READING COMPREHENSION

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C1

Consejera de Educacin

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Listening ComprehensionE.M. Forster, the author of the story The Road from Colonus, is one of the great English novelists of the 20th century. This interview with the BBC was done in 1958. Here you can hear an extract as background to a little film made in those years, after he had returned to Cambridge - the university where he had studied in his youth. His accent is a wonderful example of Public school English pronunciation. Try to answer the questions. You will watch it three times.

1. Where, when and how did Forster start writing literature?

2. What regret does he express?

3. What have been his motivations to write?

4. Forster wrote his last and best novel, A Passage to India, in 1924. Then he stopped writing novels for the rest of his life he died in 1970. Why did he do that?5. Along with novels, did he stop writing completely?6. How does he describe his experience of writing?

7. What is his assessment of himself as a novelist? Why?

8. What is his favourite among the novels he wrote, and why?9. I never preach. If you have a sermon inside you, it quite certain to come out incidentally What is the point of Forster quoting this sentence?

10. What kind of values did he try to convey in his writing?