B1 Preliminary Parte 4: gapped text con método y soluciones

Learning to cook at home

Three years ago I could not cook anything except pasta. (1) Now I make dinner from scratch almost every evening, and I actually look forward to it.

The first thing I learned was that you do not need much equipment. A good knife, one big pan and a wooden spoon will get you through most recipes. (2) I bought mine second-hand for almost nothing and they still work perfectly.

I also stopped following recipes word by word. (3) These days, if I do not have an ingredient, I use something similar, and nine times out of ten nobody notices.

The hardest part was timing. (4) Now I start with whatever takes longest and work backwards from there, which sounds obvious but took me a year to work out.

People ask me if cooking at home saves money. It does, but that is not really why I keep doing it. (5)

The school choir

Our music teacher decided in October that the school needed a choir. She put a note on the door and eleven of us signed up. (1)

The first problem was where to rehearse. The music room was booked every afternoon, so we tried the gym, then the dining room, then the corridor. (2)

The second problem was the concert itself. She had booked the town hall, which seats four hundred people, and by December we had sold thirty-eight tickets. (3)

On the night, something strange happened. Parents brought neighbours, neighbours brought friends, and by seven o clock there were people standing at the back. When we finished, the noise was enormous. (4)

We sang badly, but we sang together, and the following week twenty-six more people signed up. (5)

The Tuesday ride

Every Tuesday evening about forty people meet outside the sports centre and cycle twelve kilometres along the old railway line. (1)

It started two years ago, when a woman wrote to the council to say that the path was too dark to use after work. (2) Instead of lights, which were expensive, the council suggested a group ride once a week.

At the first ride there were six cyclists. (3) By the end of the summer there were thirty, and people had begun to bring flasks of tea for afterwards.

One of the regulars is Andrés, who is seventy-one and joined because his doctor told him to walk more. (4) He now rides further on Sundays than most of the group manages on Tuesdays.

Last winter the rides continued in the rain, with lights and reflective jackets. (5) Nobody has asked the council for anything since.