Zadania 1–9 — 60 punktów / 90 minut
Read the text below. Five sentences have been removed. Choose from options A–H the one which best fits each gap. Three options are distractors and do not fit any gap.
The Rocky Mountains stretch for 3,000 miles from north to south – from New Mexico, across the United States to Montana, and well into Canada – which makes them the longest mountain range in North America and the second longest in the world. They are made up of several smaller ranges: the Big Horn Mountains, the Front Range, the Wasatch Mountains and the Bitterroot Range are all part of the Rockies. The oldest of these is Yellowstone, which Congress created in 1872 “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people”; Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton and Glacier followed.
Yellowstone, which spreads across 3,468 square miles of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, is home to wildlife from bears to bison and to natural wonders such as hot springs and geysers. The Great Fountain Geyser erupts every 9 to 15 hours, shooting water up to 220 feet into the air.
The Rockies are known for their distinct seasons: warm, rainy summers and cold, snowy winters. Among the trees live bighorn sheep, badgers, grizzly bears and black bears, coyotes, elk and white-tailed deer.
Grand Teton National Park, in Wyoming, is a place of jewel-like lakes, blue and white glaciers and bare granite pinnacles. Photographers and nature lovers still come to stand where he stood, and the park as a whole drew more than 3.5 million people in 2024.
Rocky Mountain National Park lies only a two-hour drive north of Denver, Colorado, and its stretch of craggy, snow-capped peaks is unrivalled. Together, the peaks and the trails attract more than four million people every year.
Glacier National Park, in Montana, was created in 1910 and covers 1,584 square miles, but it is best known for a single road, the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Wonderful as that view is, the park’s most unusual distinction lies across the border: together with Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada, it makes up the world’s first international peace park.
Read the text below. For questions 2.1–2.4, decide if each statement is True, False, or if there is No Information given in the text (4 pts). For questions 2.5–2.8, find the word in the text that matches the definition (4 pts).
Since 1904, some 15 billion visits have been made to the national parks of the United States, and there are now 63 of them to explore, from the crystalline waters of Dry Tortugas in Florida to the deep, dark recesses of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. The photographer Jonathan Irish set out to see every one of them – in 52 weeks. “National parks are sacred and cherished places – our greatest personal and national treasures,” he says. “It’s a gift to spend a year adventuring and capturing incredible images and stories in some of the most beautiful places on Earth.” At the time of his journey there were 59 parks; four have been added since – the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan, White Sands in New Mexico and New River Gorge in West Virginia – which is how the total reached 63.
Some of his most striking pictures come from the deserts of the south-west. In Death Valley, the largest national park south of Alaska, he photographed the Mesquite Sand Dunes in a landscape of extremes: it is the driest and hottest spot in North America, with fewer than two inches of rain a year and a record temperature of 134 degrees Fahrenheit, and its floor, 282 feet below sea level, is the lowest point on the continent. In Joshua Tree National Park, in California’s Mojave Desert, he found the tough, gnarled plants that give the park its name – plants that are now threatened by climate change. And in Big Bend, in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas, the views sweep for a hundred miles across the mesas and dry stream beds; the park was recently named the world’s largest International Dark Sky Reserve.
Zion, in Utah, was another favourite. One of the most photographed views in the park is of Watchman Mountain from the Canyon Junction Bridge, and Irish’s own favourite spot is the very centre of that bridge, where the river leads the eye to the Watchman Spire in the background. In Yosemite, in California, he waited for a full moon: the best time to see a rainbow there, he says, is at night, when the spray of the waterfalls produces a so-called moonbow. His advice to anyone hoping to photograph one is to bring a wide-angle lens, a tripod and a lens cloth, because the spray has to be wiped off the glass again and again. Further north, in Oregon, he photographed Wizard Island, named for its resemblance to a sorcerer’s hat, which juts into Crater Lake – at 1,943 feet in places, the deepest lake in the country.
Not every picture was taken from the ground. To capture the sheer scale of the Bagley Icefield in Wrangell–St. Elias, Alaska, six miles long and ringed by snow and debris, he took his photographs from an aeroplane. In Denali, a wilderness larger than the state of New Jersey, he had to wait for the park’s notorious clouds to part and reveal the great massif of Denali itself, the highest peak in North America at 20,310 feet. Further north still, Gates of the Arctic lies entirely above the Arctic Circle and is as far off the beaten track as a park can be: there are no roads, no trails and no campsites, and mobile phones do not work.
