Пробный ЕГЭ 2013. Чтение А15-А21

Диагностическая работа №2

Прочитайте текст и выполните задания А15 - А21. В каждом задании выберите цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному вами варианту ответа.

Cruel Irony

When I was younger, I used to envy the children that grew up in one place, went to the same school, and had the same friends. I was also jealous that many of them had a mom and dad that were together and loved each other. My parents divorced when I was five years old and since then life has been chaotic.
I began living with my Dad. My mom had problems with depression – that’s what they told me, anyway. I have a feeling she just didn’t want to put up with me and so she dumped me off on my dad. “It’s not that I don’t love you, Teddy, I just don’t know how to deal with boys.” These were her parting words.
My dad is OK and he does the best he can, but he’s restless. He has itchy feet and can’t stay put anywhere more than a year. He’s a writer, but supports himself  by teaching English. He’s never really paid much attention to me, and I’ve been on my own ever since my parents split up and we hit the road. That was ten years ago. Now, that we’ve been to so many countries,  they are all a blur  in my head: Thailand, India, Russia, Mongolia, China, Uganda…
I never intended to become a polyglot, it happened out of boredom and the freedom my father gave me. Since then I have met a lot of kids who hate foreign languages. They were forced down their throats in childhood by parents or teachers who made them memorize rule after rule, and after all that torture, they still couldn't talk and ended up hating them. For me it was nothing like that at all.
I remember living in a tiny village in Uganda when I was about 6. I was surrounded by  a throng of black children, laughing and pointing at me, chanting “mzungu mzungu mzungu” over and over again.  It only dawned on me later that they were calling me whitey, the term used for foreigners, but at the time it was my  first foreign word. I pointed to myself and repeated it to their delight and laughter, and then I pointed at a skinny dog that happened to be nearby and they shouted out: “Mbwa, mzungu, mbwa!” That was my second word and so began my journey of pointing and repeating, that a few months later found me fluent in Swahili, my first foreign language.
After that, picking up languages became second nature. I would point and repeat everything I heard like a parrot. I swam in language. At first everything would sound strange and unfamiliar. But then after a while, it would begin to grow on me, like music which you don't like at first, sometimes does. And then I would begin to notice patterns and recognize words until I could participate in making the same music myself. Ever since those early experiences, music and language are one and the same to me.
And now after years of living abroad, I'm home again. My father has just gone to my school because I'm failing Spanish. He can't understand how I could pick up Swahili, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic, but can't cope with  simple textbook Spanish. Well, I'll tell you a secret. I never learned to write in any of those other languages. I can't memorize words by reading them in a textbook, my mind just doesn't work like that. I don't get grammar, either. I recognize patterns when I've been listening to a language for a long time, and when I say something wrong, for me it's like singing the wrong note, it sounds bad. In school, the teacher doesn't speak Spanish, she just teaches us rules. So there you go, I'm fluent in over eight languages, and yet I'm failing Spanish. Sometimes irony can be cruel.

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