CPE Reading and Use of English Part 6
You are going to read an extract from a magazine article. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A–H the one which fits each gap (37–43). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Night Shift: Life Hidden Between the Aisles.
On a whim, fuelled more by insomnia than journalistic ambition, I signed up for a week’s night shift at a 24-hour ‘Megamart’ on the city’s outskirts. I wanted to pierce the eerie fluorescence of the always-open, to understand the life that unfolds when most of the world is asleep.
My guide into this realm was Piotr, the veteran night manager, a man of few words but precise gestures. On that first night, he simply handed me a box-cutter and pointed to a towering pallet of canned beans. The message was clear: productivity, not conversation, was the currency here.
The initial awkwardness slowly melted into a rhythm. By my third night, the repetitive tasks—facing products to the front of the shelf, scanning expiry dates, building symmetrical pyramids of soup tins—became almost meditative. The store’s hum was a constant: the buzz of the lights, the distant groan of freezer units, the soft hiss of the polishing machine gliding over linoleum.
Just after 2 a.m., the automatic doors would sigh open to admit the regulars. There was the elderly man who bought a single banana and a newspaper, reading the headlines under the dairy aisle’s glow. A pair of nurses, still in scrubs, would laugh wearily as they debated the merits of instant noodles. These fleeting interactions were glimpses into other people’s ongoing nights.
The real bonding, however, happened in the stockroom during our designated breaks. Here, surrounded by cardboard and the smell of packing tape, the crew emerged as individuals. Maria was saving every penny to bring her son over from the Philippines. Leon, a philosophy student, saw the empty aisles as a physical manifestation of existential absurdity. Piotr, it turned out, wrote intricate haiku about the store on the back of delivery manifests.
The climax of our nocturnal labour was the ‘night fill’: the arrival of the massive delivery truck at 4 a.m. It was a burst of controlled chaos, a race against the clock to unpack and shelve hundreds of boxes before the day staff arrived at six. We moved as a single organism, communicating in grunts and nods, finding a strange exhilaration in the shared, physical effort.
As 6 a.m. approached, a subtle shift occurred. We’d mute the store’s radio, which played tinny pop music all night. The first morning light, a dull grey through the high windows, felt like an intrusion. We’d complete a final sweep, erasing the evidence of our work, making the store pristine for the day people.
Breathing in the crisp morning air after my final shift, the world felt strangely inverted. I was exhausted but wide awake, an outsider to the bustling commuters. I had learned little about retail, but much about the invisible forces that keep our world running, and the unexpected communities that form in the liminal hours.
A It was during this nightly ritual that I first felt a sense of belonging. The shared focus created a silent camaraderie. When I finally managed to slice open a stubborn plastic wrapping without sending dozens of yoghurt pots cascading, Piotr gave me an almost imperceptible nod. It felt like a graduation.
B The first shock was the light—a relentless, shadowless fluorescence that bleached colour and thought. The second was the silence, vast and deep, contrasting with how busy the place is during peak hours. It was a loneliness I hadn’t anticipated, a feeling of being a ghost in the machine of consumption.
C One particularly quiet night, a technical glitch plunged the entire store into utter darkness for three minutes. In that profound black silence, dimly lit only by the emergency exit signs, we all froze in our places. When the lights snapped back on, we exchanged glances of shared disorientation, a bond forged in sudden vulnerability.
D Our work was periodically punctuated by the soft chime of a customer arriving. The night shift code was clear: we became invisible, gliding into the shadows of an adjacent aisle to avoid disturbing their fragile solitude. We were supposed to be the unseen stagehands for their private, nocturnal shopping voyages.
E The aftermath was a scene of peaceful exhaustion. We’d slump in the staff canteen, steam rising from mugs of barely palatable coffee, not needing to speak. The pre-dawn quiet felt earned. In those moments, the store was fully, unquestionably ours.
F I’d assumed the night would drag interminably, but I was wrong. Time behaved differently. It stretched during the solitary stocking, then collapsed entirely during the frantic inventory check before dawn. The clock became irrelevant, replaced by the rhythm of tasks completed.
G I expected there to be a lot of drudgery, and I certainly found it. What I didn’t expect was the dry, surreal humour that grew from it. One of the employees once spent an hour arranging a display of garden gnomes so they appeared to be staging a protest. The girl responsible for stocking shelves would leave encouraging notes on pallets for the day shift. These small acts of frolicking were a defence mechamisn against the monotony, bringing the staff closer together.
G Leaving on that morning felt strangely poignant. I handed in my badge and apron to Piotr, who shook my hand firmly. “You didn’t break anything,” he said, which I understood was high praise. The day manager, bright-eyed and buzzing with a different energy, barely glanced up as I left.
For this task: Answers with explanations :: Vocabulary
