Reading Aptis matching headings

1. Heading:

Michael Owen doubtless doesn’t know it, but he probably owes some of his success as a footballer to the Victorians. Before the 1800s, ‘football’ was a pretty rough pastime and a man of Michael’s size would have been at a distinct disadvantage. Had they existed, the laws of the game would have read something like this: rule one – there are no rules. Bone-crunching tackles were literally that, and there were no referees, blind, biased or otherwise, to offer protection.

In 1602, Sir Richard Carew described the Cornish hurling game, a forerunner of today’s field sports, thus: when the hurling is ended, you shall see them retyring home, as from a pitched battaile, with bloody pates, bones broken, and out of joynt, and such bruses as serve to shorten their daies.

Luckily for Michael, matters would change. The course of the Victorian period saw a drive towards a more civilised and controlled society. In sport this manifested itself by a desire for rules and regulations, changing the emphasis from manly physical pursuits to moral and spiritual exercises with disciplinary value and a spirit of fair play.

It was a process that was largely driven by the Industrial Revolution. Industry began to dominate the economy and workers moved from field to factory and developed a new-found desire for material wealth. This gave their middle class employers greater control and the chance to dictate how employees should live their lives. A campaign was mounted against violent sports like football which left men injured and unable to work, while working hours were increased to levels previously deemed unacceptable leaving fewer opportunities to play.

2. Heading:

But things were different in one area of society. In the public schools the aristocratic pupils held sway over their middle class teachers, and were free to play as they pleased. Nevertheless, parents were becoming concerned about the treatment of youngsters who, under the prefect-fagging system, were put in goal and suffered the brunt of the violence. Schools had to take action or face the prospect of parents taking their children elsewhere.

Thomas Arnold, headmaster at Rugby school, wanted his pupils to grow up into moral Christian gentlemen. He therefore moderated the prefect-fagging system and advocated regulated sports which provided exercise and encouraged healthy competition. By 1845, the pupils at Rugby felt it necessary for the first time to write down the rules of football at their school to establish exactly what constituted fair play. In the Rugby version, handling the ball was allowed, but, in 1849, pupils at Eton created a rival game. It may well have been an attempt to outdo the ‘upstarts’ at Rugby, but football Eton-style greatly restricted the use of the hands.

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The pupils took their games with them to university, the only problem being that everyone played different versions. A need for a common set of rules arose and at Cambridge University four attempts were made in the 1840s and 1850s. Eventually, in 1863, they decided on a set of rules in which handling the ball was outlawed.

At the end of that year, players from around the country came together to form the Football Association and the Cambridge rules were adopted. It didn’t suit everybody, and the representative from the Blackheath club withdrew because he favoured the Rugby style of game. He also advocated a type of tackle that they called ‘hacking’ – these days we would probably call it GBH.

3. Heading:

So the modern games of football and rugby were born (although rugby would divide again into league and union games) and these sports were portrayed as healthy rather than destructive. Of course legend has it that rugby was invented in a moment of inspiration by one of the pupils at Rugby. A plaque on the school grounds reads:

Sadly the evidence to support the myth is harder to find – still it’s a nice story.

The formation of the FA was a symptom of the desire for order prevalent at the time. Other sports soon followed suit – the Amateur Athletic Club was formed in 1866, the Rugby Football Union in 1871, and the Lawn Tennis Association in 1888. There was evidently a social aspect to these organisations (most were formed in pubs), but they enabled the establishment of rules and the arrangement of competitions. The first ever FA Cup followed in 1872. The Rev RWS Vidal, known as the ‘Prince of Dribblers’, lived up to his name and set up MP Betts to score the only goal as the Wanderers beat the Royal Engineers.

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In tennis the cart came before the horse, with the first Wimbledon championships being held in 1877, 11 years before the launch of the LTA. The game’s birth can be traced back to 1858 when Major Henry Gem marked out the first court on a lawn in Edgbaston. But it was Major Walter Wingfield who developed the modern game of tennis. Helped by the invention of a rubber ball which would bounce on grass, he patented a game he catchily called ‘Sphairistike’ which used a ‘New and improved court for playing the ancient game of tennis’. Wingfield sold sets of his game for five guineas – they included balls, four racquets and netting to mark out the hourglass shaped court. Not surprisingly ‘Sphairistike’ did not stick, and the name lawn tennis was adopted.

