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Here you can find the solutions for the Maturita Practice Exam and Cambridge First (FCE) Practice Exam from the Bridge Magazine maturita special (January-February 2017).
MATURITA
Listening
Part 1:1C, 2B, 3A, 4C
Part 2: 5F, 6F, 7F, 8T, 9F, 10T, 11T, 12T
Part 3: 13 (in the) 20th century/(the) early 20th century, 14 a shop assistant, 15 two/2, 16 May, 17 by train/train/by trains/trains, 18 two/2/two times/twice, 19 sharks/shark, 20- 312-939-2438
Part 4: 21B, 22B, 23B, 24D

Reading
Part 5:25C, 26D, 27A, 28A, 29D
Part 6: 30F, 31F, 32T, 33F, 34T, 35T, 36T, 37F, 38F, 39T
Part 7: 40C, 41D, 42A, 43B, 44A
Part 8: 45G, 46F, 47D, 48E, 49B
Part 9: 50B, 51A, 52A, 53A, 54C, 55A, 56B, 57C, 58B, 59B, 60B, 61A, 62B, 63B, 64C

Speaking
Part 1 - Let's Practise:1C, 2E, 3 not answered, 4A, 5B, 6D
Part 4 - Let's Practise: 1 She's been dizzy and tired, feels feverish, has strange pains all over her body, has trouble breathing and gets get an upset stomach.; 2 She is dizzy and finds it hard to breathe.; 3 The doctor thinks that stress is the cause.; 4 The doctor advises the girl to try to get her stress under control, to not think what will happen if she doesn't pass her exams, to see a psychologist.; 5 She should come in two weeks, or immediately if she doesn't start feeling better or suddenly gets worse.

Here you can find the recordings from the "Listening" section:

http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-01-Part1-1.mp3 http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-02-Part1-2.mp3 http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-03-Part1-3.mp3 http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-04-Part1-4.mp3 http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-05-Part2.mp3 http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-06-Part3.mp3 http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-07-Part4-1.mp3 http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-08-Part4-2.mp3 http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-09-Part4-3.mp3 http://www.bridge-online.cz/wp-content/uploads/B-CD-2017-01-TRACK-10-Part4-4.mp3
FCE
Reading and Use of English
Part 1:1B, 2D, 3A, 4D, 5A, 6C, 7C, 8D
Part 2: 9 that / which, 10 to, 11 by, 12 on, 13 on, 14 had, 15 of, 16 out
Part 3: 17 voluntary / volunteer, 18 interested, 19 elderly, 20 neighbourhood, 21 simply, 22 passionate, 23 detailed, 24 difference
Part 4: 25 is more useful than, 26 (that) he had taken, 27 she didn't/did not mind, 28 if he had understood, 29 would rather go, 30 have been working
Part 5: 31B, 32B, 33C, 34D, 35A, 36D
Part 6: 37G, 38E, 39A, 40F, 41D, 42B
Part 7: 43D, 44C, 45B, 46C, 47D, 48A, 49A, 50B, 51D, 52B

Listening
Part 1:1B, 2C, 3C, 4A, 5B, 6A, 7C, 8C
Part 2: 9 two/2 years, 10 heat, 11 temperature, 12 trouble, 13 laptop, 14 IT teacher, 15 nervous, 16 scientists, 17 by surprise, 18 Christmas tree
Part 3: 19E, 20C, 21A, 22H, 23B
Part 4: 24B, 25C, 26A, 27B, 28A, 29C, 30C

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Maturita Special Solutions - Bridge-online.cz

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Here you can find the solutions for the Maturita Practice Exam and Cambridge First (FCE) Practice Exam from the Bridge Magazine maturita special (January-February 2017).

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I would like to know definition of the word, because I understand it just from context.

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What if a photo showed how beautiful you were on the inside? Read what happens when people download a new app called TrueBeauty.

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Imagine knowing every plate of food you eat could be your last. That breakfast, lunch and dinner are potentially deadly. And you have to eat them anyway.

For a group of young women in the Third Reich, this was their daily reality: they tested Hitler's food during the last two-and-a-half years of World War Two. The Führer demanded young women of good German stock sample each of the meals made for him, in case the Allies, or one of his own, were trying to poison him. Such a role was seen as a kind of honour - a way to serve.

The astonishing story of these young women's experiences only came to light in 2013, when the then 95-year-old Margot Wölk revealed her former role to the German magazine Der Spiegel. Now, Hitler's Tasters, a play by Michelle Kholos Brooks freely imagines what risking your life, fork by fork, was really like.

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The show has been seen in various theatres across the US, but now comes to the Edinburgh Fringe - the world's biggest arts festival - for a month. Performed by an all-female cast, it focuses on four young women (in reality, about 15 were used on rotation) who lived in a schoolhouse next to Wolf's Lair, Hitler's Eastern Front headquarters in East Prussia (now Poland).

Brooks heard about Hitler's tasters quite by accident - a writing partner mentioned the story in passing when they were killing time before a flight. "I said 'are you going to write that? Because if you're not, I'm going to write that,'" she recalls. As a story, it seemed instantly and obviously thematically rich to Brooks. "It just hits every button of things that I think about and worry about: how young women are treated, how children are used in fields of war, how hard it is to be an adolescent woman, political manipulation..."

All of which sounds heavy-going, but the play is actually a comedy - albeit a black one. And Brooks sets it in its historical moment while also imagining these trapped young women as contemporary teenagers. The girls dance to pop music and pose for selfies, but gossip about fancying Frank Sinatra, Clark Gable and - queasily - Hitler himself; they speak like Californian valley girls, calling each other "girlfriend" or "loser", but then spout hatred for Jewish people.

"I was watching these young women taking selfies, seeing their deep commitment to getting the right selfie, and it hit me that these are the same girls. There is no difference except for time," says Brooks on her decision to have this double perspective. "I didn't want these characters to be sepia-toned people in history, I wanted them to feel very, very present."

The play uses this strange chapter of World War Two history as a way to examine the universal experience of being an adolescent woman - albeit in an extraordinarily high-stakes environment. But the thing about life for the tasters was that while each mouthful was fraught with peril, it was also an incredibly banal and boring existence.

Compared to many people's experiences in the war, they had it easy on one level - by 1944, many people were going very hungry in Germany, and they were getting three square meals a day. Of course, they were vegetarian meals - Hitler famously eschewed meat - and Wölk described a diet of vegetables, rice, pasta, noodles and exotic fruits, a real rarity at the time. But although the food "was good - very good" she added that they couldn't enjoy it.

