. The professionalism of the ancient Olympic competitors made the royalty … .

8. Women were not allowed neither to attend the ancient Olympic games nor to participate in them. 

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