VI. Read the passage, and choose the correct answer A, B, C or D for each question.
It is sometimes very difficult to decide which career to choose when you leave school. British students are helped by careers teachers, who inform them about different careers, qualifications needs and try to help them make up their minds. Mr. Hemmings, a careers teacher as well as a History teacher, talks about his experience.
“I’ve been a careers teacher for around five years and, on the whole, I’ve found it a rewarding experience. Our students have careers lessons once a week for the fourth and the fifth years (15 or 16 years old). My task consists of explaining as accurately as possible the qualifications required for each job, as well as the type OS work and personal skills involved.
Advising teenagers can be rather difficult - some youngsters have no idea at all of what they want to do, or of what the real world outside school really is. They come to me and say “I don’t like routine nine- to-five jobs... I’d like something exciting that pays well...” What I can say? That we’re running out of exciting jobs? But they usually end up facing reality and come down to their senses after a while...
Anyway here in school we only give them a piece of advice according to what we know about their favourite and weakest subjects, pastimes and personality. But if you ask me, things are happening so quickly around here, with our economy in the dumps that sometimes you don’t know what to say. A few days ago I asked a fifteen-year-old boy what job he had in mind and he replied “I haven’t any plans...You see, Sir, I don’t know what new jobs will replace today’s” What could I say?