"Some of the girls started to shed tears as they began eating because they were so afraid," she said in an interview in 2013. "We had to eat it all up. Then we had to wait an hour, and every time we were frightened that we were going to be ill. We used to cry like dogs because we were so glad to have survived."

Members of the SS would serve the food, wait the hour to see if the girls keeled over, and if they didn't, the food would be taken to Hitler. But in between each meal, the young women had little to do except sit around and wait to see if they died.

Getting under their skin in her writing was "about how they kill time, how they kill boredom," Brooks explains. "What do they talk about? I feel like to survive that you have to just keep getting back to being girls: you have to braid each other's hair, and laugh, find a way to make sense of the insanity that's happening."

As far as we know, none of the real girls were ever actually poisoned by the food. But their story is barely documented - if it hadn't been for Wölk's account, it would never have been known. It seems that she was the only of Hitler's tasters who survived: as Russian forces advanced, a lieutenant sneaked her out on Joseph Goebbels's train, heading to Berlin. It's thought that all the other girls who remained were shot by Soviet soldiers.

Making comedy from such a situation can be "a funny line to walk" she acknowledges - and she has had people ask her if it's okay to laugh at the play, or even refuse to see the show. "Some people have said they don't want to see it because we're laughing about something awful - but if you saw the show you would know [we're not]. We're not in cahoots with Hitler, we actually don't like him!" jokes Brooks, a little incredulous that such a thing needs spelling out. Hitler's Tasters is about laughing with these young, essentially innocent women - and acknowledging that laughing at melomaniac fascists is one way to diminish their power.
Hitler's Tasters is playing at Greenside @ Infirmary Street, Edinburgh until 24 August 2019.
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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Imagine knowing every plate of food you eat could be your last. That breakfast, lunch and dinner are potentially deadly. And you have to eat them anyway. For a group of young women in the Third Reich, this was their daily reality: they tested Hitler's food during the last two-and-a-half years of World War Two.

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They were feasts of sublime asparagus - laced with fear. And for more than half a century, Margot Woelk kept her secret hidden from the world, even from her husband. Then, a few months after her 95th birthday, she revealed the truth about her wartime role: Adolf Hitler's food taster.

Woelk, then in her mid-twenties, spent 2½ years as one of 15 young women who sampled Hitler's food to make sure it wasn't poisoned before it was served to the Nazi leader in his "Wolf's Lair," the heavily guarded command centre in what is now Poland, where he spent much of his time in the final years of the Second World War.

"He was a vegetarian. He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there," Woelk said of the Nazi leader. "And Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him - that's why he had 15 girls taste the food before he ate it himself."

With many Germans contending with food shortages and a bland diet as the war dragged on, sampling Hitler's food had its advantages.

"The food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine. And always with a side of rice or pasta," she recalled. "But this constant fear - we knew of all those poisoning rumors and could never enjoy the food. Every day we feared it was going to be our last meal."

Secret past only recently revealed

The petite widow's story is a tale of the horror, pain and dislocation endured by people of all sides who survived the Second World War.

Only now in the sunset of her life has she been willing to relate her experiences, which she had buried because of shame and the fear of prosecution for having worked with the Nazis, although she insists she was never a party member. She told her story as she flipped through a photo album with pictures of her as a young woman, in the same Berlin apartment where she was born in 1917.

Woelk first revealed her secret to a local Berlin reporter a few months ago. Since then, interest in her life story has been overwhelming. School teachers wrote and asked her for photos and autographs to bring history alive for their students. Several researchers from a museum visited to ask for details about her life as Hitler's taster.

Woelk says her association with Hitler began after she fled Berlin to escape Allied air attacks. With her husband gone and serving in the German army, she moved in with relatives about 435 miles (700 kilometres) to the east in Rastenburg, then part of Germany; now it is Ketrzyn, in what became Poland after the war.

There she was drafted into civilian service and assigned for the next 2½ years as a food taster and kitchen bookkeeper at the Wolf's Lair complex, located a few miles (kilometres) outside the town. Hitler was secretive, even in the relative safety of his headquarters, that she never saw him in person - only his German shepherd Blondi and his SS guards, who chatted with the women.

All other tasters shot

Hitler's security fears were not unfounded. On July 20, 1944, a trusted colonel detonated a bomb in the Wolf's Lair in an attempt to kill Hitler. He survived, but nearly 5,000 people were executed following the assassination attempt, including the bomber.

"We were sitting on wooden benches when we heard and felt an incredible big bang," she said of the 1944 bombing. "We fell off the benches, and I heard someone shouting 'Hitler is dead!' But he wasn't. "

Following the blast, tension rose around the headquarters. Woelk said the Nazis ordered her to leave her relatives' home and move into an abandoned school closer to the compound.

With the Soviet army on the offensive and the war going badly for Germany, one of her SS friends advised her to leave the Wolf's Lair.

She said she returned by train to Berlin and went into hiding.

Woelk said the other women on the food tasting team decided to remain in Rastenburg since their families were all there and it was their home.

"Later, I found out that the Russians shot all of the 14 other girls," she said. It was after Soviet troops overran the headquarters in January 1945.

When she returned to Berlin, she found a city facing complete destruction. Round-the-clock bombing by U.S. and British planes was grinding the city centre to rubble.

On April 20, 1945, Soviet artillery began shelling the outskirts of Berlin and ground forces pushed through toward the heart of the capital against strong resistance by die-hard SS and Hitler Youth fighters.

After about two weeks of heavy fighting, the city surrendered on May 2 - after Hitler, who had abandoned the Wolf's Lair about five months before, had committed suicide. His successor surrendered a week later, ending the war in Europe.

For many Berlin civilians - their homes destroyed, family members missing or dead and food almost gone - the horror did not end with capitulation.

Memories 'haunt me at night'

"The Russians then came to Berlin and got me, too," Woelk said. "They took me to a doctor's apartment and raped me for 14 consecutive days. That's why I could never have children. They destroyed everything."

Like millions of Germans and other Europeans, Woelk began rebuilding her life and trying to forget as best she could her bitter memories and the shame of her association with a criminal regime that had destroyed much of Europe.

She worked in a variety of jobs, mostly as a secretary or administrative assistant. Her husband returned from the war but died 23 years ago, she said.

With the frailty of advanced age and the lack of an elevator in her building, she has not left her apartment for the past eight years. Nurses visit several times a day, and a niece stops by frequently, she said.

Now near the end of her life, she feels the need to purge the memories by talking about her story.

"For decades, I tried to shake off those memories," she said. "But they always came back to haunt me at night."

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Hitler's food taster reveals haunting past | CBC News

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They were feasts of sublime asparagus - laced with fear. And for more than half a century, Margot Woelk kept her secret hidden from the world, even from her husband. Then, a few months after her 95th birthday, she revealed the truth about her wartime role: Adolf Hitler's food taster.

