Part 2 · Sentence completion

Narrator: You will hear a young man called Sam talking about a cycling trip along a river. For questions 1 to 10, complete the sentences with a word or short phrase.

Sam: Hi, I'm Sam, and last summer my friend Leo and I cycled the whole length of a river, from the mountains where it begins to the coast where it meets the sea. The guidebooks say the river is about six hundred and fifty kilometres long, although with all our detours and wrong turnings we probably rode nearer eight hundred.

Sam: Quite a few people have asked why we chose a river. Well, we'd done a mountain trip the year before. Leo hurt his back on that one, but he was fine within a week – for me it was my knees that never really recovered. Rivers flow downhill, so we assumed most of the route would be easy. We were wrong about that, as it turned out, because the path often climbs a long way above the water.

Sam: In the end it took us seventeen days, mainly because the weather was so good, so we had a few days on the beach at the end. We'd planned to do it in three weeks, and we'd even booked our train home for the twenty-second day. We carried everything on our bikes – tent, cooking equipment, clothes – and I'd strongly recommend keeping things as light as possible. The heaviest thing we had by far was the tent. You'd think it would be the cooking gear or the tools, but they were nothing in comparison.

Sam: Halfway through, we had a serious conversation about weight. We nearly sent our spare clothes back, but we'd have regretted that when it got cold. So instead we gave up on cooking altogether and posted the stove home, which saved about two kilos. We ate in cafés after that.

Sam: Most nights we camped, and when it rained we found small guesthouses, which were surprisingly cheap and usually included breakfast. We never once stayed in a hotel – far too expensive. The thing I'd do differently is the maps. We relied on an app on my phone, and in the more remote valleys there was no signal at all, so we got lost more than once. I really wish we'd packed paper maps as well.

Sam: People always ask about the food. For me, nothing beat a simple plate of fresh trout at a little riverside café near the start. If you asked Leo, he'd say the best meal was the enormous pizza we had on our last night by the sea – but he'd be wrong. After that, most of our meals were bread and cheese from village shops.

Sam: The biggest surprise was the people. Farmers let us fill up our water bottles, and one family whose field we'd camped in invited us back a month later for their daughter's wedding. We're still in touch with them.

Sam: If you're thinking of doing something similar, people expect me to say 'buy a really good bike', but actually ours were quite ordinary. My main tip would be to train properly before you start. We did a few long rides at weekends, but not enough, and the first four days were painful. And whatever you do, bring a good waterproof jacket. Even in summer, the mountains can surprise you.

Narrator: You will hear a man called Chris Palmer talking about his work as a hot-air balloon pilot. For questions 1 to 10, complete the sentences with a word or short phrase.

Chris: Hi everyone. I'm Chris, and for the past eight years I've been working as a hot-air balloon pilot. People often assume I must have been in the air force, but actually my background is in teaching. I was in a secondary school for ten years. I started out teaching history, because that's what my degree was in, but after a couple of years the school was short of geography staff, and that's what I taught for the rest of my time there.

Chris: It all started with a present from my wife. People assume it was for our wedding anniversary, because she booked it for June, but in fact it was for my fortieth birthday. I was hooked from the moment we left the ground. What really stayed with me was the silence. Apart from the burner, you hear almost nothing up there. Everyone expects me to say it was the view, and that was amazing, of course, but it's the quiet I still think about.

Chris: Getting a licence took me about two years. You need a minimum number of flying hours with an instructor, and you have to pass written exams. I'd been warned that navigation was the tough one, and I'd heard horror stories about the air law paper too, but I passed both first time. It was meteorology that nearly defeated me – I had to take it twice. Which is ironic, because understanding the weather is central to the job.

Chris: In fact, the weather decides everything. We never fly in the middle of the day, because the sun heats the ground and the air becomes bumpy. So it's either just after sunrise or in the evening, when things have calmed down. I get up at four and check the wind forecast before anything else. My personal limit is ten miles an hour. I know pilots who are perfectly happy to go up at twelve, but I'm not one of them.

Chris: Other companies sometimes tell customers that cancellations are rare – one flight in ten, that kind of figure. In my experience it's nothing like that. Over a whole season I cancel roughly a third of all flights, which passengers find frustrating, but safety has to come first.

Chris: A lot of people ask how we steer. The honest answer is that we can't, not in the normal sense. What we can do is change height, because the wind often blows in different directions at different levels. So by going up or down, you can choose your direction to some extent. Speed, on the other hand, is something we have no control over at all – we travel at whatever speed the wind is blowing.

Chris: Landing is the part passengers are most nervous about. We usually come down in a farmer's field, so funnily enough, the people I spend most time keeping happy aren't my passengers – they're the local landowners. Without their goodwill, we'd have nowhere to land. I stick with tradition: a bottle of champagne for the owner of the field. Some pilots hand over a box of chocolates these days, but that's not for me. That custom is said to go back to the very first balloon flights in France.