At that stage croquet that was all the rage, but that was soon to change. We know it by a different name now, but in 1875 The All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon chose to adopt tennis, and a tournament for all-comers was organised two years later to raise funds. Twenty-two players paid £1.05 for the privilege of entering, and Spencer Gore went down in the history books as the first Wimbledon champion, although he later confessed that he thought tennis would never catch on. He was very quickly proved wrong.

4. Heading:

Many other great contests were born in the Victorian era. Cricket’s rules had been laid down as early as 1744, but in 1861 an English touring team travelled down under for the first time. Seven years later a team of Aborigines toured England, although the first official Test match was not until 1877 when Australia beat England in Melbourne. An inauspicious start, but worse was to come. When Australia won a Test in England for the first time in 1882, The Sporting Times published the famous obituary:

The ‘body’ is reputed to be one of the bails, and England and Australia have played for the Ashes ever since.

Like cricket, golf’s rules were first laid down in the 18th century, but it is the Victorians we have to thank for the Open Championship which was first played in 1861. Prior to that, there had been separate competitions for amateurs and pros as professionalism did not fit with sport’s new image. The Marylebone Cricket Club hired professionals for the menial tasks of bowling and fielding so the ‘gentlemen’ could practise their batting. This distinction between amateur batsmen and professional bowlers led to the annual matches between Gentlemen and Players.

But spectator interest in sport was growing, helped by improvements in transport, and entrepreneurs cottoned on to the fact that there was money to be made. Football was a particular money-spinner and clubs vied for the top players. While the ex-public schoolboys of the FA found the notion of the professional footballer ungentlemanly, they gave in to the threat of a block withdrawal from the FA Cup by a group of teams from the North and the Midlands. In 1885 professionalism was legalised and three years later a league was formed.

5. Heading:

Not happy with just laying down the rules in their own country, British settlers spread the gospel wherever they went. Even today, many Argentine and Brazilian football sides betray their roots with English names. Closer to home, Italian clubs such as AC Milan and Juventus, who got their famous playing strip from Notts County, also have English connections.

But it was not just football that the English migrants took with them. Rugby and cricket would flourish in Australia and New Zealand, while India and Pakistan took cricket to their hearts.

And so sport entered the 20th century with a new image. The Victorians had cleaned it up and repackaged it as a moral, exciting spiritual activity, rather than a rough pursuit dependent on physical prowess. Tennis and golf would go from strength to strength, while athletics would flourish, particularly with the establishment of the Olympic movement.

The factory owners, who once did all they could to prevent their workers playing sports like football, now changed their views as sport was more likely to keep their employees healthy. In fact many employers encouraged the formation of works teams to try to foster feelings of solidarity among the workforce. Dial Square, formed by workers at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich in 1886, went on to become Arsenal FC; West Ham was formed by the workforce at Thames Iron Works in 1895; while Newton Heath, a club founded by workers from the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, went on to become known by a slightly more familiar name – nowadays we call them Manchester United.

Answers Reading Aptis matching headings:

1º There are no rules; 2º A game of two halves; 3º Laying down the law; 4º Ashes to ashes; 5º Word gets around

1. Heading:

The hardest and most bitterly fought confrontation between the Soviet Union and the western democracies during the 50 years of the Cold War was on the espionage front. In this arena the KGB, the ‘sword and the shield’ of the USSR, pitted its wits against its principal adversaries – the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

The aim of each was to steal the secrets of the other side, to try to peer inside the mind of the enemy, to fathom his intentions, and to neutralise them before they could be executed. The soldiers in this war were the spymasters, the spies and their agents, all of whom operated in an undercover world where deception and betrayal flourished.

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During the spy war it was impossible to write authoritatively about it. The present author once wrote that the truth could not be told ‘until the files of the KGB, the CIA and the SIS are all opened to public scrutiny’ – little dreaming that this would ever happen.

But when Communism collapsed and the Cold War ended, this is exactly what did occur, and thus it became possible to tell the story of the four most remarkable spies of the Cold War, four larger-than-life Englishmen: HAR (Kim) Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, all of whom betrayed their country to spy for Moscow.

In the new political climate, it became possible to tell the story both from Britain’s point of view and through the eyes of the KGB. And from this tale we can draw some startling conclusions about the nature of espionage and its real value in the modern world.

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In the early 1930s, the democratic world appeared to be in trouble. The Great Depression had caused widespread unemployment. Fascism was on the march in Germany and Italy. To many young students at Cambridge University, privileged though they were, this was worrying and unacceptable.

