Reading

Read the text and decide if the statements (1-6) below are true or false.                                                                    

Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage

Think about all the emotions expressed in the music you listen to: joy, happiness, loneliness, nervousness, and, of course, sadness. Music with sad themes is often called the blues.

Blues music developed in the USA among Southern blacks after the Civil War. When slaves were brought to America from Africa, they brought their musical traditions with them. Mixed with folk and popular music of whites, these African musical traditions developed into the blues.

The blues is believed to have originated in the Mississippi Delta, a region in northern Mississippi between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. This is a rural area where the poorest black people lived. The sadness of their lifestyle was expressed in the blues. The conditions in this area – poverty, racism, difficult working situations – led many blacks to go north, to cities such as Memphis, Chicago, St Louis and Detroit.

The blues didn’t disappear from the Mississippi countryside, however, and in 1978, the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage festival was founded to celebrate and promote the blues and the culture. Now it is the oldest and largest blues festival in the South, with 20,000 visitors and performances 

1) The blues is the music with sad themes.

Read the text and decide if the statements (1-6) below are true or false.                                                                   

Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage

Think about all the emotions expressed in the music you listen to: joy, happiness, loneliness, nervousness, and, of course, sadness. Music with sad themes is often called the blues.

Blues music developed in the USA among Southern blacks after the Civil War. When slaves were brought to America from Africa, they brought their musical traditions with them. Mixed with folk and popular music of whites, these African musical traditions developed into the blues.

The blues is believed to have originated in the Mississippi Delta, a region in northern Mississippi between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. This is a rural area where the poorest black people lived. The sadness of their lifestyle was expressed in the blues. The conditions in this area – poverty, racism, difficult working situations – led many blacks to go north, to cities such as Memphis, Chicago, St Louis and Detroit.

The blues didn’t disappear from the Mississippi countryside, however, and in 1978, the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage festival was founded to celebrate and promote the blues and the culture. Now it is the oldest and largest blues festival in the South, with 20,000 visitors and performances 

2) Blues music developed after the World War among Southern blacks.

Read the text below. Choose from (A-F) the one which best fits (1)

(1) _________ is one of the Channel Islands, Sark is located some 80 miles from the south coast of England and only 24 miles ________. Neither part of the United Kingdom nor the European Union, Sark is reputed to be ________independent feudal state in Europe and to have the last feudal constitution in ________ . Sark is a dependency of the British crown. In 1565 Queen Elizabeth I granted Sark to Helier de Carteret as a fief, with the condition that at least 40 men would live on the island.