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Explanations > Behaviors > Lying > Four Colors of Lies

There are four types of lie that can be characterized by naming them with four colors: Gray, White, Black and Red.

Two dimensions

To get the four colors we need to create two dimensions which are each subdivided into two categories. These are about who is affected by the lie.

How it affects me

The forces of evolution naturally push us towards self-preservation, especially when we feel threatened. When basic needs seem at risk we hence become inclined to lie in order to protect ourselves.

We also lie to get less basic needs, for example to fulfil our personal or received goals. Lying always causes values conflict and selfish lies cause even greater dissonance. This hence tends to reduce self as a primary reason for lying (or at least in terms of personal justification).

How it affects others

What we say often has an effect on others, especially when we are directly communicating with them. Lies may help or harm others and the thought of this impacts how or whether we lie.

The decision to lie to others is particularly affected by social values which at least say we should do no harm. As a result, decisions to lie can be a complex balance of who is affected and by how much.

Four lies

The four types of lie can be illustrated by the matrix below.

White lie

In this model, white lies are altruistic as we seek first to help others, even at some cost to ourselves.

In practice, there are shades of white and what we tell ourselves are white lies are often tending more towards gray than pure white.

Even when we lose out significantly, there is arguably always some benefit, for example in the way we feel good about our actions and how others praise or thank us for our selflessness.

Gray lie

Most of the lies we tell are gray lies. They are partly to help others and partly to help ourselves. They may vary in the shade of gray, depending on the balance of help and harm.

Gray lies are, almost by definition, hard to clarify. For example you can lie to help a friend out of trouble but then gain the reciprocal benefit of them lying for you while those they have harmed in some way lose out.

Black lie

Black lies are about simple and callous selfishness. We tell black lies when others gain nothing and the sole purpose is either to get ourselves out of trouble (reducing harm against ourselves) or to gain something we desire (increasing benefits for ourselves).

The worst black lies are very harmful for others. Perhaps the very worst gain us a little yet harm others a great deal.

Red lie

Red lies are about spite and revenge. They are driven by the motive to harm others even at the expense of harming oneself. They may even be carved in blood.

When we are angry at others, perhaps because of a long feud or where we feel they have wronged us in some way, we feel a sense of betrayal and so seek retributive justice, which we may dispense without thought of consequence.

Seek to understand lies and the motivation beneath them. Then respond to the lies in ways that help people tell the truth or otherwise further your aims.

When lying yourself, question your own motives. It is easy to think you are telling white lies when actually they are a certain shade of gray.

See also

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Explanations > Behaviors > Lying > Four Colors of Lies There are four types of lie that can be characterized by naming them with four colors: Gray, White, Black and Red. To get the four colors we need to create two dimensions which are each subdivided into two categories.

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1) | Why do people lie?
(2) | Is it OK to tell lies?
(3) | How often do you lie?
(4) | What’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told?
(5) | Children who are good liars often grow up to be very intelligent. Were you a good liar when you were a child?
(6) | Have you ever lied in a job interview?
(7) | Have you told any lies today?
(8) | Who lies more, men or women?
(9) | Has a lie someone told you ever hurt you?
(10) | What do you think of liars?

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When trying to obtain the truth from a dishonest employee, a suspect involved in another type of criminal investigation, or even a member of your family, we typically see five types of lies. These lies include:

Lies of Denial. This type of lie will involve an untruthful person (or a truthful person) simply saying that they were not involved.

Lies of Omission. A lie of omission is often referred to as the "lie of choice," as the person using this method can blame the interviewer for not asking the right question.

Lies of Fabrication. Fabrication is typically the most difficult type of lie for an individual to tell; the dishonest person needs to make up their "facts" as they are telling them, which of course makes it harder to remember later.

Lies of Minimization. Minimization involves attempts to distort the truth by making statements like "It was an accident" or "It was already damaged, though" in an attempt to minimize what they've done.

Lies of Exaggeration. This type of lie is similar to the lie of minimization in that there is a distortion of the truth; however, the subject will overstate what happened. For example, they might say something like, "Yeah, I am responsible for all the losses here."

It's always important to be aware of all five types of lies when interviewing a dishonest associate, another type of criminal-and yes, even someone in your family.

Every loss prevention investigator should continuously strive to enhance their investigative interviewing skills as part of an ongoing commitment to best-in-class interviewing performance. This includes holding ourselves to an elite standard of interview and interrogation training that is ethical, moral and legal while demanding excellence in the pursuit of the truth. The International Association of Interviewers (IAI) and Wicklander-Zulawski (WZ) provide interview and interrogation training programs and additional guidance to investigators when dealing with dishonest employees, employee theft, sexual harassment, policy violations, building rapport, pre-employment interviewing, lying, denials and obtaining a statement.

By focusing on the latest information and research from experts in the field as well as academic, legal and psychological resources, these video tips provide interview and interrogation training techniques that can enhance the skill sets of professionals with backgrounds in law enforcement, loss prevention, security, asset protection, human resources, auditors or anyone looking to obtain the truth.

To learn more about interview and interrogation training and how you can further develop your professional skill sets, please visit www.w-z.com or www.certifiedinterviewer.com for additional information.
This article was originally published in 2015 and was updated September 3, 2018.

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Interview and Interrogation Training: The Five Types of Lies

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When trying to obtain the truth from a dishonest employee, a suspect involved in another type of criminal investigation, or even a member of your family, we typically see five types of lies. These lies include: Lies of Denial. This type of lie will involve an untruthful person (or a truthful person) simply saying that they were not involved.

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Jack and Beverly Wilgus, collectors of vintage photographs, no longer recall how they came by the 19th-century daguerreotype of a disfigured yet still-handsome man. It was at least 30 years ago. The photograph offered no clues as to where or precisely when it had been taken, who the man was or why he was holding a tapered rod. But the Wilguses speculated that the rod might be a harpoon, and the man's closed eye and scarred brow the result of an encounter with a whale.

So over the years, as the picture rested in a display case in the couple's Baltimore home, they thought of the man in the daguerreotype as the battered whaler.

In December 2007, Beverly posted a scan of the image on Flickr, the photo-sharing Web site, and titled it "One-Eyed Man with Harpoon." Soon, a whaling enthusiast e-mailed her a dissent: that is no harpoon, which suggested that the man was no whaler. Months later, another correspondent told her that the man might be Phineas Gage and, if so, this would be the first known image of him.

Beverly, who had never heard of Gage, went online and found an astonishing tale.