Four of them – Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt – wanted to do something about it. They believed that the democracies would prove too weak to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini, and they knew that many people in Britain did indeed admire these leaders. They also thought that only the Soviet Union would be powerful enough to defeat Fascism. So, when they were approached by a recruiter from Moscow, the four young men agreed to serve the KGB.

The KGB believed that recruiting clever people from a respected university was a good game plan, because the chances were that sometime in the future these young men would be among Britain’s rulers and well placed to betray their country’s secrets.

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This is how it turned out. By the time World War Two was underway, Maclean was climbing the ladder in the Foreign Office, Burgess was an intimate of prominent politicians, and Blunt was an officer in the Security Service – MI5. Even more astoundingly, Philby was an officer in the SIS. And all the while they were establishing themselves in these positions, these four men were reporting to Moscow.

It got better for the KGB. Just before the war ended, Philby was appointed head of the SIS’s anti-Soviet section, so that the man who was charged with running operations against the Russians, was a Russian agent. Blunt, meanwhile, had been on the distribution list for material from the war’s most secret operation, Ultra, decoded German radio traffic.

Then, as the Cold War got under way, Philby became SIS liaison officer with the newly formed CIA in Washington, where Maclean was first secretary at the British embassy, sitting on a committee that dealt with atomic bomb matters.

Burgess at this time was with the Foreign Office news department. Put together, their information should have been of inestimable value to Moscow. But the KGB files on these dedicated Soviet agents show a different picture.

3. Heading:

Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution, when a British secret service plot nearly brought down the new Communist government, the KGB had regarded the SIS as the most sophisticated and ingenious of all the capitalist intelligence services, capable of all sorts of duplicity and convoluted conspiracies.

So although the KGB had recruited four young Englishmen who appeared dedicated to their cause, was it just possible that the SIS had deliberately placed these men in the path of the Russian recruiter? Was it possible that although the KGB believed that these four agents had penetrated the British establishment, the very opposite was the case – Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt had instead penetrated the KGB?

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The KGB files show that a powerful section of the KGB believed that this was the case. Officers argued that it had been all too easy for the Cambridge ring. Could the British authorities be so stupid to as to allow men of such left-wing backgrounds into positions of trust in the establishment? How could Philby, who had helped Communists escape from Vienna and had then married a Viennese Communist, get through the security checks that the SIS must carry out on all those it recruited?

This suspicion tainted the KGB careers of all four. None of them was entirely trusted. None of the important information they sent to Moscow was accepted at face value, unless it could be confirmed from other sources.

Moscow’s spymasters argued that they could not be sure they were not having disinformation deliberately fed to them, with the intention of misleading the KGB. And all the while the KGB wasted the agents’ valuable time by trying to trip them up, trying to prove that their loyalty really lay with Britain.

4. Heading:

With the Germans at the gates of Moscow in 1941, the KGB bombarded Philby with orders to write his autobiography yet again, hoping to find in the new version some discrepancy with which to tax him. Even the patient Philby, who is never known to have once said a bad word about the KGB, to anyone who spoke to him, got fed up.

His controller reported to Moscow: ‘We’ve recently raised the issue with ‘S’ about his submitting a summarising, complete and detailed autobiography, with notes on all his contacts, all his work with us, the English institutions, and the like. But ‘S’ says that he doesn’t have the time, that in his opinion, now is the time that attention should be paid primarily to getting information, and not to writing various biographies. We pointed out the error of his conclusions to ‘S’.’

And when Philby was not writing and re-writing reports about himself, the KGB wanted him to find out the names of Soviet citizens who might have been recruited by the SIS station chief in Moscow. When Philby looked at the SIS files, and reported that the SIS had not recruited anybody yet, the KGB asked Blunt the same question. When he confirmed Philby’s reply, the KGB concluded that this was evidence that Blunt was, like Philby, a British plant, and the British conspiracy to penetrate was more widespread that the KGB had imagined.

5. Heading:

Once the KGB had convinced itself that the Cambridge spy ring was most likely a British conspiracy against the Soviet Union it faced a difficult decision. How was it to handle this?

If it cut off all contact with the Cambridge ring and it later turned out that its agents were genuinely loyal to the USSR, then the KGB would be blamed. Those officers running the Cambridge ring might be accused of sabotage. They might be shot. All right, then, Moscow reasoned, let’s pretend that nothing has happened and do our best to reinforce Philby’s conviction that we trust him and his ring completely.

