Fill the gaps in these sentences with suitable word.

 

q We put our luggage in the …boot…, got in the car and fasten our s……….

q After you’ve passed your driving t………..you’ll get your driving l……....

q An a………..may happened if a driver forgets to look in the driving m…….before o……… another car.

q At a r……. In Britain you have to give w…… to traffic from the r………..

q If you’re going to turn left at the traffic l……., get into the left-hand l…….

q If you can’t find a parking s……. In the street, you’ll have to pay to park in a car p……… or at a parking m…….

q If you’re caught speeding, you may have to pay a f…….. or you may even be d…… from driving.

q It’s dangerous for p…… to walk in the road. They should stay on the p………..

 

33. Read the text:

SON AND FATHER

 

The big Oldsmobile saloon cut through two miles of traffic on a busy four-lane highway with a nine-year-old boy at the wheel and a seriously ill man by the side.

Minutes earlier at Wilmington, Delaware, schoolboy Mark Spencer had been out for a drive with his father. Then 37-year-old Philip Spencer suffered a heart attack, just managing to stop before collapsing in agony.

Mark is only four feet tall, allowing him to peep over the top of the dashboard, while reaching the control pedals with toe. But he didn’t hesitate, pushing his father across the bench seat and setting off for the nearest hospital.

“I did drive trough a red light and had to honk the horn to get past other cars but there weren’t too many problems”, he said.

Mr. Spencer is recovering in hospital, where the opinion is that he wouldn’t have survived if Mark had hesitated, or even done the expected thing and phoned for an ambulance.

The Spencers are an exceptionally close and loving family, and, as Mark says: “We need my Dad, he’s really nice.”

His mother, Blanche, confirms what one suspected — that her son is “car mad” and, at the age of two, succeeded in reversing a station wagon down drive.

“Thank God he was with his father”, she said. “I would have panicked …because I can’t drive”.

34. Read three stories:

1. The time I remember was when Priers was quite tiny and for some long-forgotten reason Peter and I were over to some friends in Burton-on-Trent, and we were in separate cars. And I was trying to follow quite closely to, behind Peter, but he always says I leave to much space, and so I did when he went through some traffic lights on green, and I thought, “If I speed up a little bit I’ll just get through”. And I didn’t, and what I hadn’t noticed was that the only other car on the road, directly behind me, was a police car. He saw me go through the light on amber/red, I thought, but he thought it was red. So he followed us round the corner onto the bridge, overtook, stopped, and I sat tight in my car while Pete leapt out and defended me. We said that we didn’t want to make a noise because the baby was asleep in the back, but we didn’t get away with it, and I did get my license endorsed.

2. I was driving from France and it had been a long drive, and I had had a fairly depressing experience in France. I was driving as fast as I could through the west London suburbs to get home. I had got hot jazz blasting of the car cassette player at enormous volume, and as I pulled up at a traffic light I saw this large white car pull beside me. I played back things in my mind and realised that I had just overtaken a police car at 50 miles an hour in a 30 limit. And the policemen wound down his window, and wound down mine, and I was too perturbed to turn of the jazz. And he looked at me and he listened to this noise coming out of the car, and he looked at me again and said, “You must be bloody crazy!” And the light changed to green and he drove off.

3. The time that I recall was I think, I was up at university, and I was down in London at my parents’ flat. I hadn’t be out, moderately late, and drove a little Mini car back to the flat, which was in rather smart part of London. And you had to park the car under the block of flats in an underground car park. I did this one night and noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was a car parked opposite, sort of in a right-angled road, facing the opening of the basement car park. And I didn’t pay any attention to it. I got out of the car as usual and went to see the night porter. He saw me, recognised me, and came to the door. And at that moment the doors flung open, and just I like TV, you know, TV series, these plainclothes people whipped out their wallets and snowed their badges and said, “Just a moment” you know, and all that sort of stuff, and you had to sort of, in there, and you thought, “This is ridiculous”, you know, “this is I mean, can’t be serious”. But they were very serious, and they sort of almost frog-marched me to the car and asked me all these usual details, about did I know what license number it was, how many miles I’d gone, and they took some persuading that someone looking as scruffy as in a tiny little Mini could possibly live in such a smart block of flats.

 

ü Choose a likely meaning for each of the numbered words:

1. amber

a) yellow b)broken c) fast

leapt

a) jumped b) kept c) shouted

endorsed

a) given back b) taken off the car c) marked with a bad point

 

2. blasting

a) coming very loudly b) coming very quietly c) falling

wound

a) broke b) thought c) turned a handle to move

 

3. flung

a) couldn’t b) stayed c) were thrown

scruffy

a) rich b) untidy c) sleepy

 

ü Choose one of the stories

ü Retell two of the three stories. Write five or seven questions about it for your partner to answer.