Part 4
Questions 16-20
Five sentences have been removed from the text below. For each question, choose the correct answer (A-H). There are three extra sentences which you do not need to use.
Number in the Booth
There is a public phone booth at the end of my street. Nobody uses it anymore, but the phone company hasn’t removed it yet. One rainy afternoon, I stepped inside because of the pouring rain. On the metal shelf below the phone, someone had written a number in black pen. Not a full number – just six digits. 16 .
I almost did not call. But I was bored, and the rain was getting heavier. The phone still worked. It rang four times. Then a woman answered. Her voice sounded old, tired, friendly. I told her I had found her number in the phone booth. There was a long pause – and then the woman laughed. 17 .
Marta – that was her name – said she had written it there twenty years ago, when she was seventeen. Back then, she had been waiting for a boy who never called. She had almost forgotten about the number until my call. I asked what happened to the boy. 18 . The memory clearly still hurt.
We spoke for forty minutes. Marta told me about the music she listened to as a teenager, her favourite movies, the job she took after school. I told her the few stories of my own life that were worth sharing. 19 . Marta admitted it felt unusual, talking to a stranger in a phone booth decades later.
When I got home, I did the maths. Twenty years ago, Marta was seventeen. That meant she would be thirty-seven now. But her voice on the phone had sounded much older. 20 . I never called the number again. But sometimes I walk past the phone booth and wonder if Marta is still waiting, somewhere, for a call that already came.
A. She said she had never received a call there.
B. I looked at the phone and decided to try it.
C. I felt as if we had known each other for years.
D. The boy had moved away without saying goodbye.
E. Then I realised – she had written the number twenty years ago, but she had not been seventeen then.
F. She did not answer my question.
G. The booth smelled of old rain and dust.
H. She told me she had never told anyone that story before.
For this task: Answers with explanations :: Vocabulary
