Английский ЕГЭ - банк заданий - страница 363

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.

I have to confess I was disappointed on my first visit to the canyon more than a decade ago. On our way to Los Angeles, my family and I swung off the highway, made the 60-mile detour to the South Rim and found ourselves caught in a long traffic jam. When we eventually managed to park, and walked to the rim, the scale of the sight off the edge was so great that it was hard to muster a response. It was so familiar from innumerable pictures that it might just as well have been a picture. What surprised me most was the babel of languages audible among the files of visitors pouring off the tour buses. It sounded like Times Square on a Saturday night, with every continent represented in the hubbub.

We didn’t take any photos. We only stayed an hour or two, but before we left the rim I saw a trail, pale as chalk, winding down a huge slope beneath a cliff. This thread snaking over the landscape — where does it go, who uses it, why does it seem so intimate with the land? And why does it arouse such an intense longing to follow it? An unknown path seems almost necessarily a metaphor. We like to conceive of life as a thread, after all, a path crossing unexpected terrain on its journey to another element. There wasn’t time to follow it, and I left with a nagging sense of opportunity lost, and that pale thread of a path still pulling at me.

It wasn’t until last winter that I got to answer that pull. The first thing I learned is that for the Grand Canyon, winter is the best time to go. Winter is cool, and the cool is good for hiking. Sunlight becomes a blessing instead of a 120-degree curse when you step out of chill shade into some welcome warmth. The chief district ranger John Evans told me, “You’ll more or less have the place to yourself.” Although the canyon is a desert, it’s a kind of oasis in winter — a place of peace, sequestered from the rest of the world. Indeed, in three days of hiking I saw only two or three mule trains, each carrying baggage not riders, and maybe two dozen hikers in all.

To experience the canyon, you have to leave the rim. The frustration aroused by the grandness on a rim-only visit turns into liberation once you drop down. The modern world falls away. It’s not just a trip out of the human realm, but into the deep geology of the Earth. Layer upon layer of the planet’s crust is revealed. And in the silence and stillness, in the solitude of the canyon in winter, it’s all the more impressive.

As I was preparing to go, I was amazed how many people knew the inner canyon well. One acquaintance told me that he had spent 300 nights below the rim. In a grocery store in Santa Fe I talked with a Grand Canyon crazy runner who hikes from rim to rim in a single day several times a year. A woman in a coffee shop line told me about the time when a 10-pound falling rock nearly knocked her off a trail. I began to get the feeling the Grand Canyon is truly a national monument, similar to the Lake District in England. It’s something all Americans share and take pride in.

The canyon is one mile deep, and the trail is about 10 miles long, and that translates to a very arduous walk, especially for an 8-year-old son, who went on a trip with me. After an impossibly smooth two-hour ride in the vintage coaches of the Grand Canyon Railway from the nearest settlement, we checked in at Bright Angel Lodge near the canyon rim, to reconfirm our bookings for Phantom Ranch, down in the bottom. The woman behind the desk glanced at my son Saul and said: “I hope you’re planning to leave immediately, if not sooner.”

It was already one o’clock, and most hikers set off in the morning. My heart dropped. Saul is strong, fit as an Olympic athlete, but he is still only eight. Was it crazy and cruel to ask him to walk down then up a whole mile of elevation? What if he hurt himself? What would happen if my own legs failed me? The fear only amplified over the first spectacular mile of trail, where we had to pick our way precariously over ice. But then we were out on the spine of a ridge and the ice had all melted away. Here, it wasn’t so much about looking at a view as being in the midst of one.

I have always found geology more or less unbelievable. Could a river really carve out a gash that deep? However, before the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, in a single day the Colorado River used to carry away 380,000 tons of silt, enough to fill a train 25 miles long. Obviously, a river this size is indeed an efficient grinding tool. The scientist John Strong Newberry said that “nowhere on the Earth’s surface are the secrets of its structure revealed as here.”

On his first visit to the canyon, the narrator was astonished by

The narrator wanted to return to the Grand Canyon because

John Evans advised the narrator to visit the Grand Canyon in winter because

When you leave the rim and drop down, you experience the feeling of

Preparing for the trip, the narrator understood that

When they checked in at Bright Angel Lodge, the narrator was worried because

According to the narrator,

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.

When I decided to become a vegetarian, it was not for the reasons many people might normally assume. I had just moved to Malaysia and I often came across people who abstained from meat for religious reasons or because of health issues, but for me being a vegetarian is more of a lifestyle choice. In the months before moving to Malaysia, I had begun living plastic-free as part of a zero waste lifestyle. Of course, this has had several major positive influences on my life, but one of the greatest takeaways so far has been opting for a more plant-based diet.

Ever since I started my journey to living with less waste, I have constantly been looking for new ways to limit my individual impact on the planet. I regularly shopped at bulk food stores with my own reusable containers, but nothing has been more effective than removing meat from my diet. Without knowing it, my individual response to plastic packaging and composting had unearthed thoughts on the unethical and environmentally unsound practices of animal agriculture around the world. Thus, by the time I moved to Malaysia, I was ready to kick my daily meat-eating habits, replacing beef and chicken with leafy greens and seafood to help ease the transition.

In the months since, it has been challenging at times to stay motivated. That is why it is important to have like-minded friends, who will remind you to keep moving forward when you encounter problems. It was also difficult for me to realize that there were more options out there than just salad, green beans, and asparagus. Here in Malaysia, one can have an entire buffet of vegetarian options. Having grown up in a small town in Alabama to a family occupationally obsessed with cows and meat eating, the concept of vegetables being a stand-alone meal was the hardest for me to grasp because they had always been mere supporting side dishes to the more substantial slab of beef, chicken, or fish.

The things I have learned since switching to the green side have ranged from mastering the art of cooking to taking advantage of seasonal produce. When I found myself bored, I approached an ingredient differently and cooked something new. Thus, instead of missing that cut of rib-eye steak, I discovered I really enjoyed the taste and texture of roasted eggplant. Being creative with cooking my food allowed me to go on without missing my meaty past. I transitioned slowly by first cutting out beef, chicken, and pork, before gradually removing seafood. Unfortunately, anchovies and prawn paste are quite common in Malaysian food, so that continues to be a challenge at most restaurants.

Incorporating a vegetarian diet has had a truly “mind, body and soul” effect on me. Since I made the decision to be a vegetarian, I have become more mindful of what I eat and where the food comes from. My body has reaped several rewards as well. Not only have I become more aware of the effects the food I eat has on my body, but I have also started losing weight while eating just as much as I did before. My skin has improved too (partly thanks to the plant-based skincare products I have personally blended for myself), and I have rarely fallen ill. Of course, vegetarian meals take more time to prepare than throwing a chunk of meat on the grill, but I have never felt healthier than I do today.

Since the transition to a vegetarian diet, my life has changed tremendously. What I have learned so far is that vegetarianism is not a package deal. It does not dictate a set of rules on how one should live. More importantly, though, this lifestyle gives people a cause to care and inspires them to be more aware of the struggles our animal friends face in factory farms. If living a zero waste lifestyle rekindles a sense of environmentalism and conservation, a plant-based diet instils a sense of compassion

The author became a vegetarian

What was NOT the author’s motive for becoming a vegetarian?

The expression “kick my daily meat-eating habits” in paragraph 2 (“...by the time I moved to Malaysia, I was ready to kick my daily meat-eating habits,…”) is synonymic to