His own favourite night, though, was a quieter one. In Kings Canyon, California, he backpacked into Paradise Valley and slept beside the river, in what he calls one of the most peaceful and beautiful camping spots of the whole trip. And in Cuyahoga Valley, Ohio, he walked across the Everett Covered Bridge – a reconstruction of an 1870s structure destroyed by a flood in 1975 – imagining the hoof taps and footsteps that once echoed over its wooden planks. Not one of his stops, in other words, was quite like the last.
White Sands was one of the national parks Irish photographed on his journey.
Irish photographed the dunes of Death Valley in the hottest part of the year.
Irish suggests cleaning the lens repeatedly while photographing a moonbow.
The Everett Covered Bridge was rebuilt in the same year that the original was destroyed.
Find the word in the text that matches each definition.
in a place that is far away from the towns and routes most people use
rough and twisted, especially because of age
to stick out further than the things around it
to love something and want to protect it
Uzupełnij poniższe wypowiedzi (3.1.–3.6.), wybierając spośród podanych możliwości. Zakreśl literę A, B albo C.
Hanging your food from a branch to keep it away from bears is a trick as old as the ______.
X: Do you think the guide will change his mind about the route?
Y: You can argue until the ______ come home – he won’t.
Nobody has mentioned the broken tent pole, so let sleeping ______ lie and say nothing.
X: The last bus has gone and my phone is dead.
Y: Great. So we’re up the ______ without a paddle.
After thirty years of moving from state to state, my aunt has finally put down ______ in a small town in New Mexico.
X: Shall I tell the ranger it was us who left the gate open?
Y: I would – you’re already on thin ______ with him after last week.
Read the text below. Complete each gap (4.1.–4.10.) with one word to create a coherent and grammatically correct text.
Unlike the Rockies, which rise to more than 14,000 feet, the Appalachian Mountains are modest in height: their highest point is only 6,684 feet above sea level. What they lack in height they make 4.1. _______ for in length, running 1,500 miles along the east coast from northern Alabama in the south to Maine in the north. Most of the range is covered 4.2. _______ forest – pine, spruce, birch and maple – and is home to black bears and wolves as 4.3. _______ as squirrels, rabbits and white-tailed deer.
In the early history of the United States the mountains mattered for a reason that had nothing to 4.4. _______ with nature: they stood as a barrier to the first colonies. At one point Britain even made a deal with the Native American tribes, promising 4.5. _______ colonists would not settle beyond the mountains. 4.6. _______ so, it was not long before people found passes through them and blazed trails such as Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Trail.
4.7. _______ of a single range, the Appalachians are really a collection of smaller ones – the Blue Ridge, the Green Mountains, the White Mountains, the Berkshires and, best known of 4.8. _______, the Great Smoky Mountains on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. These 4.9. _______ their name to the filmy “smoke” that lingers among the wooded slopes: it is produced by water and hydrocarbons given 4.10. _______ by the trees.
Complete each sentence with one word. The number of dashes corresponds to the number of missing letters. Some letters are already given.
Wash your boots _ _ _ r _ _ _ h _ _ before you leave the park, so that you do not carry seeds from one valley into the next.
A permit is _ _ c _ _ _ _ _ _ for anyone who wants to camp below the rim, and they sell out months in advance.
The ranger said the road will _ _ _ i _ _ _ _ _ _ be closed if more than ten centimetres of snow fall tonight.
There is no _ _ _ r _ _ _ _ _ that you will see a bear, however long you stay in the park.
Cactuses store _ _ i _ _ _ _ _ in their thick stems, which is how they survive for months without a drop of water.
We took a wrong turn twice, but we _ _ _ _ t _ _ _ l _ found the start of the trail, two hours later than planned.
The _ _ _ c _ _ _ to the river takes about three hours; the climb back to the rim takes nearly twice as long.
Only a handful of plants can _ _ _ u _ _ _ _ where the temperature reaches 50 degrees and it rains once or twice a year.
Read the text. Complete each gap (6.1.–6.8.) with one word by transforming the words given in the box. Two words are extra.
