"New Concept English"

[fiefoe]

A nice trip down the memory lane.

In book II, the mundane ('LADY: And I want some black ink and some glue.') gives way  to misdemeanors and adventures.

Out of the darkness:
    Nearly a week passed before the girl was able to explain what had happened to her.
One afternoon she set out from the coast in a small boat and was caught in a storm. Towards evening, the boat struck a rock and the girl jumped into the sea. Then she swam to the shore after spending the whole night in the water. During that time she covered a distance of eight miles.
Early next morning, she saw a light ahead. She knew she was near the shore because the light was high up on the cliffs. On arriving at the shore, the girl struggled up the cliff towards the light she had seen.
That was all she remembered. When she woke up a day later, she found herself in hospital.

The end of a dream
    Tired of sleeping on the floor, a young man in Teheran saved up for years to buy a real bed. For the first time in his life, he became the proud owner of a bed which had springs and a mattress.
Because the weather was very hot, he carried the bed on to the roof of his house. He slept very well for the first two nights, but on the third night, a storm blew up. A gust of wind swept the bed off the roof and sent it crashing into the courtyard below. The young man did not wake up until the bed had struck the ground. Although the bed was smashed to pieces, the man was miraculously unhurt. When he woke up, he was still on the mattress. Glancing at the bits of wood and metal that lay around him, the man sadly picked up the mattress and carried it into his house.
After he had put it on the floor, he promptly went to sleep again.

The record-holder
    Little boys who play truant from school are unimaginative. A quiet day's fishing, or eight hours in a cinema seeing the same film over and over again, is usually as far as they get. They have all been put to shame by a boy who, while playing truant, travelled 1600 miles.
He hitchhiked to Dover and, towards evening, went into a boat to find somewhere to sleep. When he woke up next morning, he discovered that the boat had, in the meantime, travelled to Calais. No one noticed the boy as he crept off.
From there, he hitch-hiked to Paris in a lorry. The driver gave him a few biscuits and a cup of coffee and left him just outside the city.
The next car the boy stopped did not take him into the centre of Paris as he hoped it would, but to Perpignan on the French-Spanish border. There he was picked up by a policeman and sent back to England by the local authorities.
He has surely set up a record for the thousands of boys who dream of evading school.

April Fools Day
    To end our special news bulletin,' said the voice of the television announcer,' we are taking you to the macaroni fields of Calabria.
Macaroni has been grown in this area for over six hundred years.
Two of the leading growers, Giuseppe Moldova and Ricardo Brabante, tell me that they have been expecting a splendid crop this year and harvesting has begun earlier than usual.
Here you can see two workers who, between them, have just finished cutting three cart-loads of golden brown macaroni stalks. The whole village has been working day and night gathering and threshing this year's crop before the September rains.
On the right, you can see Mrs Brabante herself. She has been helping her husband for thirty years now. Mrs Brabante is talking to the manager of the local factory where the crop is processed.
This last scene shows you what will happen at the end of the harvest: the famous Calabrian macaroni-eating competition ! Signor Fratelli, the present champion, has won it every year since 1961.
And that ends our special bulletin for today, Thursday, April 1st.
We are now returning you to the studio.