And so the game of deceit and double-dealing continued. The Cambridge spies were deceiving their colleagues, their service, their families and their country. They did this in the sincere belief that they were serving a greater cause, through an elite intelligence service, the KGB, which fathered and mothered them and appeared to trust them totally. But the KGB, in turn, was deceiving the Englishmen, because it really believed that they were playing a treble game and were all traitors to the Communist cause.

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The conclusion from all this is that the main threat to intelligence agents comes not from the counter-intelligence service of the country in which they are operating, but from their own centre, their own people.

In a dirty bogus business, riddled with deceit, manipulation and betrayal, an intelligence service maintains it sanity by developing its own concept of what it believes to be the truth. Those agents who confirm this perceived truth – even if it is wrong – prosper. Those who deny it – even if they are right – fall under suspicion.

From that moment on, the better that agent’s information, the greater the suspicion with which he or she is treated. When other agents offer confirmation, the suspicion spreads, until the whole corrupt concern collapses, only for a new generation of paranoid personalities to start afresh. Knowing this, anyone interested in the spy world should reflect on the moral problems of espionage, and how they might be confronted.

Perhaps one way would to be to consider whether we need intelligence services in the 21st century. They are only a comparatively recent phenomenon (the SIS dates from 1911, the KGB from 1917, and the CIA from as recently as 1947). It could be that nations have been the victim of a vast confidence trick to deceive us about the necessity and the value of spies.

Answers Aptis reading matching headings:

1º A world of shadows, 2º The early years, 3º Failure to trust, 4º Looking for discrepancies, 5º Dealing with suspicion

Aquí tienes otro multiple choice reading Aptis  para practicar.

3. Viking Religion

El siguiente va sobre vikingos. Esperamos que te guste, dale duro!

1 Heading:

The Viking Age was a period of considerable religious change in Scandinavia. Part of the popular image of the Vikings is that they were all pagans, with a hatred of the Christian Church, but this view is very misleading. The Vikings had many gods, and it was no problem for them to accept the Christian god alongside their own. Most scholars today believe that Viking attacks on Christian churches had nothing to do with religion, but more to do with the fact that monasteries were typically both wealthy and poorly defended, making them an easy target for plunder.

The Vikings came into contact with Christianity through their raids, and when they settled in lands with a Christian population, they adopted Christianity quite quickly. Although contemporary accounts say little about this, we can see it in the archaeological evidence. Pagans buried their dead with grave goods, but Christians normally didn’t, and this makes it relatively easy to spot the change in religion.

As well as conversion abroad, the Viking Age also saw a gradual conversion in Scandinavia itself, as Anglo-Saxon and German missionaries arrived to convert the pagans. By the mid-11th century, Christianity was well established in Denmark and most of Norway. It wasn’t until the mid-12th century that Christianity became established in Sweden. As part of the process of conversion the Christians took over traditional pagan sites.

2. Heading:

We know almost nothing about pagan religious practices in the Viking Age. There is little contemporary evidence, and although there are occasional references to paganism in the Viking sagas we have to remember that these were written down 200 years after the conversion to Christianity. We know that chieftains also had some sort of role as priests, and that pagan worship involved the sacrifice of horses, but not much more.

We know rather more about the stories associated with the pagan gods. Besides occasional references in early poems, these stories survived after conversion because it was possible to regard them simply as myths, rather than as the expression of religious beliefs. The main sources of evidence are the Eddas, wonderful literary works which represent the old pagan beliefs as folk tales. Even here there is some Christian influence. For example, the chief god Odin was sacrificed to himself by being hanged on a tree and pierced in the side with a spear, and this was followed by a sort of resurrection a few days later – a clear parallel with Christ’s crucifixion.

Even so, the Eddas provide a huge amount of information about the gods, and their relationship with giants, men and dwarfs. The most powerful god was the one-eyed Odin, the Allfather, god of warfare, justice, death, wisdom and poetry. Probably the most popular god, however, was Thor, who was stupid but incredibly strong. With his hammer Miollnir, crafted by the dwarfs, he was the main defender of the gods against the giants. He was also the god of thunder, and he was particularly worshipped by seafarers. Amulets of Thor’s hammer were popular throughout the Viking world. The brother and sister Frey and Freyja, the god and goddess of fertility, were also important, and there were many other minor gods and goddesses.

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The great enemies of the gods were the giants, and there were often conflicts between the two races. Among the gods, only Thor was a match for the giants in strength, so the gods usually had to rely on cunning to outwit the giants. Odin himself was capable of clever tricks, but whenever the gods needed a really cunning plan, they turned to the fire-god Loki. Like fire, which can bring necessary warmth or cause great destruction, Loki did many things that benefited the gods, but he also caused them great harm, and often the problems he solved had been caused by his mischief in the first place.

