Listening LISTENING 35 page 68
Hi, I’m Paula Hausman and I’m here today to tell you something about my job as a wedding coordinator. Planning a wedding can be quite stressful anyway, but when you are doing it in a foreign country and mixing traditions it can be even harder. So I help foreigners living in New York to bring their own traditions to American weddings. My first wedding was my best friend Petra from Slovakia. She was marrying Hans, a Norwegian guy, and they asked me to help with the plans. A lot of Petra’s and Hans’s family and friends came from Slovakia and Norway for the wedding. The beginning of the day was organized according to Slovak traditions. The bride thanked her parents for her upbringing and then they left to go to the ceremony in a decorated horse-drawn carriage to the sound of folk music. The reception was really fun. In Norway, every time the bride leaves the room all the women line up to kiss the groom and then when the groom leaves all the men kiss the bride. Big Norwegians all desperate to kiss little Petra was a really funny sight. My next wedding was a Swedish-Israeli couple. Their marriage was lovely because they combined the traditions of both countries. It’s customary in Israel to have the ceremony in the late afternoon when the first star appears in the sky. So they did that, but also the Swedish relatives dressed in traditional Swedish wedding outfits and taught everyone the traditional Swedish wedding dance. It was a marriage of people and cultures. In Turkey the night before the wedding the bride is decorated with henna tattoos on her hands and her guests dance and sing traditional Turkish songs. So when Burcu married Jakub here in Prague, we organised a traditional ‘Henna’ night for her. The wedding itself was quite Czech: the male guests kidnapped the bride, as is customary in the Czech Republic, and then the happy couple broke a plate and swept it up together, a tradition that’s meant to bring happiness and unity to the newly married couple.
1 C
2 E
3 B
4 F
5 D
6 A
Reading page 68
1 In the middle of a forest in Corsica.
2 A helicopter picked him up accidentally.
3 Because they were watching planes.
4 Because he was trying to shoot moles with a powerful gun.
5 The French ambassador wanted peace and love. The Japanese ambassador
wanted an end to all wars.
6 The French and Japanese ambassadors wished for world peace, so the
British ambassador’s very ordinary wish sounds silly in comparison.
Use of English page 69
1 B
2 D
3 B
4 A/D
5 B
6 B
7 B
8 A
Speaking page 69
Students own answers
Writing page 69
Students’ own answers