In 1848, Gage, 25, was the foreman of a crew cutting a railroad bed in Cavendish, Vermont. On September 13, as he was using a tamping iron to pack explosive powder into a hole, the powder detonated. The tamping iron-43 inches long, 1.25 inches in diameter and weighing 13.25 pounds-shot skyward, penetrated Gage's left cheek, ripped into his brain and exited through his skull, landing several dozen feet away. Though blinded in his left eye, he might not even have lost consciousness, and he remained savvy enough to tell a doctor that day, "Here is business enough for you."

Gage's initial survival would have ensured him a measure of celebrity, but his name was etched into history by observations made by John Martyn Harlow, the doctor who treated him for a few months afterward. Gage's friends found him"no longer Gage," Harlow wrote. The balance between his "intellectual faculties and animal propensities" seemed gone. He could not stick to plans, uttered "the grossest profanity" and showed "little deference for his fellows." The railroad-construction company that employed him, which had thought him a model foreman, refused to take him back. So Gage went to work at a stable in New Hampshire, drove coaches in Chile and eventually joined relatives in San Francisco, where he died in May 1860, at age 36, after a series of seizures.

In time, Gage became the most famous patient in the annals of neuroscience, because his case was the first to suggest a link between brain trauma and personality change. In his book An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage, the University of Melbourne's Malcolm Macmillan writes that two-thirds of introductory psychology textbooks mention Gage. Even today, his skull, the tamping iron and a mask of his face made while he was alive are the most sought-out items at the Warren Anatomical Museum on the Harvard Medical School campus.

Michael Spurlock, a database administrator in Missoula, Montana, happened upon the Wilgus daguerreotype on Flickr in December 2008. As soon as he saw the object the one-eyed man held, Spurlock knew it was not a harpoon. Too short. No wooden shaft. It looked more like a tamping iron, he thought. Instantly, a name popped into his head: Phineas Gage. Spurlock knew the Gage story well enough to know that any photograph of him would be the first to come to light. He knew enough, too, to be intrigued by Gage's appearance, if it was Gage. Over the years, accounts of his changed character had gone far beyond Harlow's observations, Macmillan says, turning him into an ill-tempered, shiftless drunk. But the man in the Flickr photogragh seemed well-dressed and confident.

It was Spurlock who told the Wilguses that the man in their daguerreotype might be Gage. After Beverly finished her online research, she and Jack concluded that the man probably was. She e-mailed a scan of the photograph to the Warren museum. Eventually it reached Jack Eckert, the public-services librarian at Harvard's Center for the History of Medicine. "Such a 'wow' moment," Eckert recalls. It had to be Gage, he determined. How many mid-19th-century men with a mangled eye and scarred forehead had their portrait taken holding a metal tool? A tool with an inscription on it?

The Wilguses had never noticed the inscription; after all, the daguerreotype measures only 2.75 inches by 3.25 inches. But a few days after receiving Spurlock's tip, Jack, a retired photography professor, was focusing a camera to take a picture of his photograph. "There's writing on that rod!" Jack said. He couldn't read it all, but part of it seemed to say, "through the head of Mr. Phi..."

In March 2009, Jack and Beverly went to Harvard to compare their picture with Gage's mask and the tamping iron, which had been inscribed in Gage's lifetime: "This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phinehas P. Gage," it reads, misspelling the name.

Harvard has not officially declared that the daguerreotype is of Gage, but Macmillan, whom the Wilguses contacted next, is quite certain. He has also learned of another photograph, he says, kept by a descendant of Gage's.

As for Spurlock, when he got word that his hunch was apparently correct, "I threw open the hallway door and told my wife, 'I played a part in a historical discovery!' "

Steve Twomey is based in New Jersey. He wrote about map and document thieves for the April 2008 issue of Smithsonian.

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Phineas Gage: Neuroscience's Most Famous Patient

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Jack and Beverly Wilgus, collectors of vintage photographs, no longer recall how they came by the 19th-century daguerreotype of a disfigured yet still-handsome man. It was at least 30 years ago. The photograph offered no clues as to where or precisely when it had been taken, who the man was or why he was holding a tapered rod.

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The Legacy of Patient H.M. for Neuroscience

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H.M. is probably the best known single patient in the history of neuroscience. His severe memory impairment, which resulted from experimental neurosurgery to control seizures, was the subject of study for five decades until his death in December 2008.…

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Henry Molaison, known by thousands of psychology students as "HM," lost his memory on an operating table in a hospital in Hartford in August 1953. He was 27 years old and had suffered from epileptic seizures for many years.

William Beecher Scoville, a Hartford neurosurgeon, stood above an awake Henry and skilfully suctioned out the seahorse-shaped brain structure called the hippocampus that lay within each temporal lobe. Henry would have been drowsy and probably didn't notice his memory vanishing as the operation proceeded.

The operation was successful in that it significantly reduced Henry's seizures, but it left him with a dense memory loss. When Scoville realized his patient had become amnesic, he referred him to the eminent neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield and neuropsychologist Dr. Brenda Milner of Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), who assessed him in detail. Up until then, it had not been known that the hippocampus was essential for making memories, and that if we lose both of them we will suffer a global amnesia. Once this was realized, the findings were widely publicized so that this operation to remove both hippocampi would never be done again.

Penfield and Milner had already been conducting memory experiments on other patients and they quickly realized that Henry's dense amnesia, his intact intelligence, and the precise neurosurgical lesions made him the perfect experimental subject. For 55 years, Henry participated in numerous experiments, primarily at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Professor Suzanne Corkin and her team of neuropsychologists assessed him.

Access to Henry was carefully restricted to less than 100 researchers (I was honored to be one of them), but the MNI and MIT studies on HM taught us much of what we know about memory. Of course, many other patients with memory impairments have since been studied, including a small number with amnesias almost as dense as Henry's, but it is to him we owe the greatest debt. His name (or initials!) has been mentioned in almost 12,000 journal articles, making him the most studied case in medical or psychological history. Henry died on December 2, 2008, at the age of 82. Until then, he was known to the world only as "HM," but on his death his name was revealed. A man with no memory is vulnerable, and his initials had been used while he lived in order to protect his identity.

Henry's memory loss was far from simple. Not only could he make no new conscious memories after his operation, he also suffered a retrograde memory loss (a loss of memories prior to brain damage) for an 11-year period before his surgery. It is not clear why this is so, although it is thought this is not because of his loss of the hippocampi on both sides of his brain. More likely it is a combination of his being on large doses of antiepileptic drugs and his frequent seizures prior to his surgery. His global amnesia for new material was the result of the loss of both hippocampi, and meant that he could not learn new words, songs or faces after his surgery, forgot who he was talking to as soon as he turned away, didn't know how old he was or if his parents were alive or dead, and never again clearly remembered an event, such as his birthday party, or who the current president of the United States was.

