End of the Road

The real threat to _______________ (1 – travel / journey / travels) is that our sense of wonder will vanish along with the exotic destinations.

Far is not so far anymore. When I took my first long trip to India in 1986, I didn’t speak to my parents for five months because the phone lines were so bad. These details already belong to a very ______________ (2 – outdated / old-fashioned / unfashionable) world. If a young traveller went five months without calling nowadays you would assume the worst.

The world is _______________ (3 – shrinking / converging / diverging), thanks to cheap flights and computers, cable television, mobile-phone networks and the spread of commercial franchises that have put Irish pubs and pizzerias in cities as far apart as Baku and Tegucigalpa. And yet, the purpose of travel remains the same – ________________ (4 – to encounter / to come across / to meet) the unfamiliar, to get Elsewhere. It’s a piece of enchantment and transformation which can be arduous to reach, but which promises to enrich your understanding of the world. But the same global culture that now draws us together also ______________ (5 – frightens / endangers / threatens) to tame Elsewhere with uniformity.

I once traveled by plane through a wilderness of snow to visit the Even, a group of reindeer -herding near- nomads in northern Siberia, only to find myself in a wooden hut watching a Hollywood submarine movie with them. I wanted to eat ritual food and talk about shamanism; they wanted to drink whiskey and discuss Mr. Bean.

Our appetite for more and more ____________ (6 – extravagant / exotic / extraordinary) destinations is partly driven by this sense that Elsewhere is disappearing. It’s almost a relief when you come across indisputable national ________________ (7 – identities / traits / features): Russians quoting Pushkin, Argentines dancing the tango. Yet you half expect those characteristics to disappear in a shopping mall.

The danger is that as travel becomes easier, and places change to accommodate the homogenized appetites of global tourism, we will lose the sense of wonder that travel has always inspired. And if we lose sight of Elsewhere then we are no longer provoked by its unfamiliarity, challenged to open our eyes and look at our own lives afresh.

Nothing _____________ (8 – lifts / raises / rises) your heart like the first ____________ (9 – glance / site / sight) of home after time spent Elsewhere. Our native planet never seemed so spectacular as when we first saw it from space. Yet the answer is not to take space tourism, but to recognize that the close and familiar can have as much ____________ (10 – strength / force / power) to surprise us as the snowy Andes, or any other Elsewhere you choose. I recently returned home after a weekend spent walking with three friends. We covered 60 kilometers in three days – it would have taken 45 minutes in a car. But at our slow ____________ (11 – pace / speed / rate), the hills and churchyards and soft rain of north Devon gave me a greater sense of Elsewhere than I ever got from my first and somewhat disappointing glimpse of the Taj Mahal.

(After Marcel Theroux, Newsweek, April 2006.)

b) Answer the teacher’s questions.