Reading 2

Climb every mountain

Stephen Venables’ love of mountains began at nine years old on a skiing trip to the Alps. ‘I was thrilled,’ he remembers. ‘It was actually far more impressive and exciting than seeing the Himalayas for the first time, because when you’re nine it’s all new and you don’t know what to expect.’

From that moment, Stephen knew that he wanted to climb mountains, but he didn’t realise then that one day he would be the first British man to climb Everest without oxygen. ¹___ He was coming down from the top of the mountain when he was caught in a snowstorm. After years of climbing, he was prepared for this and he knew that the best thing he could do was wait for the weather to change.

‘At first I tried sitting on a rock because rock is warmer than snow, but it wasn’t completely flat. ²___ I did sleep a bit,’ he says. ‘They always say you should stay awake, but I was totally exhausted.’ Fortunately, the storm passed, and Stephen managed to climb back down to his camp and enter the record books.

The Everest expedition wasn’t Stephen’s only difficult climb. In 1992, while climbing another Himalayan mountain, he fell 100 m, breaking both his legs. ‘It was very unlucky that it happened, but I was lucky that there were five of us.’ The group included Chris Bonnington and Stephen’s good friend Harish Kapadia. It took them twelve hours to make camp in a safe place. Then two of the team went for help.

‘I think that was one of the most wonderful moments of my life – finally being in the tent and realising that I could just lie back in my sleeping bag.’ But Stephen didn’t know that the rescue would take four days. ³___ ‘On the last day we had a boiled sweet and we used the last tea bag so many times that it wasn’t actually changing the colour of the water.’ But luckily, the team managed to keep going until help arrived. 

     Read the text. Choose the correct answers. 

    1   What happened to Stephen Venables when he was nine years old?

 What did Stephen Venables do when he was caught in a snowstorm?

What is the writer’s purpose in this article?

What is the writer’s purpose in this article?