In contrast, he did retain the ability to learn some new motor skills, such as becoming faster at drawing a path through a picture of a maze, or learning to use a walking frame when he sprained his ankle, but this learning was at a subconscious level. He had no conscious memory that he had ever seen or done the maze test before, or used the walking frame previously.

We measure time by our memories, and thus for Henry, it was as if time stopped when he was 16 years old, 11 years before his surgery. Because his intelligence in other non-memory areas remained normal, he was an excellent experimental participant. He was also a very happy and friendly person and always a delight to be with and to assess. He never seemed to get tired of doing what most people would think of as tedious memory tests, because they were always new to him! When he was at MIT, between test sessions he would often sit doing crossword puzzles, and he could do the same ones again and again if the words were erased, as to him it was new each time.

Henry gave science the ultimate gift: his memory. Thousands of people who have suffered brain damage, whether through accident, disease or a genetic quirk, have given similar gifts to science by agreeing to participate in psychological, neuropsychological, psychiatric and medical studies and experiments, and in some cases by gifting their brains to science after their deaths. Our knowledge of brain disease and how the normal mind works would be greatly diminished if it were not for the generosity of these people and their families (who are frequently also involved in interviews, as well as transporting the "patient" back and forth to the psychology laboratory). After Henry's death, his brain was dissected into 2,000 slices and digitized as a three-dimensional brain map that could be searched by zooming in from the whole brain to individual neurons. Thus, his tragically unique brain has been preserved for posterity.

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Henry Molaison, known by thousands of psychology students as "HM," lost his memory on an operating table in a hospital in Hartford in August 1953. He was 27 years old and had suffered from epileptic seizures for many years.

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A Part of Conversation Questions for the ESL Classroom.Do you have a good memory or a bad memoryDo you usually remember things or forget things?Would you like to have a perfect memory?Why or why not?How would it change your life?Who do you know who has the best memory?Can you tell us about them?Who do you know who has the worst memory?Can you tell us about them?What's your earliest memory?When was it?Can you tell us about your earliest memories in detail?What's your most vivid memory?When was it?Can you tell us in detail about it?Have you ever forgotten something important, like your keys or your phone?Can you tell the us what you did?Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you went there?

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A Part of Conversation Questions for the ESL Classroom.Do you have a good memory or a bad memoryDo you usually remember things or forget things?Would you like to have a perfect memory?Why or why not?How would it change your life?Who do you know who has the best memory?Can you tell us about them?Who do you know who has the worst memory?Can you tell us about them?What's your earliest memory?When was it?Can you tell us about your earliest memories in detail?What's your most vivid memory?When was it?Can you tell us in detail about it?Have you ever forgotten something important, like your keys or your phone?Can you tell the us what you did?Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you went there?

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Listen to the classroom conversation about the benefits of sport and do the exercises to practise and improve your listening skills.

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B1 Reading Test

Read the text a famous British town and for questions 1 to 7, choose the correct answers.

Chocolate town for chocolate workers

If you love chocolate, maybe you have eaten a bar of Cadbury's Bournville chocolate. But Bournville isn't just the name of an English chocolate bar. It's the name of a village which was built especially for workers at the Cadbury's chocolate factory.
George and Richard Cadbury took over the cocoa and chocolate business from their father in 1861. A few years later, they decided to move the factory out of the centre of Birmingham, a city in the middle of England, to a new location where they could expand. They chose an area close to the railways and canals so that they could receive milk deliveries easily and send the finished products to stores across the country.

Here, the air was much cleaner than in the city centre, and the Cadbury brothers thought it would be a much healthier place for their employees to work. They named the site Bournville after a local river called 'The Bourn'. 'Ville', the French word for town, was used because at the time, people thought French chocolate was the highest quality. The new factory opened in 1879. Close to it, they built a village where the factory workers could live. By 1900, there were 313 houses on the site, and many more were built later.

The Cadbury family were religious and believed that it was right to help other people. They thought their workers deserved to live and work in good conditions. In the factory, workers were given a fair wage, a pension and access to medical treatment. The village was also designed to provide the best possible conditions for workers too. The houses, although traditional in style, had modern interiors, indoor bathrooms and large gardens. The village provided everything that workers needed including a shop, a school and a community centre where evening classes were held to train young members of the workforce.

Since the Cadbury family believed that their workers and their families should be fit and healthy, they added a park with hockey and football pitches, a running track, bowling green, fishing lake, and an outdoor swimming pool. A large clubhouse was built in the park so that players could change their clothes and relax after a game. Dances and dinners were also held here for the factory workers, who were never charged to use any of the sports facilities. However, because the Cadbury's believed that alcohol was bad for health and society, no pubs were ever built in Bourneville!

The Cadbury brothers were among the first business owners to ensure that their workers had good standards of living. Soon, other British factory owners were copying their ideas by providing homes and communities for their workers designed with convenience and health in mind. Today, over 25,000 people live in Bournville village. There are several facilities there to help people with special needs, such as care homes for the elderly, a hostel for people with learning difficulties and affordable homes for first-time homeowners and single people. Over a hundred years since the first house in Bournville Village was built, the aims of its founders are still carried out.

Reading comprehension test

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Chocolate town for chocolate workers - B1 English reading test - Test-English

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English B1 reading test for intermediate students (CEFR B1 level). Read a text about history and culture and answer the questions.

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'To rewild', or 're- wild', means 'to make something wild again'. The idea is to restore natural environments to their original state, back to how they were before human activity damaged them. Rewilding aims to put nature, not humans, in control.

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One of the most notorious robberies in English history took place on 8, August, 1963, when a gang of men stole over two million pounds (US$53 million in 2018) from a night mail train in the countryside outside London. The daring audacity of the raid and its meticulous planning have given the heist iconic status.

The story began months earlier when the gang received a tip-off from a post office worker that a mail train would be carrying bags of old banknotes to London for recycling, an irresistible prize for criminals as they would be untraceable.

After careful research, they chose a lonely spot 50 kilometres north of London and stopped the train in the early hours by making a false red signal.

They then swarmed onto the locomotive, hitting the driver over the head in the struggle that followed. After uncoupling the front two coaches containing the money, they drove the train to a bridge 800 metres ahead where the rest of the gang were waiting.

Here they unloaded the 128 mailbags weighing 2.5 tons onto trucks parked in the lane below. These were disguised as military vehicles taking part in a night exercise. The whole operation took just 30 minutes.

