END OF YEAR Test Reading 10th form

Reading. Text 1

   Read the text.

  In 1968 Mel Brooks directed his first film from a script that he had written himself. The film was The Producers and it has become famous as one of the funniest films ever made. There are two main actors in the film and they are both perfect in their parts. Zero Mostel played Max Bialystock, a poor Broadway play producer. For eight years, between 1951 and 1959, Mostel wasn’t able to work in films or on stage in the USA because of his political opinions, but he was a famous theatre actor and he had also appeared in a few films. He didn’t want to be in The Producers at first, but his wife persuaded him that it was a good part when she read the script. The other lead actor was Gene Wilder, who had become famous in 1967 in the Oscar-winning film Bonnie and Clyde. He had had only a small part in that film but had received good reviews. He had actually met Mel Brooks in 1963, when he appeared in a play with Brooks’ wife, Anne Bancroft.

  The Producers got mixed reviews. Some critics didn’t like it and said it wasn’t funny. Others thought it was brilliant and Brooks won an Oscar for the screenplay (story and script). The film made only a small amount of money, but it made Brooks famous, and he was the most successful comedy director of the 1970s with films such as Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie, all three starring Gene Wilder. Brooks continued making films during the 1980s and 1990s, but with less success. Then, in 2001, he rewrote The Producers and made it into a musical play. The play was performed 2,502 times on Broadway in New York and won twelve Tony Awards, the theatre’s Oscars. It also had three years in London’s West End.

In 2005 Brooks worked with Thomas Meehan to turn the musical play into a musical film. Again, the film had mixed reviews and a lot of critics felt that no film could be as funny as the original. Again, it wasn’t a great success and there was no Oscar this time. It earned about $38 million, but it actually cost $45 million to make.

1. Choose the correct answer to the questions.

1   In 1968 Mel Brooks:

2   Zero Mostel:

3   Gene Wilder:

4   The Producers:

5   Mel Brooks:

6   The second The Producers film:

Reading. Text 2

 Read the article. 

Europe is full of minority language speakers. Some, such as the Basques, Catalans, Welsh and Corsicans, are large groups and well known all over the world. Others are less well known. Here are a few you might not have heard about.

The Walloons live in the southern half of Belgium in an area called Wallonia. Everyone from Wallonia is a Walloon. However, they don’t all speak the Walloon language. The majority of the population speak French. Others speak other minority languages such as Picard or Lorraine. Walloon itself is now almost a dead language with only 10 percent of the population speaking it as their first language. Most of the speakers are old people, and when they die, Walloon probably won't exist in Wallonia. However, it is also the first language in a few villages in northern France and it may survive there.

The area of northern Poland near Gdansk is home to the Kashubians. About 300,000 people call themselves Kashubian and speak Kashubian. Poland also has another minority language in the south of the country: Silesian. Some words in Kashubian and Silesian are the same in Polish and Poles can understand both languages. So are Kashubian and Silesian actually different languages or a form of Polish? Different people have different opinions, but the Kashubians and Silesians agree that they have got their own language and that this language is definitely not Polish. A much smaller group of people are the Grikos of Italy. There are about 40,000 Grikos in total and they live in two different parts of southern Italy. One group live in the far south-west, near the island of Sicily, while the other group live in the far south-east, on the Adriatic coast. Their roots are in the Greek communities who

lived in the area thousands of years ago. About 20,000 of these people speak Griko as their first language. Unfortunately, most of them are older people; the younger generation want to speak Italian. However, even the Italian speakers are proud of their Griko roots, and the Griko people celebrate their culture every year with a night of singing and dancing in the town of Melpignano.

1. Are the statements true (T) or false (F)?

1. Walloon is the only minority language in Wallonia. _____

2. The Walloon language may soon only be spoken outside Wallonia. _____

3. Some people think that Kashubian and Silesian are a form of Polish. _____

4. Kashubian is very different from Polish. _____

5. There has been a Griko community in Italy for a very long time. _____

6. Young people don’t like being Grikos. _____