UNIT 4. HOLIDAYS AND TOURISM - Exercise 1 ⇱
Read the following passage about “Travelling online “ and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the option that best fits each of the numbered blanks
If you haven't got time to go travelling, you can still enjoy it by following a traveller's experiences on their blog.
Here are three of the most interesting and unusual globetrotters online!
Α. At the age of seventeen, Alex Chacón set off from his home in El Paso, Texas and went for a motorbike ride. Alex's thirty-day tour of the USA took in California, Washington, and Florida and gave Alex an aim in life: ___(1)___. Although Alex usually travels alone, he has shared his experiences on his blog. While travelling, Alex videos himself doing all sorts of activities against breathtaking backgrounds of remote jungles, deserts, and mountains. On one trip, he filmed himself by moving in a 360° circle so that all the famous landmarks would be included.
During Alex's motorcycle expeditions, he regularly stops to take part in volunteering projects at orphanages that he comes across on his route. Furthermore, he uses his blog to raise donations for orphans. Alex is now planning to cross Africa, Europe, and Asia. It seems that by the time he's thirty, ___(2)___.
B. Dutch actress Manon Ossevoort has dreamed of travelling from Europe across Africa to the South Pole for years, and she chose a slow form of transport: a tractor. Manon only averaged 5 km/h as she drove, ___(3)___. She would explain why she was going to the South Pole and ask people to follow her blog and write down their own dreams. She promised to build a snowman when she arrived at her destination and leave all their dreams inside it.
The idea was popular, and Manon received thousands of dreams on pieces of paper and in emails. Finally, on 9 December 2014, ___(4)___. She then built a snowman and left a time capsule inside it with all the dreams she had collected.
C. Have you ever travelled with no luggage? That was the question Rolf Potts aimed to answer on the 'no-baggage challenge.' However, the task wasn't simply a question of going off for a week to soak up the sun on a beach. Rolf had to travel 50,000 km by plane and get around eleven countries in 42 days ___(5)___.
(Adapted from Global friends)
UNIT 4. HOLIDAYS AND TOURISM - Exercise 2 ⇱
Read the following passage about “Aborigines and Maoris: The Original Inhabitants” and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the option that best fits each of the numbered blanks
Anybody who is hoping to have new experiences when they visit Australia or New Zealand should meet the original inhabitants of these two countries, the Aborigines and the Maoris. However, while both cultures have experienced similar problems caused by the arrival of Europeans to their lands, the Aborigines and the Maoris are very different.
The Aborigines
The Aborigines have one of the oldest surviving cultures in the world. It is more than 60,000 years old, and during this period of time, ___(6)___. In 1971, a flag was designed to represent all the Aborigine tribes and help unite them.
The Aborigines hold a lot of ceremonies to celebrate different events, but one of the most important to nearly all of the tribes is the 'walkabout'. It might seem like an adventure to people from other cultures, but the walkabout involves boys aged thirteen ___(7)___. They spend the whole time alone and learning to hunt for food to survive. Once the walkabout period has finished, they are welcomed back by their village, which celebrates the arrival of a new man in the community.
The Maoris
The Maoris arrived in New Zealand from East Polynesia in the second half of the 12th century. The Maoris all speak the same language and share the same customs, and ___(8)___. Maori is one of the country's two official languages. Maoris believe that all natural things and living things are connected, and modern Maoris ___(9)___.
One important aspect of Maori culture is Ta moko- tattooing. Both men and women can have tattoos on their bodies or their faces. The tattoos represent ___(10)___. The designs are very intricate and are now inspiring a lot of the designs of tattoo artists around the world.
(Adapted from Global friends)
UNIT 4. HOLIDAYS AND TOURISM - Exercise 3 ⇱
Read the following passage about “The rise of Airbnb“ and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the option that best fits each of the numbered blanks.
In 2007, design graduates, Joe Gebbie and Brian Chesky, were struggling to pay the rent for their San Francisco apartment. Hearing that there was a conference coming to town and there were no hotel rooms available, they created the website airbedandbreakfast.com where they advertised three airbeds in their home at $80 each a night, breakfast included. Only six days later, they had three guests sleeping on their floor. They knew immediately ___(11)___.
Being budding entrepreneurs, the pair decided to take their idea further. They enlisted Gebbie's former flatmate, Nathan Blecharczyk, a computer science graduate, ___(12)___. Their idea was to target conferences and festivals across the USA, getting local people to list their rooms and travellers to book them. The new website was completed just in time for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, at which Barack Obama was due to speak in front of 80,000 people. Within a week, ___(13)___, but did not solve their financial problems, as the site was not making any money.
The team decided that they would have to handle payment for the bookings. They began to charge three per cent to the host and between six and twelve per cent to the traveller, depending on the price of the booking. Meanwhile, investors ___(14)___. By April 2009, when larger investments began to arrive, they moved the company out of their flat into a new state-of-the-art office and hired more staff.
Since then Airbnb has gone from strength to strength. The company now has over 1.5 million listings in 34,000 cities in 190 countries, and ___(15)___.
(Adapted from Global friends)