Driving slowly through back lanes to avoid detection, they arrived forty-five minutes later at a remote farmhouse which they had bought six weeks earlier. When they counted the money, they found it was far more than they had expected and amid noisy celebrations, they shared out the loot.

By listening in on police radio messages, they soon learned the police had guessed they were still in the area. Concerned that the farmhouse would soon be discovered, they decided to leave immediately and over the next 24 hours went their separate ways. Each man had about £150,000 (nearly US$4 million in 2018). The police found the farm four days later.

It was at this point that things started to go wrong. They had paid a man to clean up the farmhouse to remove all evidence but he never turned up, which meant that fingerprints remained at the farm. These would later lead to the arrest of some of the gang.

Meanwhile, as the story hit the headlines, public reaction was surprisingly sympathetic. People wished the robbers good luck rather than deplore their lawless behaviour, never mind that the driver had been brutally beaten.

The gang were eventually to become victims of their own success. The media frenzy put the police under intense pressure to make arrests, and as leading professional criminals, they were prime suspects. A few weeks later, an unknown informer who was in jail for another crime revealed most of their names, possibly in return for early release. By Christmas, most of the robbers had been caught.

When their trial came early in 1964, the sentences shocked the nation: the defendants were given a total of over 300 years in prison. The government had clearly been embarrassed by the raid - the train had neither security guards nor an alarm system - and was determined to make an example of the men.

Many criticised the harsh sentences, including the detective in charge of the investigation. But as it turned out, none of the gang served more than fifteen years, while a number escaped and four were never caught.

As for the money, to this day only a fraction of it has ever been recovered.

It is sobering to reflect that train driver, who had bravely defended the state's millions, received a mere £250 (US$6,700 in 2018) in compensation. Yet some of the robbers' wives were later paid thousands for their stories by the newspapers.

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The Great Train Robbery | Reading comprehension exercise

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The Great Train Robbery - Reading comprehension exercise for students of English. 606 words. Intermediate B1-B2. One of the UK's best-known crimes, the Great Train Robbery of 1963 was a daring heist that gave the robbers almost celebrity status. PDF download with reading comprehension, vocabulary and grammar exercises.

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The Great Train Robbery

The UK's best-known robbery took place on 8, August, 1963, when over two million pounds was stolen from a night mail train 50km from London. It is a crime that has passed into English folklore and has been the subject of countless books and movies.

Some months before the raid, a gang of professional criminals had received a tip-off from a postal worker that large quantities of used banknotes would be on the train. Such a prize proved irresistible, and they planned a military-style operation to get the money which even the police thought was brilliantly planned.

Stopping the train in the middle of the night with a false red signal, they unloaded the money bags into trucks and drove to a remote farmhouse which they had bought six weeks earlier.

Here they shared out the loot, and the following day went their separate ways. But problems arose when a man they had paid to clean up the farmhouse cheated them and failed to show up. As a result, the gang's fingerprint s were left at the farm.

Meanwhile, media attention put the police under intense pressure to make arrests. The robbers were all professional criminals, so they became prime suspects.

By Christmas, most of the gang had been caught, and two months later they were sentence d to over 300 years in prison. Many people were sympathetic to the robbers and thought the jail terms were too long. In the event none served more than 15 years while some managed to escape. Very little of the money has ever been recovered.

The Brink's Mat robbery

Pic:
bullion Vault (CC BY)
On 6, November, 1983, six gunmen robbed a high-security warehouse near London airport in Britain's biggest ever armed robbery. Let into the building by an inside accomplice, they threatened to kill the guards if they didn't open the vaults.

Here, instead of the £3 million cash they were expecting, they stumbled upon £26 million worth of gold bars awaiting transit abroad. Hardly able to believe their good luck, they cram med the 3 tons of gold into their elderly van (designed to carry 900kg) and with its floor almost touching the ground, drove away.

When the story hit the news, the gold price increased and the loot gained another £1 million in value overnight. But the robbers had bitten off more than they could chew. They had no idea how to dispose of the bullion and had to get help from other criminals to turn the gold into cash.

Meanwhile, the police quickly narrowed down their list of suspects and found that one of them was the brother-in-law of a security guard at the warehouse. In 1984 two men were jailed for 25 years; the security guard got 6 years.

The rest of the gang were never caught, but arguments over the disposal of the bullion arose, and gangland shootings related to the robbery have continued to this day.

Much of the gold was melted down and turned into jewellery. But a third of the haul, worth £10m, has never been found.

The Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary

Pic:
Ptone805 (CC BY)
It was the biggest burglary in English legal history: £14 million in cash, jewels and valuables, stolen from a safe deposit facility in central London over the Easter weekend in 2015.

It soon became clear that the heist was the work of seven, mainly elderly, men - the oldest was 76 - suffering from medical conditions that included diabetes and a heart problem. But the 'Bad Grandpas' were veteran criminals with histories stretching back to the 1960s.

On the evening before the Easter holiday, they entered the building and abseil ed down a lift shaft to the basement, at one point activating an alarm. Fortunately for them, the police failed to respond.

They then drilled a hole through the half-metre wall of the vault, only to find their way blocked by a huge metal cabinet weighing over a ton. Two of them gave up and went home, but the others drove off to find a power tool that could push the cabinet over and returned the next day to finish the job. They eventually left with the contents of 73 safe deposit boxes stuff ed into dustbins.

But carelessness was their undoing, and they were picked up on CCTV. The police then bugged their cars and listened to them chatting about their plans to spend the money. All were subsequently arrested and jailed.

Of the money, only around £4 million has been recovered. Some of the robbers, who have now served their sentences, have been jailed a second time for refusing to reveal where it is hidden.

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Three English robberies | Reading comprehension exercise

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Three English robberies - Reading comprehension exercise for students of English. 754 words. Intermediate B1-B2. Three 250-word texts on the best-known UK robberies since WWII: the Great Train Robbery, the Brink's Mat robbery and the Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary. PDF download with reading comprehension and vocabulary exercises.

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A Short But Incredibly Wise Parable of Socrates | Parable "Three Sieve"

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Choose the correct color idiom from the table to fill the space in each sentence. You may need to make some changes to the idioms to put them in the sentences correctly.

see red
green with envy
rose colored spectacles
tickled pink
black sheep of the family
caught red handed
blue-eyed boy

browned off
out of the blue
in the red
the green light
have green fingers
black market
white lie

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Advanced Vocabulary | Color Idioms | esl-lounge Student

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Choose the correct color idiom from the table to fill the space in each sentence. You may need to make some changes to the idioms to put them in the sentences correctly.

