Leseverstehen

Task 1: Benjamin Zephaniah

Read the text and the headings below. Then decide which heading best fits each paragraph and put the correct number into the box. There is one more heading than you need.

Article published in The Economist, December 14, 2023

It was his Mum who started it. She was always singing round the house, turning any stray remark

into a rhyme, such as “Let’s go to the show, we have to go now, you know….” Uncle Everett added

to it when he’d play the latest records from Jamaica at family parties, the men in their suits all dancing

to reggae and ska while he, Benjamin the eldest, would add on verses about cooking. Then there

was the time he was called to testify at church and made a rap of “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus” and

all the Bible books, forwards then backwards. The pastors named him Zephaniah after that, a

prophet’s name. So when people said later that he ought to be a painter, or a car mechanic, he clung

to what he’d known since he was eight years old: he was going to be a poet, poet, poet.

They said, you can’t make a living that way. He was sure he could. It didn’t need much, just “a pencil

full of lead…light and fine, …[that] moves with me through space and time”, and a mind burning with

ideas. The first of which was that he didn’t like poetry much. The world Wordsworth wandered in

wasn’t his: Birmingham’s poor black end, all grey tin baths, grey pavements, grey sky, or London,

“magnificent through its pollution”. He wanted to write about the lives of people now, walking those

streets: struggling to survive with social services cut, lied to by politicians, oppressed by authority

right and left without even knowing it.

And then, as important as writing, he wanted to stir those people up by standing on a stage and

letting rip the verse of fire. He could make them laugh, too, before jabbing in a serious point. Britain’s

diversity, for example, was worth celebrating, a pot of Picts and Celts to which had been added

Romans, Saxons, Normans, Afghans, cool Jamaicans, fresh Indians, Pakistanis, Bosnians, Turks,

all sorts. Let simmer; add respect. But “treating one ingredient better than another will leave a bitter

unpleasant taste”.

Nowhere was the bitterness sharper than in black Britain. It was his main theme. […] even as a

dread Rasta strolling real and regal down the street, with his poetry and novels in every bookshop

and his face on TV, he still felt unsure about asking a policeman the time. Black males were stopped

and searched five times more than white men. When young black men were killed, like Stephen

Lawrence, white killers got off. When black men like his cousin Michael and a whole litany of others

died in custody, there was no inquiry. And when a white woman sat well away from him on the Tube,

was that because he was black? […]

Some black entertainers sold out, of course. They thought going to the Palace and sipping

champagne proved how far they had come. He couldn’t do that shit. The queen had met him

backstage once, a nice old lady, but No Monarchy was his motto. In 2003 the establishment tried to

award him the Order of the British Empire; he threw that thought straight back. If there was anything

he had railed against all his life, it was the empire and all its works.

People sometimes got the strange idea that he had softened. Perhaps it was because he was

interviewed on the BBC and went into schools to teach children to love words, have fun with them

and think again about eating animals, who were people too:

Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas

Cos’ turkeys just wanna hav fun…

It could be yu mate, an not on your plate…

He also worked for the British Council, though mostly to prove that British poetry was reggae and

dub as well as Keats. Murmurs even arose that he could be poet laureate. But then he would declare

yet again that capitalism would eat itself to death, and urge people to break the law every day just

to prove they weren’t entirely under control: by speeding, or wanking at the bus stop. At which point

the establishment would cry, “Fuck! He’s still militant!”

His anger did indeed burn a long, long time. So many causes inflamed him. He wrote, and worked

for charities, to address all the suffering he heard of: war victims, abused women, the homeless,

refugees (“We can all be refugees. Sometimes it only takes a day”). His duty was to drag into the

daylight injustice everywhere. On the cover of his anthology of 2001, “Too Black, Too Strong”, with

poems about East Timor and Palestine as well as his home cities, his fist punched out smack in the

reader’s face.

Yet he did have a more reflective side. It showed as he got older, when he moved to the remote

Fens of eastern England, grew his own organic vegetables and thought more about “the African

heart deep in my Brummie chest”. Religion, he had long ago decided, gave God a bad name. After

trying and rejecting several, he took Buddha as his hero and self-knowledge as his creed. Meditation

gave him a direct line to the creator, and didn’t blunt his anger. In fact, one wouldn’t work without the

other.

When good at last triumphed over evil, as he was sure it would, he hoped it might be partly due to

the poetry he had sown in people’s heads, especially young heads. The love of words, the drive of

rhythm, the search for justice; the sense of prophetic power.

I used to think nurses were women,

I used to think police were men,

I used to think poets were boring,

Until I became one of them.

Number	Heading
	Deep regrets
	Appearing tame
	Exploring spirituality
	Rejecting opportunism
	Recipe with a message
	Champion of the miserable
	Early inspirations and talent
	Wishing for profound impact
	Actual and suspected racism
	Traditional genre, contemporary content
	Using institution and encouraging disobedience

10 BE

Task 2: A Film Classic

Read the following article about the film Roman Holiday. Then tick () the correct answer (a, b, c, or d). There is only one correct answer.

