Reading comprehension: Travelling

TRAVELLING

 The government has recently presented its plans for air travel. It wants to make the two London airports bigger. Some people have already started complaining. They say that planes already make too much noise and cause too much pollution. They also say that the air travel is very cheap and easy. They think that the government should make air travel more expensive and stop people travelling by plane.

Of course there are problems with air travel but there are also so many good things about it.

My grandparents never went abroad and they didn’t know much about the rest of the world. They thought that the north of England was a foreign country. My life is very, very different. I work for a German company, so I often need to travel to Germany, I live with my Argentinean wife, and we go to Japanese, Italian, Spanish restaurants. We watch films from all over the world. We speak three different languages.

 Long ago it took days to travel from Europe to America and only rich people could travel, but now things have changed a lot. You can find very cheap tickets in the Internet. We sometimes go to Holland to spend the weekend –or France or Spain.

1. Give full answers to the following questions:

a) What are the plans the English government has?

 b) Do people agree with those plans? Say why/why not?

 c) What do they say about airplanes?

d) How different is the writer’s life from his grandparents?

e) Where does the writer sometimes spend the weekends?

2. Say if these statements are true or false. Provide some evidence from the text.

1. My grandparents thought that the south of England was a foreign country.

2. People can find cheap tickets in the Internet.

3. Find words or phrases that mean:

1. Contamination

2. In a foreign country

3. Business

4. 1 Change into the passive voice: “ The government has recently presented plans for air travel”

4.2 Write the question for the underlines part of this answer: “Some people have already started complaining”

4.3 Write the following sentence into the reported speech: “ My grandparents never went abroad and they didn’t know much about the rest of the world”