(For better concentration and result we recommend you print the article on paper before doing this test.)
You are going to read a magazine article. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs! A – H the one which fits each gap (27 - 33). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
SLED-TIME STORY
Jenny Diski thought she’d be a mere observer when she traveled to the far north of Sweden to spend time with the remote Sami people. Instead she found herself tangling with reindeer and experiencing the coldest night of her life.
I had said I wanted to spend a few days in the dark, brooding under the midday moon in Sweden’s far north, above the Arctic Circle. ‘Oh, its never dark up here,’ Per-Nils Paivio insisted when I and Mark, the photographer, arrived in the cabin in Ovre Soppero where Per-Nils’s wife, Britt-Marie, was preparing reindeer stew with lingonberry sauce.
It was our first night in Swedish Lapland as a guest of the Sami, the indigenous people who were here long before the Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Russians arrived. ‘Snow, Northern Lights, you can go out into the forest in the middle of December and you hardly need a torch,’ Per-Nils said proudly.
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The first two days and nights in the warmth of the cabin were cosy enough. Informative, too, as Britt-Marie gave me – along with a breakfast of pancakes – a thorough education in the ancient and barely altered life of the reindeer-herding Sami people of northern Sweden.
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They positively clanged when after trotting over a forest path in a nicely-tied up convoy, he turned and said he would untie the reindeer and I’d take the reins of mine. Left for faster, right for stop. Actually, my reindeer knew immediately who was boss and sauntered, insolently nibbling moss, when I jerked the left rein, then, when I pulled the right, raced his best mate over heart-stopping humps on a frozen lake or hurtled between frozen winter birch trees in the pale morning sunshine. I renounced any pretence to authority and just clung on, fearing for my life.
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Later on Hakan Enoksson took over. We were incredibly lucky, he told us. The Sami had brought together the 7,000 reindeer of the whole district, and we would be able to participate in the great annual separation of the herds into family groups for the winter grazing, according to the signs cut into the ears of each yearling calf. Every Sami – man, woman and child – has their own animals bearing their own sign and the whole mustering process takes several days.
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But all of that lay ahead of me after an hour’s journey by snowmobile. We crashed through the forest (me riding pillion, Mark hunkered down in the trailer with all the equipment) as fast as swerving along the narrow, bumpy track would allow. There hadn’t been enough snow yet for a smooth ride. My bones cracked and rattled.
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While I was on the flight back to southern ease, I was wondering why the Sami people are battling to continue to live their incredibly hard life. Then I remembered that journey when I felt that I was being whisked off to the world’s end by the snow Queen and fell into an enchantment at the magic of the frozen wilderness.
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Yet somehow I survived, stiff and red-eyed. Then the round-up began. Everyone revved up their snowmobiles and spread out in a mysterious pattern, surrounding the reindeer. Dogs barked, people shouted and 7,000 reindeer ran in the desired direction into the large corral. There they were shooed by a snaking line of people on foot, pressing them towards the narrow passage where there was a small circular corral with gates to family paddocks radiating off it.
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After the round-up we traveled by snowmobile and then car Kiruna, the town that contains the Sami parliament. It also had the Hotel Ralleran, an old, wooden building, devotedly restored and a shrine to simplicity and comfort with the most beautiful bed I have ever slept in. now I’m back in the warm, I am very grateful to have had such an extraordinary experience.
A. By contrast, the down-to-earth of the Arctic winter was without doubt my experience of attempting to sleep in a Sami lavvu at 28 below zero. Our lavvu had a layer of reindeer skins over the bare, snow-covered ungiving earth. The six-inch gap around the bottom of the tent was ‘to let the fresh air in’. I noted every second of the seven unimaginably cold, inconceivably long hours I had to live through until morning.
B. Fortunately, however, all I lost was the respect of my human guides, but they were kind about it and provided lunch – reindeer soup and flat bread – around a blazing log fire. I thawed and relaxed until it was time to get going again.
C. All the young people had plans for their lives beyond reindeer herding but they also wanted to keep their Sami heritage, not as a museum exhibit but an actual existence. One reason they are inviting visitors to to share something of that existence is so that they can sustain their reindeer-herding way of life.
D. The sun did not rise the next morning until 11 a.m. Just visible above the horizon, it sidled west for an hour or so and had disappeared by 2 p.m. By then the moon was high. It shone huge and brilliand, the snow gleamed, the stars blazed. Snowlight. It was too eerie to be a a disappointment, even for someone who had been dreaming of spending days in blanketing obscurity.
E. It was when we were handed over to Nils-Torbjorn Nutti in the village of Jukkasjarvi thaty I realized some misunderstanding had occurred. ‘would you like to take your reindeer and lead him out to the sled?’ he asked in the corral. ‘No, thank you,’ I replied. ‘You have to,’ Nils-Torbjorn said, handing me a halter with a huge-antlered animal attached to the other end. Alarm bells began to ring.
F. They told me my job was to head off the stragglers and escapees from the herd. This is done by flapping the arms and down and hooting. I found that even the most desultory of flaps would persuade a wayward reindeer to fall back into line.
G. None of this mattered however, once the headlight revealed a fairyland labyrinth. Every twig was a glistening white, starkly frosted finger urgently pointing in every direction, a latticeword which sparkled, twinkled, actually dazzled as if it had been sprinkled with a thick layer of diamond dust.
H. For this reason the Sami have built some huts by the network of corrals where the lengthy round-up takes place. But we were going to spend the night in a lavvu, guarding the reindeer. I had searched for lavvu on the internet and discovered it meant a tent. I had initially imagined a nice, warm tourist tent. Now it began to dawn on me that it might be rather more of an endurance.
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