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Intermediate Reading | Contradictory Proverbs | esl-lounge Student

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Why do we need Anti-Bullying Day?

Unfortunately, bullying is really common. It affects millions of people's lives. It can happen anywhere, any time, to anyone. People who are bullied are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. They might lose interest in the activities they enjoy, avoid spending time with other people and not go to classes or school, which has a negative effect on their learning. Anti-Bullying Day aims to raise awareness about bullying, to support people who are experiencing it and to try to stop it from happening.

What is Anti-Bullying Day?

The United Nations Anti-Bullying Day takes place on 4 May. In Canada and some other parts of the world, 22 February is Pink Shirt Day, and people wear a pink-coloured shirt to stand up against bullying. Anti-Bullying Week takes place in England and Wales every November. The message is that bullying is never OK.

What is bullying?

Bullying can be physical, like hitting or kicking someone or stealing their things. It can also be with words - saying or writing mean things. Another type of bullying is social - choosing not to include someone, embarrassing someone or telling other people not to be friends with them. Bullying can happen at school, on public transport, when you're walking home, online ... in fact, it can happen anywhere. Bullying involves one person (or a group of people) who is more powerful than another. Their power could come from private information they have about someone, or their popularity, or maybe they are physically stronger.

Who's involved in bullying?

Bullying usually involves more people than you think. There are the people who bully and those who are bullied. Then there are 'bystanders'. A bystander is someone who joins in with the bullying and makes it worse, or encourages the bullying by watching and laughing. People who see bullying but do nothing to stop it are also bystanders.

What should you do if you see bullying happening?

An 'upstander', on the other hand, sees bullying and helps the person who is being bullied. Never join in with, laugh at or encourage bullying. You can support the person who is being bullied by walking away from the situation with them. Tell them that they don't deserve to be treated in that way and encourage them to reach out for help. If you feel confident and safe, you can tell the person who is bullying, calmly and directly, that their behaviour is not OK. Otherwise, you may decide to report the bullying to a trusted adult.

What can you do if you're being bullied?

If you're being bullied, you may feel helpless and that there's nothing you can do to make it stop. But there are things that you can do, and the bullying can be stopped. If you're being bullied in person, you could try walking away, ignoring it or telling the person to stop. If that doesn't work, it's really important to reach out to a friend or classmate and ask them for help. Or speak to a parent, a teacher or another adult you trust. Nobody should have to deal with bullying alone.
If you're being bullied online, leave the conversation and do not reply to mean messages. Save any evidence, for example by taking a screenshot or keeping a copy of the messages you've received, and speak to a trusted adult as soon as possible.

What can you do to avoid bullying someone?

There are lots of reasons why people bully others. They might just think it's funny or cool. Or perhaps they don't feel good about themselves, and they want to make themselves feel better. If you think that your actions could be hurting another person, it's important to realise this and to see that they don't deserve to be treated in that way. Try to find other, positive ways to interact with people and help them feel good about themselves. It's OK to admit that you've made a mistake. If you feel as if you can't handle the situation, talk to an adult you trust. Why not become someone who stands up against bullying instead?

We can all make a difference

Bullying is never acceptable, and we all have a part to play in standing up against it. So, whether it's offering support to a friend, telling someone that their behaviour is not OK or talking to an adult you trust - your actions can make a difference and help stop bullying.

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Do you know what to do if you see or experience bullying? Read this article to understand more about bullying and find out what you can do to stop it.

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Read the text and look at the questions that follow it. In this reading comprehension, the questions are true or false.

An Ipswich mother, who allowed her son to go on holiday during school term, has been fined £400 after her son repeatedly refused to go to school.

The 36-year-old mother, who can not be named for legal reasons, appeared before South East Suffolk Magistrates Court yesterday where magistrates heard her 14-year-old son was currently on holiday in Spain.

She told that court: "He just does not like going to school. Although he is getting better now and seems to be enjoying it."

The boy has had 145 unauthorised absences between October 15 last year and March 22 this year. His absences were blamed on a late-night life style.

The mother has been attending parenting classes voluntarily and told the court that she thought they were helping her.

Out of the last eight school sessions - there are two a day - he has attended five.

Chairman of the bench David Coe asked her if she thought she could get her son to school in future.

"Yes I think I can with some help," she said.

She told the court that he was on holiday during the time other pupils were doing work experience because he had not been given a place.

On sentencing Mr Coe said: "He is not in school and then he disappears on holiday. We would expect the local authority to bring this back to court quickly if there are further problems."

She was fined £400 and ordered to pay £50.

Yesterday's case is the second to be dealt with by south east Suffolk magistrates recently. Last month a 37-year-old was fined £50 after her son had attended just 16 out of 182 sessions.

And the cases follow national concern after Oxfordshire mother Patricia Amos was jailed for allowing her children to miss school. She was originally sentenced to 60 days' jail, but this was reduced on appeal.

Where Now?

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Advanced Reading | Mother Fined For Son's Absences | esl-lounge Student

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Read the text and look at the questions that follow it. In this reading comprehension, the questions are true or false. An Ipswich mother, who allowed her son to go on holiday during school term, has been fined £400 after her son repeatedly refused to go to school.

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There was an old lady who swallowed a lion. I have a book about ones there was an old lady who swallowed fly guy. That when a boy name's buzz have a pet fly. When the time he visited his grandma, his grandma swallowed his pet fly.

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Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid.

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The Concept of Role Theory

Any individual in any situation occupies a role in relation to other people. The particular individual with whom one is concerned in the analysis of any situation is usually given the name of focal person. He has the focal role and can be regarded as sitting in the middle of a group of people, with whom he interacts in some way in that situation. This group of people is called his role set. For instance, in the family situation, an individual's role set might be shown as in Figure 6. Role set

Figure 6

The role set should include all those with whom the individual has more than trivial interactions. Role definition
The definition of any individual's role in any situation will be a combination of the role expectations that the members of the role set have of the focal role. These expectations are often occupationally denned, sometimes even legally so. The role definitions of lawyers and doctors are fairly clearly defined both in legal and in cultural terms. The role definitions of, say, a film star or bank manager, are also fairly clearly defined in cultural terms, too clearly perhaps.

Individuals often find it hard to escape from the role that cultural traditions have defined for them. Not only with doctors or lawyers is the required role behaviour so constrained that if you are in that role for long it eventually becomes part of you, part of your personality. Hence, there is some likelihood that all accountants will be alike or that all blondes are similar - they are forced that way by the expectations of their role.

It is often important that you make it clear what your particular role is at a given time. The means of doing this are called, rather obviously, role signs. The simplest of role signs is a uniform. The number of stripes on your arm or pips on your shoulder is a very precise role definition which allows you to do certain very prescribed things in certain situations. Imagine yourself questioning a stranger on a dark street at midnight without wearing the role signs of a policeman!