Of the five regions into which the United States is usually divided, the Southwest is the one with the fewest states: only four – Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona – belong to it. Since the regions have never been 6.1. _______ defined, a state on the edge of one may appear in a different region on the next map you look at. What the four share is a climate that is dry in the west and more humid towards the east, a long border with Mexico to the south and, above all, the Colorado River.
The Colorado rises in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and flows 1,450 miles to the Gulf of California, passing through Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California before it reaches Mexico. It is only the seventh longest river in the country, but few rivers are more 6.2. _______. Over millions of years its waters have cut down through layer after layer of rock to form the Grand Canyon, a sprawling gorge whose walls of pink, red and orange reveal the 6.3. _______ history of the whole region. 6.4. _______ a national park since 1919, the canyon covers 1,902 square miles of Arizona. The river’s work is not over, either: today the Colorado 6.5. _______ water and power to the whole of the south-west.
Water is not the only force that shapes this dry country. Further north, in southern Utah, wind and weather have carved more than 2,000 natural stone arches out of the rock by slow 6.6. _______, and the park that protects them is named after them. Not far away, Bryce Canyon draws 2.7 million 6.7. _______ a year with its red arches and ghostly spires, known as hoodoos. And in Colorado, just beyond the region’s northern edge, Great Sand Dunes National Park contains the 6.8. _______ sand dunes in North America, in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
6.1. FORMAL → formally (adverb: 'have never been formally defined’)
6.2. FAME → famous (adjective: 'few rivers are more famous’)
6.3. GEOLOGY → geological (adjective: 'the geological history of the whole region’)
6.4. OFFICIAL → Officially (sentence adverb, capital letter: 'Officially a national park since 1919’)
6.5. SUPPLY → supplies (third-person verb, y -> ie: 'the Colorado supplies water and power’)
6.6. ERODE → erosion (noun: 'by slow erosion’)
6.7. VISIT → visitors (plural agent noun: '2.7 million visitors a year’)
6.8. TALL → tallest (superlative adjective: 'the tallest sand dunes in North America’)
Distractors (not used): POWER, PROTECT
Using the word given in CAPITALS, complete each sentence so that it has a similar meaning to the original. Do not change the form of the given word. You may write a maximum of five words, including the word given.
I’d prefer not to camp so close to the river tonight.
Key word: RATHER
I ________ so close to the river tonight.
Although it was hot, the rangers finished counting the desert tortoises.
Key word: SPITE
________ the rangers finished counting the desert tortoises.
I’m sure the coyotes didn’t take the food – the box was still locked.
Key word: CAN'T
The coyotes ________ the food – the box was still locked.
Campers are not permitted to light fires outside the stone rings.
Key word: LET
The rangers ________ fires outside the stone rings.
When we first moved to Arizona the heat was hard to bear, but it doesn’t bother us any more.
Key word: USED
We ________ the heat now.
The storm meant that the boat trip on the lake was cancelled.
Key word: CALLED
The boat trip on the lake ________ because of the storm.
We left at five so that we could reach the rim before sunrise.
Key word: ORDER
We left at five ________ the rim before sunrise.
Someone is repairing the trail to the falls at the moment.
Key word: BEING
The trail to the falls ________ at the moment.
Match each feature (8.1.–8.6.) to one option (A–H). Two options are extra and match none of the features.
| Feature | Answer |
|---|---|
| Mount Elbert | |
| The Sierra Nevada | |
| Mount Mitchell | |
| The Sonoran Desert | |
| The Great Basin Desert | |
| The Chihuahuan Desert |
| Feature | Answer |
|---|---|
| Mount Elbert | B |
| The Sierra Nevada | D |
| Mount Mitchell | E |
| The Sonoran Desert | H |
| The Great Basin Desert | G |
| The Chihuahuan Desert | C |
Rozwiąż zadania (9.1.–9.5.), udzielając odpowiedzi w języku angielskim. Wymagana jest pełna poprawność merytoryczna i językowa odpowiedzi.
Which dam was built on the Colorado River in 1936, and which lake did it create?
Which tree of the Great Basin Desert is the oldest known living organism in the world, with some specimens over 5,000 years old?
Which mountain range along the north-west coast of the USA, part of the Ring of Fire, includes Mount Rainier and the active volcano Mount St Helens?
Which river, 1,900 miles long, forms the southern border of Texas with Mexico?
The Rocky Mountains were formed at a point where two of the Earth’s tectonic plates meet. What type of mountains does this make them?