Reading comprehension — reference words (2 marks)
I. READING COMPREHENSION. Read the text below carefully, then answer the question that follows it. The underlined words are printed in bold.
1. Every Saturday morning, a small queue forms outside a garage in the village of Ashby Green. The people waiting are not customers, and nothing is for sale. They have come for Frank Doyle's bicycles. Since he closed his bakery three years ago, Frank has repaired more than four hundred old bikes and given every one of them away, mostly to teenagers who could not afford a new bike.
2. The 67-year-old did not plan any of this. "After forty years of getting up at four to bake bread, I suddenly had nothing to do before lunch," he says. When his grandson Liam asked him to fix a bike he had found in a skip, Frank spent a whole week on it. Liam rode it to the next village and back the same evening, and his friends started knocking on the door the following day.
3. Today the work happens in a wooden garage behind Frank's vegetable beds, which was once his late wife Maureen's pottery studio. Donated bikes arrive from all over the county: some need only new tyres, while others have to be taken apart completely. Frank keeps a notebook for each bike, with the name of the person who gave it and the name of the young rider who takes it home.
4. Local shops have noticed the difference. "Kids who used to wait for a lift now cycle to their part-time jobs," says the owner of the village newsagent. Frank, however, prefers to talk about the bikes. "People think I am giving something to the young ones," he says. "In fact, they are the ones keeping me busy."
Practice text written in the style of the adapted press articles of the bac papers.
COMPREHENSION QUESTION
1. What do the words underlined in the text refer to? (2 marks)
a. the 67-year-old (paragraph 2) refers to ____________________.
b. which (paragraph 3) refers to ____________________.
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Idea: an underlined word is a pointer back to something the text has already named. The answer is the words it points to, copied from the text and complete enough to identify one person or thing. Four checks, in this order: number and person (singular or plural? a person or a thing?), backward search (go back from the word, sentence by sentence), substitution (put your answer in place of the word and reread), specificity (a name or a full noun phrase, never another pronoun). 1 mark per item.
1.a Idea: a descriptive noun phrase — an age, a job, a nationality — is how the writer avoids repeating a name. Singular, a person, aged 67: going back from paragraph 2, the only person already named is Frank Doyle, who closed his bakery three years ago (paragraph 1); the quote that follows, after forty years of getting up at four to bake bread, confirms it.
Answer: Frank Doyle (the retired baker). Substitution: "Frank Doyle did not plan any of this" — it reads correctly.
0 mark: Liam (he is the grandson, the one who asks for help); a baker or the man (too vague to identify him); he (a pronoun in place of a pronoun).
1.b Idea: the relative which points to a thing named just before the comma — but not always to the nearest noun. Two candidates stand before it: Frank's vegetable beds and a wooden garage. The verb that follows is was, singular, so the plural vegetable beds is excluded; and a pottery studio is a building, which a garage can be.
Answer: a wooden garage (behind Frank's vegetable beds). Substitution: "the wooden garage was once his late wife Maureen's pottery studio".
0 mark: Frank's vegetable beds (nearest noun, wrong number); the work (the subject of the sentence, not the antecedent of which).