CAE Reading and Use of English Part 7
You are going to read an article about long-distance walking. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Long-distance walking
Long-distance walking is a subject that has long interested me as a journalist, but that is also of concern to geographers, poets, historians and film students. In recent years the film industry has produced Wild, an account of the writer Cheryl Strayed’s walk along the 4,000 km Pacific Crest Trail, and an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, in which the writer attempts to hike the 3,300 km Appalachian Trail.
For Bryson, it was simply a response to a small voice in his head that said, ‘Sounds neat! Let’s do it.’ For Strayed, whose memoir inspired Wild, the reasons were more complex. Battered by a saddening series of personal problems, she walked the trail in the hope that the experience would provide a release.
For me, the attraction of such walks has nothing to do with length for its own sake and everything to do with the fact that long trails invariably provide a journey with a compelling academic structure. Many long walks tick the geographic box, not least the Appalachian and Spain’s GR11 trails, which are both defined by great mountain ranges that guarantee topographical appeal.
Such links to the past are to be found on shorter walks, but on a longer trail the passing of the days connects us more profoundly to the same slow, enforced journeys made by travellers before cars, planes or trains. They also reconnect us to the scale of our world – a kilometre, never mind 100, means something when you walk it. But what of the more specific pleasures of a long walk?
Strayed shares this idea, writing that her trek ‘had nothing to do with backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, streams and rocks, sunrises and sunsets.’
These are what Bryson is referring to when he says, about trekking, that you have ‘no engagements, commitments, obligations or duties . . . and only the smallest, least complicated of wants’. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, the author Rebecca Solnit explores another of hiking’s pleasures – the way it allows us to think. Walking is slow, she writes; ‘ … the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour … ‘
In my experience, though, the longer you walk, actually the less you think. A trek often begins with me teasing at some problem, but by journey’s end, walking has left my mind curiously still. As the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard put it, ‘I have walked myself into my best thoughts,’ but ‘I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.’
A Mine begin with the allure of beautiful landscapes, a notion nurtured by 19th-century Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, both ‘walkers’ in the modern sense at a time when walking usually suggested vagrancy or poverty. They helped suggest the idea that Nature, far from being a malign force, can be a balm for the soul.
B As the ancient historian Jerome once said: ‘to solve a problem, walk around.’ ‘All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking,’ said the great philosopher Nietzsche, while the novelist Charles Dickens observed: ‘It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.’
C Having spent most of my spare time tackling long-distance trails, including the Pacific Crest Trail and sections of Spain’s 800-km GR11, I am ideally placed to explore the question: what is it that inspires people to hike thousands of kilometres?
D The scenic highlights of those recent long walks are many. On longer walks the landscape’s effect, as Strayed suggests, is cumulative: the countryside changes over time, sometimes subtly, often dramatically. Having reached a summit or crossed a pass, a sense of ownership or belonging begins to develop.
E What’s more, to walk for long periods is to escape jobs, people and life’s minutiae for routines of a different, more nourishing kind. The effects of solitude, like those of landscape, accrue over time. Simple pleasures and modest imperatives become the most important things in life – chocolate, dry clothes, blister-free feet.
F But any long walk is also the sum of its parts, and in the Pyrenees these parts often consist of ancient paths between settlements. Time and again on the GR11, I walked along part-cobbled paths, edged with crumbling walls and terraces, the work of centuries lost in a generation.
G Between the two extremes, doing it for fun and the journey of self-discovery and healing, are countless other motivations and pleasures that draw us to the outdoors and the ancient imperative of covering immense distances on foot.
For this task: Answers with explanations :: Vocabulary