Pregunta 1
Part 7 · Time well spent
You are going to read an article in which a man describes how he took up clock repair as a hobby.
The first clock I ever took apart belonged to my grandfather. I was eleven, it was raining, and nobody had thought to tell me not to. By the time my mother found me, the kitchen table was strewn with tiny brass wheels and springs whose purpose I could only guess at, and the clock, needless to say, never worked again. I was not even punished, which somehow made it worse.
(1) ______
The class was taught by a former watchmaker named Gerald, who had spent forty years at the bench and had the steadiest hands I have ever seen. He was a man of few words, most of them dry, and he regarded the expensive tool kits some of us had bought in advance with undisguised amusement. On the first evening he handed each of us a cheap alarm clock and a set of screwdrivers and told us to take it to pieces. The only rule was that we had to be able to put it back together.
(2) ______
That attitude characterised everything he taught. Gerald had little interest in whether we got things right first time; mistakes, to his mind, were simply information that had not yet been interpreted. What mattered to him was that we understood why something had gone wrong, since in his view a repairer who could not diagnose a fault was merely lucky when he fixed one.
(3) ______
Resisting that temptation did not come naturally to me. In my day job, speed was everything, and a decision made quickly was generally reckoned to be better than one made well. Unlearning a habit of mind that had served me for two decades proved far harder than mastering any technique, and it took me the best part of a year to accept that at the workbench the opposite was true.
(4) ______
It was ready in four months. Every time I thought I had tracked down the problem, another lay concealed behind it, like a set of nested boxes. At one stage I seriously considered admitting defeat and handing it back with an apology. What stopped me was the thought of Gerald's face if I told him I had given up without knowing why.
(5) ______
Moments like that are, I suspect, the real reason why people take up this kind of work. The technical satisfaction is considerable, but it is the stories attached to the objects that stay with you. A clock is rarely just a clock to the person who brings it in; more often it is a grandparent's wedding present, or the sound a childhood home made at night.
(6) ______
Gerald retired last year, and at his farewell party he gave each of his former students a small present. Mine was a cheap alarm clock, still in its box. Attached to it was a note in his careful handwriting: 'In case you ever forget what you don't know.'
Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A–G the one which fits gap 5. There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
- A. Diagnosis, I soon discovered, is largely a matter of patience. An old clock may stop for a dozen different reasons: a worn pivot, a bent tooth, oil that has dried into something resembling glue. Finding the culprit can take hours of peering through a magnifying glass, and the temptation to guess is almost overwhelming.
- B. I still work in insurance, though I have cut my hours to four days a week so that I can spend Fridays at the bench. I have no plans to turn my hobby into a business; the moment it became a matter of deadlines and invoices, I suspect it would lose much of its charm.
- C. It was nearly thirty years before I attempted anything similar. By then I had a steady job in insurance, two children and a vague sense that I spent my days producing nothing anyone could hold in their hands. When I saw an evening class in clock repair advertised at the local college, I signed up on impulse.
- D. Within a couple of months I was confidently taking on repairs for friends and colleagues, most of which went without a hitch. I began to wonder why I had ever found the work so daunting, and even toyed with the idea of charging a modest fee once word of my skills had spread a little further.
- E. When the clock finally began to tick, steadily and without complaint, I sat and listened to it for the best part of an hour. My neighbour, when she collected it, cried a little. Her father, she told me, had wound it every Sunday evening for as long as she could remember.
- F. Most of us could not. I managed to reassemble mine, but it ran backwards for reasons that nobody, Gerald included, could explain. He seemed delighted. 'Now you know more than you did an hour ago,' he said. 'That is the whole point.'
- G. The turning point came with a mantel clock that a neighbour had found in her late father's attic. It had not run for decades, and she was keen to have it working again before a family gathering at Christmas. I promised it would be ready in a fortnight.
Ver respuesta y explicación
Respuesta correcta: E. When the clock finally began to tick, steadily and without complaint, I sat and listened to it for the best part of an hour. My neighbour, when she collected it, cried a little. Her father, she told me, had wound it every Sunday evening for as long as she could remember.
Explicación
E: the clock finally ticking resolves the four-month struggle, and the neighbour's tears about her father are the 'Moments like that' referred to next.