Ejercicio Texto A - Questions 1-4 · Inglés PAU Asturias Ordinaria 2022

TEXTO A: Lillian

There are many things to write about in a life: births, deaths, illnesses, love. But I chose this subject after coming home from a meeting with my friend Lillian. What made the meeting special was that Lillian and I hadn't met for the previous fifteen years. We met at school. She became part of the group of friends that went through our school life. I remember going for walks and doing homework together. I passed my final exams simply because she gave me a hand with my subjects. At sixteen Lillian left London. We stayed in touch and I used to visit her in the country for weekends. At eighteen she left to study in the USA. We wrote to each other, and occasionally she visited her mother and we would spend an afternoon in a café, talking. In our late twenties she and her husband announced their plans to emigrate to Australia. A few years after this, she visited the UK and came to Oxford where I was then living. Her visit gave us an opportunity to catch up with our lives. However, after this, the friendship declined. Sometimes we didn't write or phone for a year, especially after we both had our children. One day I phoned her to tell her my second baby had been born. Instead of the cheery hello I expected, she paused for a long moment. I asked her what had happened. 'I have just divorced,' she said. Since then we had gradually been more in touch again. We e-mail mostly: short paragraphs with juicy bits of gossip of our lives. Then suddenly she e-mailed to say she was getting a plane to London the next day and wanted to meet me. I felt anxious: I have become middle-aged, fat and boring, I thought. We sat in Trafalgar Square waiting for Lillian and her children. 'What do they look like?' asked my son. 'I'm not sure,' I replied. But suddenly they were there. Lillian was, like me, older and wider, but as soon as we began to talk, we might just as well have been eleven again and the conversation interrupted only a moment before.

QUESTIONS. Do not copy literally from the text. (1 punto por respuesta = 4 puntos)

1.

What does the text say about the early stages of the friendship relationship between Lillian and the author?

2.

How did their friendship change when Lillian left London and when she moved to the US?

3.

When did the ties of friendship between them start to loosen a little? How did they strengthen their close friendship again?

4.

Why is the relationship between the author and Lillian so special?