Red Line 4, Coursebook

100 one hundred A working journey A Reading 1 Read the text and decide if these sentences are right or wrong. a Marlene’s family went through every state of the US during their working journey. b The farmers inWashington State didn’t give the family work. c Some friends of the family had trouble with the police in California. d The Smiths had no problems with their bills. e The Smiths found that life was slower in the north than in the south. f The last state of the journey was Iowa. 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 Just another family camping trip, you’d have thought, as my mother and I put things into the Volkswagen. But what a trip! My father, mother, brother and I were leaving our farm in Missouri for a year’s journey through all fifty states of the US. My mother had suggested the trip as a way to get to know our country better. It would mean a year out of school for fifteen-year-old Joe and the start of college a year later for me, but we wanted to do it. July found us working in Washington State’s Wenatchee Valley, full of fruit farms and skeptical farmers. They knew we had no experience as fruit pickers, but they gave us a chance. We learned quickly, with only a few accidents. The money we earned in the next six weeks paid for the 2,000 mile trip through the Canadian wilderness to Alaska. Back from Alaska, we were again picking fruit, this time in California, where we learned about the life of migrant workers. The early morning frost killed the feeling in our fingers, while the midday sun gave us headaches. One day, when the police checked our group for Mexicans working illegally in the US, some of our new friends were sent back. Sometimes we found jobs just in time. In Louisiana, it took two days of searching for a way to pay our motel bill before my father and Joe were hired by a cable-TV company. In Virginia, my mother worked in a flower shop, and I worked in a snack shop. Traveling 40,000 miles across America taught us about different lifestyles – the slow easy-going south and the hustle-bustle of the north. Sometimes we just got tired of all the driving and missed having a permanent home, but there were also some nice surprises. And there was a fantastic feeling of success when we saw the ‘Welcome to Iowa’ sign and proudly entered state number fifty. More and more families in the UK and the US are deciding to leave home and look for adventure in other places. This magazine article is about a trip that Marlene Smith, 17, and her family took through America. T Test practice C Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentu des Verlags öbv