Homework

 

Questions 37–42

Read the newspaper article below about a former ballet dancer talking about the physical demands of the job. Six sentences have been removed from the text below. For each question, choose the correct answer. There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

Good preparation leads to success in ballet dancing

A former classical ballet dancer explains what ballet training actually involves.

What we ballet dancers do is instinctive, but instinct learnt through a decade of training. A dancer’s life is hard to understand, and easy to misinterpret. Many a poet and novelist has tried to do so, but even they have chosen to interpret all the hard work and physical discipline as obsessive. And so the idea persists that dancers spend every waking hour in pain, bodies at breaking point, their smiles a pretence.

As a former dancer in the Royal Ballet Company here in Britain, I would beg to question this. 

37

 With expert teaching and daily practice, its various demands are easily within the capacity of the healthy human body. Contrary to popular belief, there is no need to break bones or tear muscles to achieve ballet positions. It is simply a question of sufficient conditioning of the muscular system.

Over the course of my dancing life I worked my way through at least 10,000 ballet classes. I took my first at a school of dance at the age of seven and my last 36 years later at the Royal Opera House in London. In the years between, ballet class was the first thing I did every day. It starts at an early age, this daily ritual, because it has to. 

38

 But for a ballet dancer in particular, this lengthy period has to come before the effects of adolescence set in, while maximum flexibility can still be achieved.

Those first classes I took were remarkably similar to the last. In fact, taking into account the occasional new idea, ballet classes have changed little since 1820, when the details of ballet technique were first written down, and are easily recognised in any country. Starting with the left hand on the barre, the routine unrolls over some 75 minutes. 

39

 Even the leading dancers have to do it.

These classes serve two distinct purposes: they are the way we warm our bodies and the mechanism by which we improve basic technique. In class after class, we prove the old saying that ‘practice makes perfect’. 

40

 And it is also this daily repetition which enables us to strengthen the muscles required in jumping, spinning or lifting our legs to angles impossible to the average person.

The human body is designed to adapt to the demands we make of it, provided we make them carefully and over time. 

41

 In the same way, all those years of classes add up to a fit-for-purpose dancing machine. This level of physical fluency doesn’t hurt; it feels good.

42

 But they should not be misled: there is a difference between hard work and hardship. Dancers have an everyday familiarity with the first. Hardship it isn’t.

THE TASK

• Part 6 consists of one text, for example an extract from a magazine, from which six sentences have been removed and placed in jumbled order after the text, together with a seventh sentence which does not fit in any of the gaps.
• Candidates are required to decide from where in the text each sentence has been removed. Each sentence may be used only once, and there is one sentence that candidates do not need to use. The task tests understanding of how texts are structured.
• Rather than concentrating on individual sentences, candidates need to be able to follow the development of ideas, opinions and events through the text as a whole, using their understanding of text coherence and cohesion devices.

HOW TO APPROACH THE TASK

• Read through the text with gaps in it first so that they gain an overall idea of the structure of the text and the development of the writer’s ideas, before starting to do the task.
• Make sure to look carefully at the information before and after the gap. Candidates sometimes make the wrong choices by selecting options which seem to fit the text before the gap, and neglecting to check that the text after the gap follows on logically.
• Practice in recognising a wide range of linguistic devices which mark the logical and cohesive development of a text, for example words and phrases indicating time periods, cause and effect, exemplification, contrasting arguments, repetition, concordance of tenses, pronouns, etc. This will help to make the correct choice between two possible sentences which seem rather similar at first sight.
• As in Part 5, it is important to not rely on ‘word spotting’, i.e. assuming that if the same word, name, date, etc. appears in the surrounding text and one of the options, that is automatically the right sentence to fill the gap. Train them to check all the other linguistic clues carefully before making their final decision.