Английский ЕГЭ - банк заданий - страница 343
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Прочитайте текст и выполните задания №12-18. В каждом задании запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
Uluru, known as Ayers Rock, is a large sandstone rock formation in Central Australia. Physically, it is an inselberg, which is a hill that rises from a plain. Uluru is a huge red stone, which turns into a magical vibrant pink as the sun rises and yellow ochre as the sunsets. It is made up of caves and canyons. However, what makes this rock truly special is the history attached to it. Plenty of paintings and carvings of the early Aborigines have been found in and around Uluru. Towering over the Australian outback, Uluru remains a source of reverence and awe.
It is November, springtime in the Australian desert, and I am standing at the base of Uluru with a group of travellers whom I am guiding on a two-week tour of Australia. Above us, a path snakes up the smooth face of the sandstone rock. Uluru is one of Australia’s top tourist attractions, and thousands of visitors climb this track to the top of the rock. But not today! A sign at the start of the track says the climb is closed due to high winds although the forecast is favourable.
In fact, two weeks before our arrival, the Uluru—Kata Tjuta National Park Board announced that from October 2019 Uluru is constantly closed to climbers. Though the National Park experienced a surge in visitors after the climbing ban was announced, the percentage of visitors who attempted the climb has been steadily declining over recent decades due to the traditional owners’ request for respect. For the rock’s Aboriginal owners the climbing ban is a momentous decision, the one they have dreamed of and worked towards for decades. To them, Uluru is an intensely sacred site linked to spirits of their ancestors, which requires protection against tourists.
Yet those feelings counted for little when weighed against the dollars being generated by the tourism economy. If visitors wanted to climb the rock, who were the Aborigines to stop them? Imagine the euphoria felt by the Aboriginal owners when the Park Board voted unanimously to end climbing. The director of the Central Land Council, which represents Indigenous people in Central Australia, said this decision was “righting a historic wrong.”
Today, at the start of the path up the rock, a large information panel expresses the local people’s feeling both for their most sacred place and for the visitors’ well-being. Under the headline “Please don’t climb,” the sign says. “This is our home. As custodians, we are responsible for your safety and behaviour.” This is not empty emoting. Since the 1950s at least 36 people have died while climbing Uluru and lots of climbers have needed medical rescues.
One unexpected response to the perception of Uluru as a sacred site has been the return of the rock itself or, rather, bits of it. For years, visitors had purloined pieces of Uluru as souvenirs. As awareness of Aboriginal beliefs became more widespread, people started sending the rocks back. Almost daily, the National Park receives packages of rocks from all over the world with messages of regret. Some people claim to have been cursed since taking rocks home, but the majority simply say that what they or their relatives did was wrong. The story of these “sorry rocks” has been widely reported, reinforcing the message of Uluru’s sacredness.
Bigger, wider and taller than Uluru, nearby Kata Tjuta is a spectacular collection of 36 enormous rocks. It is, arguably, one of Australia’s best-kept secrets, barely talked about among most Australians, let alone the world. Different signs invite visitors to relate to the place as the Indigenous people do. The signs say, “Kata Tjuta is sacred. Our people have always shown respect when visiting this place. It is the same for you. Hold in your heart the knowledge that this is a special place. Walk quietly, tread lightly.”
Uluru, as well as Kata Tjuta, will always be cultural landscapes deeply entrenched in the Aboriginal culture. For the Aborigines, these sacred rock formations are living creatures that emit energy. Obviously, the magnificence of these magical wonders needs protecting.
What makes Uluru such an extraordinary place?
The expression “a momentous decision” in paragraph 3 (“For the rock’s Aboriginal owners the climbing ban is a momentous decision...”) means
Прочитайте текст и выполните задания №12-18. В каждом задании запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever — transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths. To the door of the twelfth house, whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper, who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers. He asked if there was a room to let. ‘Come in,’ said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat seemed lined with fur. ‘I have the third-floor-back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?’
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so, they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.
‘This is the room,’ said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. ‘It’s a nice room. I had some most elegant people in it last summer — no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it for three months. They did a vaudeville sketch. Miss Bretta Sprowls — you may have heard of her — right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long.’
‘Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?’ asked the young man. ‘They come and go. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stay long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they come and they go.’
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said, and would take possession at once. The room had been made ready, she said. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.
‘A young girl — Miss Eloise Vashner — do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.’
‘No, I don’t remember the name. These stage people have names they change as often as their rooms. No, I don’t call that one to mind.’
No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theaters from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of today buried tomorrow in ooze and slime.
The houses of the lower West Side