Article by Guy Lodge published in The Guardian, August 28, 2023

When Roman Holiday was released, 70 summers ago, the monarchy was having a fashionable

moment. Two months before, the world had watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a

relatively young, glamorous face for a fusty institution: the first such event to be globally televised, it

made the very principle of royalty seem less like the realm of ancient history. I say “relatively”: the

frilly pomp and ceremony of English royalty can’t have been much sexier in 1953 than it was in 2023,

though at least they didn’t have official broad-bean quiche to contend with.

There was certainly ample scope for Hollywood to prettify the notion a bit, which is where Roman

Holiday proved most fortuitously timed. A romantic comedy that set a quasi-fantasy template for the

genre that has endured to the modern era – take Notting Hill, a veritable homage – it played on a

mid-century fascination with real-world princesses, with all the duller formalities taken out. Its

protagonist, crown princess Ann, is a blank slate on to which any number of princessy ideals could

be projected: she’s beautiful, gracious and charismatic, with an all-purpose Euro glamour that can’t

be tied to any specific identity, since the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo had elected to make her from

a vague imaginary nation. Beside her, England’s young new queen looked positively, rain-soddenly

drab.

Who wouldn’t, however, next to Audrey Hepburn? Twenty-three at the time of filming, and making

her Hollywood debut after a handful of minor parts across the pond, the Dutch-British ingenue was

the industry’s own coronation candidate: a star who didn’t look, sound or even move quite like her

contemporaries, suited to the part of idealised continental royalty down to her distinctive hybrid

accent and ripe, rounded diction.

“And introducing Audrey Hepburn,” state the film’s opening credits, effectively announcing Roman

Holiday’s mission statement, its reason for being. The film may be a sweet, attractive diversion on

its own terms, but it’s galvanised by this sense of purpose, this determination to mint an icon right

before your eyes. Even Vivien Leigh had a couple of leading credits before Gone With the Wind

made her anew; Julia Roberts was an Oscar nominee before Pretty Woman sent her supernova.

Rare are the films that this effectively construct a movie star from virtual scratch, setting an image

and persona to last an entire career: Roman Holiday is one.

It wasn’t quite intended to be that way. Ready-made stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Jean Simmons

were pencilled in as Princess Ann before scheduling clashes sent the director, William Wyler, in

search of fresher faces. It’s easy enough to see Taylor meeting the part’s winsome brief, but rather

harder to imagine it being a career-defining role for her. Familiarly conceived as the film may be in

many departments, Roman Holiday thrives on the thrill of the new – both within its narrative, as its

runaway princess experiences the liberties of civilian life for the first time, and in the gaze of the

camera, as it discovers and explores Hepburn’s face, finding its best angles amid infinite good ones.

You can see why Gregory Peck – himself a younger, fresher hire than initially planned, having

inherited the part after Cary Grant turned it down – agreed to drop his contractual solo star billing, in

order to elevate hers. He’s perfectly suave as Joe, the American journo who gives Ann a brief taste

of the common good life, but any true movie star knows when they’ve lost the spotlight.

If anything, Peck accepts a humble third place, behind Hepburn and the eponymous Italian capital,

shot by Wyler and the cinematographers Franz Planer and Henri Alekan with much the same rapt

generosity they apply to their leading lady. True to its title, Roman Holiday was shot wholly in Rome

– predominantly on location, with some interiors at Cinecittà studios – at a time when it was a relative

rarity for Hollywood productions, least of all modestly scaled comedies, to venture beyond Tinseltown

backlots.

The expense of the gambit dictated that the film be shot in black-and-white rather than Wyler’s

preferred Technicolor, which was the kind of practical limitation that proves creatively beneficial.

Even as the film presents a touristic vision of the Eternal City, it doesn’t feel saturated and over-

beautified: instead, the city view here is fleet, crisp, cool, with just a toenail in the aesthetic waters of

Italian neo-realism, albeit with any semblance of grit or poverty scrubbed out of the frame. Yet

compare it to Three Coins in the Fountain – an iridescently full-colour, Rome-set romantic trifle that

Hollywood churned out the following year, to smashing box office success – and Wyler’s film feels

altogether more chicly modern, even as it checks off the same sights and wish-fulfilment tropes.

For the truth of it is that there isn’t an awful lot to Roman Holiday, beyond its vast X-factor charms of

faces and places. Trumbo, then blacklisted, may have won an Oscar for his original story – accepted

then by Ian McLellan Hunter, his front – but the romance is a slender one, dictated more by

circumstance than plausible soul connection; its not-quite-happy ending lends it some bittersweet

heft, but it’s hardly Brief Encounter, in part because Ann and Joe’s characters are as cursory and

archetypal as their names.

