Use of English
Multiple Choice - Example 3

Part 1

For questions 1–8, read the text below and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each gap.

There is an example at the beginning (0).

Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet.

Example:

0 A crammed B crushed C massed D piled

Reading the slow way

It's 7 pm and I'm sitting in a café I've never been in before. It's (0) _______________ with people, but nobody's talking. Nothing (1) _______________ about this in a big city, but we're not just sitting there ignoring each other. (2) _______________ the opposite; we're all reading together, silently, in a 'Slow Reading Club', an idea from New Zealand. (3) _______________ our lives, clearing some mental (4) _______________ where our attention is not constantly divided between ten different things is the trend of the moment, but it's not easy to (5) _______________ .

The Slow Reading Club aims to meet that challenge by encouraging people to apply the same discipline to reading as to going to the gym or completing a task at work. The rules are (6) _______________ straightforward: bring a book and (7) _______________  yourself in it the way you did as a child. I've brought a thriller which has lain (8) _______________ on my bookshelves for years. At the end of our hour, we're told it's time to stop reading and it feels like emerging from a deep sleep. I'm off home to carry on reading.