Another way of travelling to remote places is through books. Reading novels and fiction makes you know unimaginable worlds, but if you want to enjoy a great book as well as improve your listening skills, audiobooks are a great option.
In the following exercise, you will listen to an extract from the novel the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written in 1884 by Mark Twain, an American writer, well-known for his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Before you read…
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel about a teenager, Huckleberry, “Huck”, who helps Jim, a slave, to scape slavery. Their adventures take place along the Mississippi River while trying to head north on the Ohio River.
Listen to some of Huck and Jim’s adventures and then answer the questions.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
CHAPTER IX.
I wanted to go and look at a place right about the middle of the island that I’d found when I was exploring; so we started and soon got to it, because the island was only three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide.
This place was a tolerable long, steep hill or ridge about forty foot high. We had a rough time getting to the top, the sides were so steep and the bushes so thick. We tramped and climbed around all over it, and by and by found a good big cavern in the rock, most up to the top on the side towards Illinois. The cavern was as big as two or three rooms bunched together, and Jim could stand up straight in it. It was cool in there. Jim was for putting our traps in there right away, but I said we didn’t want to be climbing up and down there all the time.
Jim said if we had the canoe hid in a good place, and had all the traps in the cavern, we could rush there if anybody was to come to the island, and they would never find us without dogs. And, besides, he said them little birds had said it was going to rain, and did I want the things to get wet? So we went back and got the canoe, and paddled up abreast the cavern, and lugged all the traps up there. Then we hunted up a place close by to hide the canoe in, amongst the thick willows. We took some fish off of the lines and set them again, and began to get ready for dinner.
The door of the cavern was big enough to roll a hogshead in, and on one side of the door the floor stuck out a little bit, and was flat and a good place to build a fire on. So we built it there and cooked dinner.
Which image best describes what Huck and Jim were doing?
What is the narrator's main purpose?
| To give an opinion about the place he found. |
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| To convince his partner of doing the same. |
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| To describe their journey. |
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Listen to three different summaries of the extract you just listened to. Then, choose the one that describes the correct chronological order of the events.
Summary 1 |
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Summary 2 |
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Summary 3 |
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