reading comprehension

reading comprehension

di Robin Lindsay -
Numero di risposte: 0

2nd year Reading Comprehension 



Read the text by Elena Ferrante , then choose the correct answer (A, B, C, D) for questions 1-7 

Only one answer is correct. 

The first one (0) has been done for you. 


In the course of my life, I have had intense emotional relationships with the screen versions of many actors and actresses, on both the big and small screen. My latest attachment has been to the shadow that, for the sake of convenience, I will call Daniel Day-Lewis. Is it a physical attraction? Perhaps. Let’s say he certainly corresponds to a type of man I like: lean, slightly receding hairline, a long face where the features are not annoyingly symmetrical.

This is not a long-winded way of describing what excites me about this particular male body; rather, I’m being deliberately generic. The reason is, Daniel Day-Lewis interests me as much as any other lean man with a slightly receding hairline and features that are not annoyingly symmetrical. Let’s say I have no curiosity about what he is really like, and that if I happened to meet him on the street I probably wouldn’t even recognise him. I love him only in his films. I love him for the way the light on the set calculatedly strikes him, for the way he is photographed, for the power of the plot his body moves through, for the intelligence of the remarks that someone else wrote and he speaks, for the imagination with which a director has directed him, for the skill of the makeup artist, for the costumes he wears, and so on.

I long ago stopped thinking of stars as human beings who truly exist. I know that at the origin of the love that films, or story factories, inspire in us there is not a physical person but a collection of specialties. When I love Daniel Day-Lewis, I love the novelists from whose books his films are adapted, the screenwriters who have composed the dialogue, and the film directors, the directors of photography, the lighting and sound technicians, the set designers, the acting coaches – in other words, all those who have helped to make his real body – with its mimetic ability, its gait, way of gesticulating, its photogenic quality – into a body particularly suited to becoming a movie or television icon.

Daniel Day-Lewis (like any star, or perhaps any creative person) is, in short, not a man but a work of art. His name is a sort of title by which I refer to a valuable body of work – that is to say, the sum of all the characters he has so brilliantly portrayed, all the plots into which he has been inserted. In other words, he is a marvellous product of the imagination, a phantom moulded with words and images and technical equipment and professional skill.

And he’d be that, if you think about it, even if I had the pleasure of knowing him and spending time with him. If he should suddenly be transformed into a flesh-and-blood person, poor him, poor me. Reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously.

Translated by Ann Goldstein


Guardian 07.07.2018


0. In the opening paragraph Elena Ferrante confesses:


A. to having had many love affairs with actors and actresses.

B. to being in love with a shadow.

C. X to having become very attached to many film or TV stars.

D. to having an affair with Daniel Day-Lewis


1.  Why does the writer refer to Daniel Day-Lewis as a shadow?


A. to emphasis that it is the image on the screen that interests her.

B. because the actor is often in noir films

C. because the actor is not of substance in her opinion.

D. to emphasis the fact that he is a rather two-dimensional actor.


2. Ferrante describes Daniel-Day Lewis as:


A. conventionally handsome.

B. unconventionally handsome.

C. skinny and balding

D. as having annoying features.



3. Why does Ferrante state in the 2nd paragraph that she is being genericabout her attraction to the actors physical appearance?


A. because she likes being long winded.

B. because she is curious to meet him

C. because, even though she is attracted to this type of man,  it is not his physical features per se that interest her.

D. because she doesn’t have clear ideas about what she likes.



4. Ferrante is really attracted to Daniel Day-Lewis because:


A. he is a great actor.

B. the way the light falls upon him.

C. he is part of a greater process upon which creative and skilled people have collaborated.

D. the way he moves. 


5. Why has the writer stopped thinking that famous actors are human?


A. because they are so perfectly adapted to existing in the fantasy world created around them.

B. because she rarely meets them in real life.

C. because somebody else has written their words for them.

D. because they are so perfect.


6.What does the author mean by: poor him, poor me? in the final paragraph? 


A. that it is a diminishing process for both the star and the fan to meet.

B. that neither has any money.

C. that she would be embarrassed to meet him in real life.

D. that she would have to spend time with him.  


7. What is the final meaning of the of the article?


A. that films are a complex process.

B. that actors aren’t human.

C. that having affairs is good.

D. that reality is too messy to replicate the contained beautiful of art.