But it’s Hepburn’s natural, half-smiling melancholy that makes Ann’s final rejection of romance for a

royal life of empty political gestures and spirit-crushing meet-and-greets – an acceptance of reality

in a story otherwise built as a fairytale – ultimately rather moving […]. Acting Oscars are often

awarded on the strength of the part rather than the specific actor’s more innate, idiosyncratic

qualities, which is one reason why biopics are such a drearily standard route to victory. Hepburn’s

best actress win for Roman Holiday is an exception: few Oscars have been awarded on such role-

elevating force of personality, image and expression. Hollywood needed a princess, and found her

– of course she got the crown into the bargain.

The film Roman Holiday came out in a year in which the British monarchy

a	enjoyed a certain popularity.	
b	expanded its political influence.	
c	reasserted its traditional position.	
d	started to recover after a crisis.	

The film Roman Holiday

a	combined different trends.	
b	created a lasting trend.	
c	mocked the trends of the time.	
d	revived an old trend.	

The princess in Roman Holiday was

a	a fictional version of Queen Elizabeth.	
b	more engaging than Queen Elizabeth.	
c	much younger than Queen Elizabeth.	
d	openly admired by Queen Elizabeth.	

Though not originally planned, Roman Holiday stood out because it

a	aimed at creating a new celebrity.	
b	featured a scandalous actor.	
c	focused more on time than on place.	
d	invented a fictional country.	

The role of Princess Ann turned out to be

a	attractive also for more mature actors.	
b	ideal for a beginning actor.	
c	too challenging for a foreign actor.	
d	too controversial for some actors.	

Gregory Peck

a	acknowledged Hepburn’s potential.	
b	developed feelings for Hepburn.	
c	envied Hepburn’s skills.	
d	learned from Hepburn.	

The fact that the film was shot in black-and-white was a

a	blessing in disguise.	
b	last-minute decision.	
c	minor artistic flaw.	
d	result of a misunderstanding.	

Three Coins in the Fountain is more

a	confusing than Roman Holiday.	
b	conventional than Roman Holiday.	
c	critical than Roman Holiday.	
d	pessimistic than Roman Holiday.	

Guy Lodge finds Ann’s rejection of romance

a	disappointing.	
b	inspiring.	
c	predictable.	
d	touching.	

Now think of the text as a whole.

The article focuses on how

a	a film can boost the attractiveness of a city.	
b	an actor can elevate a mediocre film.	
c	certain films can shape the spirit of their time.	
d	hard it can be to produce successful films.	

10 BE

Task 3: The Brangwens

Read the following excerpt from the novel The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence. Then fill in the missing information. You need not write complete sentences.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash

twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire. Two miles

away, a church-tower stood on a hill, the houses of the little country town climbing assiduously up to

it. Whenever one of the Brangwens in the fields lifted his head from his work, he saw the church-

tower at Ilkeston in the empty sky. So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he was aware

of something standing above him and beyond him in the distance.

There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting something unknown, about

which they were eager. They had that air of readiness for what would come to them, a kind of surety,

an expectancy, the look of an inheritor.

They were fresh, blond, slow-speaking people, revealing themselves plainly, but slowly, so that one

could watch the change in their eyes from laughter to anger, blue, lit-up laughter, to a hard blue-

staring anger; through all the irresolute stages of the sky when the weather is changing.

Living on rich land, on their own land, near to a growing town, they had forgotten what it was to be

in straitened circumstances. They had never become rich, because there were always children, and

the patrimony was divided every time. But always, at the Marsh, there was ample.

So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that

was in them, not for want of the money. Neither were they thriftless. They were aware of the last

halfpenny, and instinct made them not waste the peeling of their apple, for it would help to feed the

cattle. But heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease? They felt the

rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the

seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse

between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the

daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds’ nests no longer worth

hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to

their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing […].

In autumn the partridges whirred up, birds in flocks blew like spray across the fallow, rooks appeared

on the grey, watery heavens, and flew cawing into the winter. Then the men sat by the fire in the

house where the women moved about with surety, and the limbs and the body of the men were

impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and the sky, the men sat by the fire and

their brains were inert, as their blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day.

The women were different. On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens

running together in droves, and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed down

their throttle. But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken

world beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance,

they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.

1	Meaning of the churchtower for the Brangwens	__________________
2	Reason why the Brangwens are not worried about money	__________________
3	Example of sexual imagery	__________________
4	Trait that distinguishes the Brangwen women from the men	__________________

1	Meaning of the churchtower for the Brangwens	____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2	Reason why the Brangwens are not worried about money	____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
3	Example of sexual imagery	____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
4	Trait that distinguishes the Brangwen women from the men	____________________________________________________________________________________________________________