CPE Reading and Use of English Part 7
You are going to read four comments from people who have lived in both cities and the countryside. For questions 44–53, choose from the people (A–D). The people may be chosen more than once.
Which person …
44 suggests that changing environment altered their perception of time?
45 reinterprets their move as a shift in how they experience life, rather than simply a change of place?
46 refers to valuing a setting because it continually challenges them?
47 expresses a sense of emotional or sensory depletion before making a move?
48 contrasts getting enthused with a feeling of underlying fatigue?
49 indicates that distance has reshaped how they now experience the place?
50 presents their decision primarily as a way of disrupting personal continuity?
51 reflects on how a change of environment altered their sense of who they are?
52 suggests that the fundamental shift they experienced was qualitative rather than geographical?
53 hints that nostalgia for an alternative lifestyle may depend on not fully inhabiting it?
In and out of the city
A. Mara, freelance illustrator
I grew up in a small coastal town and couldn’t wait to leave. The city, when I finally arrived, felt like a release: galleries on every corner, strangers everywhere, the sense that nothing about you was already decided. I loved the anonymity, the permission to reinvent myself daily, and the hum of activity that made even ordinary errands feel significant. For a long time, that was enough.
But somewhere between my thirtieth birthday and my fourth consecutive year of working from the same café, the energy that had once fed me began to feel oddly thin. The crowds blurred; the novelty flattened. I was busy without feeling particularly engaged. Last year I moved back out of the city, not to escape people but to recover a texture of everyday life that had gone missing. I still commute in twice a week for meetings and exhibitions. The difference is that now the city feels like a place I visit, not a place I must continuously perform.
B. Tomas, logistics manager
I didn’t romanticise rural life before I moved – if anything, I assumed I’d find it inconvenient, understimulating and isolating. What surprised me was not the silence or the dark, but how quickly my sense of time recalibrated. In the city, every errand felt like a race, and idleness carried a faint sense of guilt; here, tasks expand to fit the day, and pauses don’t require justification.
That’s not always comfortable. There are moments when the slowness tips into frustration, when I miss the density of services, the ease of meeting people, and the anonymity of crowds. I’m also more aware of practical dependence – the car, the weather, the goodwill of neighbours. But I’ve found a steadiness I didn’t know I lacked. The place doesn’t energise me, exactly, but it does something subtler: it removes the background static and leaves more room for deliberate thought.
C. Leila, secondary-school teacher
People often assume I left the countryside because I was ambitious, or because the city offered better professional prospects. The truth is less dramatic. I loved where I grew up, but after university I realised that if I stayed, my world would remain largely composed of people who already knew my story, my family, even my opinions. Moving to the city wasn’t about opportunity in the abstract; it was about interruption.
I wanted to be forced into unfamiliar conversations, into noticing how provisional my beliefs were, and into encountering ways of living that didn’t quietly mirror my own. I still feel that pull. Even now, after a decade of urban living, I sometimes fantasise about quieter horizons, about a life with fewer decisions embedded in it – but only, I suspect, from a distance. The city unsettles me, occasionally exhausts me, and regularly contradicts me, and that is precisely why I remain.
D. Henrik, organic farmer
For years, I thought of the city as something I had escaped: noise, ambition, surfaces. I framed my move to farming as a rejection of all that. But over time, I’ve had to admit that what I really left was not a place so much as a tempo. Farming, at least the way I practise it, demands an attentiveness that urban life trained out of me. You work with cycles you can’t compress, with processes that resist optimisation.
There are seasons when nothing visible happens, and that too is labour. The waiting is not empty; it is watchful. I go into town occasionally and genuinely enjoy it – the food, the conversations, the cultural density – but only briefly. The intensity now feels curated, almost theatrical: pushing me forward, yes, but also strangely exhausting, like a language I still understand but no longer speak fluently.
For this task: Answers with explanations :: Vocabulary
