One-word retrieval: the gapped summary and « words meaning nearly the same as »

Reading comprehension. Read the text, then answer the question.

1. Houda Mejri lost most of her hearing at the age of four, after a fever. For years, the bakeries of Bizerte turned her away, saying that a baker must hear the customers' orders. At twenty-six, she opened her own bakery in a narrow street near the old port, with a loan from her uncle and a single oven.

2. Today, eight of her ten employees are deaf. Orders are written on small boards, and regular customers have picked up a few signs: a flat hand for bread, two fingers for croissants. "At first, people were puzzled," Houda says. "Now some of them come just to practise."

3. The bakery sells about nine hundred loaves a day. Last year, the regional employment office asked Houda to advise other employers, and three bakeries in the town have since hired deaf workers. "We were never unable to work," she says. "We were simply never asked."

Practice text written in the style of the adapted press articles of the bac papers.

Complete the following summary with 4 words from paragraphs 1, 2 and 3. One word per blank. (4 marks)

After a childhood illness, Houda was refused work by several ① …………… . She started her own business, and most of her staff are now ② …………… like her. Customers who were ③ …………… at first now enjoy communicating by signs. Other employers have followed her example and ④ …………… deaf workers.

Reading comprehension. Read the text, then answer the question.

1. Rania Gharbi was fourteen when a coach noticed her throwing stones into the sea at Monastir with surprising force. Two years later, she was the youngest player in the national junior handball squad.

2. Success came at a price. Rania trained twice a day, and a shoulder injury kept her off the court for seven months. During that time, she followed a strict programme with a physiotherapist and worked on her fitness in the swimming pool. She also discovered a new passion: she started to analyse videos of her opponents and wrote notes on every goalkeeper she might face.

3. When she returned, her coach made her captain. "She came back stronger in the head than in the arm," he says.

Practice text written in the style of the adapted press articles of the bac papers.

Fill in each blank with one word from paragraph 2. (4 marks)

Rania's ① …………… stopped her from playing for more than half a year. She did not give up: she respected a ② …………… programme and improved her ③ …………… in the pool. She also began to ④ …………… her rivals' videos.

Reading comprehension. Read the text, then answer the question.

1. The bookshop of Mohsen Ayari, in a narrow lane of the Tunis medina, is barely wider than a corridor. Books rise from floor to ceiling, and to reach the top shelves Mohsen climbs a rickety wooden ladder that his father made in 1968.

2. For decades, the shop earned very little. In the lean years, Mohsen and his wife had to scrape by on what a few dictionaries and old maps brought in. He never thought of closing it. "My father would have been ashamed of me," he says.

3. Everything changed when a young woman posted a short video of the ladder and the towers of books. Within a week, a throng of young readers filled the lane on Saturday mornings, many of them buying their first book of Arabic poetry. Mohsen now opens on Sundays too.

Practice text written in the style of the adapted press articles of the bac papers.

Pick out from the text words / expressions meaning nearly the same as: (3 marks)

a. old, weak and likely to break (paragraph 1): ……………

b. to manage to live with very little money (paragraph 2): ……………

c. a large crowd (paragraph 3): ……………

Reading comprehension. Read the text, then answer the question.

1. When the letter arrived from the national federation, Omar Chaabane was thrilled. At seventeen, the table-tennis player from Kairouan had been selected for the African junior championships in Cairo. His mother framed the letter before he had even finished reading it.

2. Preparation was tough. For six weeks, Omar trained in a hall without heating and ran up the hill behind the stadium every evening. His coach, a former champion called Lotfi, was demanding but patient, and he corrected the same backhand movement hundreds of times.

3. A month before the championships, a club in France offered Omar a contract. He declined it politely. "I want to finish my baccalaureate first," he said. In Cairo, he reached the quarter-finals.

Practice text written in the style of the adapted press articles of the bac papers.

Find a word in the text that nearly means: (3 marks)

a. "Delighted" (paragraph 1): ……………

b. "Hard" (paragraph 2): ……………

c. "Refused" (paragraph 3): ……………