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Despite the tension between gods and giants, there was a fair amount of contact on an individual basis, and a number of the gods had relationships with giantesses. One of these was Loki, who had three monstrous children by his giantess wife. His daughter Hel became ruler of the underworld. One son, Jormunagund, was a serpent who grew so large that he stretched all the way around the earth. The other son was Fenris, a wolf so powerful that he terrified the gods until they tricked him into allowing himself to be tied up with a magical chain which bound him until the end of time.

It was believed that the world would end with the final battle of Ragnarok, between the gods and the giants. Loki and his children would take the side of the giants. Thor and Jormunagund, who maintained a long-running feud with each other, would kill each other, and Odin would be killed by the Fenris wolf, who would then be killed in turn. A fire would sweep across the whole world, destroying both the gods and mankind. However, just enough members of both races would survive to start a new world.

4. Heading:

The raids on the Frankish kingdoms and the British Isles brought increased contact with Christianity. Although Vikings often seem to have maintained their beliefs throughout the periods of their raiding, there was considerable pressure to convert to Christianity if they wished to have more peaceful relations with the Christians.

Another more or less formal convention applied to trade, since Christians were not really supposed to trade with pagans. Although a full conversion does not seem to have been demanded of all Scandinavian traders, the custom of ‘primsigning’ (first-signing) was introduced. This was a halfway step, falling short of baptism, but indicating some willingness to accept Christianity, and this was often deemed to be enough to allow trading.

Further pressure came as Viking raiders settled down alongside Christian neighbours. Although scholars disagree on exactly how extensive the Scandinavian settlement was in different parts of the British Isles, few people would now accept that the Vikings completely replaced the native population in any area. In particular, the settlers often took native wives (or at least partners), although some settlers apparently brought their families over from Scandinavia. The children of these mixed marriages would therefore grow up in partially Christian households, and might even be brought up as Christians. Further intermarriage, coupled with the influence of the Church, gradually brought about a complete conversion.

5. Heading:

Attempts to convert Scandinavia began even before the Viking Age. The Anglo-Saxon St Willibrord led a mission to Denmark in 725, but although he was well-received by the king, his mission had little effect.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Christianity was adopted piecemeal in Norway, with settlements converting or not depending on whether the local chieftain converted. The same idea can also be seen on a larger scale. In the mid-tenth century Hakon the Good of Norway, who had been fostered in England, tried to use his royal authority to establish Christianity. However, when it became clear that this would lose him the support of pagan chieftains, he abandoned his attempts, and his Anglo-Saxon bishops were sent back to England.

Harald Bluetooth of Denmark was apparently more successful. His famous runestone at Jelling tells us that he ‘made the Danes Christian’, and this is supported both by Christian imagery on Danish coins from his reign and by German records of the establishment of bishops in various Danish towns.

Further attempts by Anglo-Saxon missionaries in the late tenth century had only a limited effect in Norway and Sweden. The latter, however, faced a pagan reaction in the mid-11th century, and it was not until the 12th century that Christianity became firmly established.

Answers Aptis reading matching headings:

1º The age of conversion, 2º Pagan belief, 3º Gods and giants, 4º Pagan and Christian together, 5º Conversion in Scandinavia

Fuente: BBC.CO.UK

4. Captain Cook: Explorer, Navigator and Pioneer

A continuación, vamos con el cuarto, este es muy interesante. Ánimo, tú puedes!

12. Heading:

Before Florence died at the age of 90, she became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit.

The headstrong girl with a well-documented shell collection had achieved so much, in field once deemed unsuitable for women of her class. Often a lone female voice appealing to the Victorian establishment, her skill for communication and mathematics helped overhaul army and civilian healthcare and saved thousands from a gruesome death. She shrewdly used her public mandate to urge governments into action, enshrining sanitation and personal well-being in our healthcare culture.

Answers Reading Aptis matching headings:

1º A gifted child, 2º Florence hears God, 3º A proposal, 4º The breakthrough, 5º The Crimea calls, 6º The death toll rises, 7º The lady of the lamp hits the big time, 8º Florence reveals the truth, 9º Florence gets to work, 10º  Healthcare for everyone, 11º Florence takes the fight to India, 12º Florence passes away

Fuente: BBB.CO.UK

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