In social circumstances, dress has often been used as a role sign to indicate the nature and degree of formality of any gathering and occasionally the social status of people present. The current trend towards blurring these role signs in dress is probably democratic, but it also makes some people very insecure. Without role signs, who is to know who has what role?

Place is another role sign. Managers often behave very differently outside the office and in it, even to the same person. They use a change of location to indicate a change in role from, say, boss to friend. Indeed, if you wish to change your roles you must find some outward sign that you are doing so or you won't be permitted to change - the subordinate will continue to hear you as his boss no matter how hard you try to be his friend. In very significant cases of role change, e.g. from a soldier in the ranks to officer, from bachelor to married man, the change of role has to have a very obvious sign, hence rituals. It is interesting to observe, for instance, some decline in the emphasis given to marriage rituals. This could be taken as an indication that there is no longer such a big change in role from single to married person, and therefore no need for a public change in sign.

In organisations, office signs and furniture are often used as role signs. These and other perquisites of status are often frowned upon, but they may serve a purpose as a kind of uniform in a democratic society; roles without signs often lead to confused or differing expectations of the role of the focal person.
Role ambiguity
Role ambiguity results when there is some uncertainty in the minds, either of the focal person or of the members of his role set, as to precisely what his role is at any given time. One of the crucial expectations that shape the role definition is that of the individual, the focal person himself. If his occupation of the role is unclear, or if it differs from that of the others in the role set, there will be a degree of role ambiguity. Is this bad? Not necessarily, for the ability to shape one's own role is one of the freedoms that many people desire, but the ambiguity may lead to role stress which will be discussed later on. The virtue of j ob descriptions is that they lessen this role ambiguity. Unfortunately, job descriptions are seldom complete role definitions, except at the lower end of the scale. At middle and higher management levels, they are often a list of formal jobs and duties that say little about the more subtle and informal expectations of the role. The result is therefore to give the individual an uncomfortable feeling that there are things left unsaid, i. e. to heighten the sense of role ambiguity.

Looking at role ambiguity from the other side, from the point of view of the members of the role set, lack of clarity in the role of the focal person can cause insecurity, lack of confidence, irritation and even anger among members of his role set. One list of the roles of a manager identified the following: executive, planner, policy maker, expert, controller of rewards and punishments, counsellor, friend, teacher. If it is not clear, through role signs of one sort or another, which role is currently the operational one, the other party may not react in the appropriate way - we may, in fact, hear quite another message if the focal person speaks to us, for example, as a teacher and we hear her as an executive.

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The Concept of Role Theory - IELTS reading practice test

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Any individual in any situation occupies a role in relation to other people. The particular individual with whom one is concerned in the analysis of any situation is usually given the name of focal person. He has the focal role and can be regarded as sitting in the middle of a group of people, with whom he interacts in some way in that situation.

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Carmen invades my mind a lot, even years after her astonishing death. Life is strange like that, sometimes. How people who didn't necessarily have a starring role in your life sometimes have the greatest impact.

As an adult, I think of Carmen as the mom I want to be. She's the mom I try to be, even though I will never be as carefree and full of joy as she was. I parent with law and order, Carmen did it with wildness and magic. As a kid, though, Carmen was the mom we all wished was our own. It was the way of preteen girls then and now; your own mother could never understand you the way another one could. Your own mom was never cool.

But Carmen really was cool-to us and to her own children. The other moms had the typical poofy 1980's hair and the "mom jeans" that have dreadfully come back in style. They sported pinched looks on their Mary Kay-painted faces. But not Carmen. She wore her dark hair long and parted in the middle, hippie-style, and her jeans were throwback bell bottoms, an ode to the decade before. She floated when she walked, as if her bare feet touched clouds instead of pavement. Her face was always devoid of make-up, always shining. Her presence was powerful. When she walked into a room, you immediately felt swathed in her beauty, in her bliss. You immediately became lighter.

Carmen didn't have rules and she didn't bake cookies or fold laundry. Instead, she let us roller skate in the basement without knee pads and since all of her daughters loved pizza, she served pizza for dinner every night. Her pantry was stocked, and it was a kid's dream: chips, cookies, and every sugar cereal imaginable-as long as you liked it dry, because there was no guarantee of milk in the fridge. It was a wonder that none of them were overweight, but Carmen's motto for life extended to food as well-indulge in what you love.

In the summer of my twelfth year, she would load up her Volvo station wagon with kids and drive us all to the pool, staying at a time when we were old enough to be dropped off, at a time when we should have been embarrassed to have a mom with us. I had somehow morphed to the age where the idea of my mother lying next to me on a towel, in a bathing suit no less, would have been a social travesty.

But we were never embarrassed of Carmen. It wasn't just because of how she looked, though that was some of it. She was younger than the other moms. We knew from Tally, the oldest, that Carmen had been just sixteen when she had her. It was blatantly clear that there was no man in Carmen's life, at least no steady man. She had dates a lot, dropping Tally and her sisters at whoever's house, winking at the parents and saying thanks so much, who knows what time I might get home. Carmen seemed oblivious to the tight smiles, the judgmental eyes that we all saw, too young to even understand judgment.

It was clear that Tally and her sisters had different fathers. They all resembled Carmen with the long dark hair and tight little gymnast bodies, but their faces were completely different, with only Tally bearing the same stunning, heavily lashed brown-gold eyes. Although it was a time when divorce was coming of age and more of us had broken homes than didn't, having a baby out of wedlock was still taboo. Having three was shocking.

Tally and her sisters seemed unbothered by it, and I could understand why. Although I myself had a great father, it was as if there was no need for one in Carmen's family, so rich was it, bursting at the seams with love. My parents balanced out with a whole good cop/bad cop routine of parenting, but Carmen had obliterated the need for that. She simply loved: softly and strongly. Her mothering was in the way she listened to us, the way she encouraged us to do thing we might otherwise roll our pre-pubescent eyes at: smell the flowers, lay down in the meadow next to her house and look for constellations, write down our dreams and burn them in a fire under a full moon. She was infused with something contagious.

None of us knew what Carmen did for a living because she never seemed to work. I don't know what she did during the school year, but in the summer nearly all her days were spent with any number of kids-in her house, at the pool, around a campfire. She seemed to be just as comfortable financially as any of our parents. Her house was modest but nice, there was a swimming pool and an acre of untouched land next to it. She drove a Volvo and her girls shopped at The Gap just like everyone else. But there were little signs that she was more well-off than she let on. The dark green Jaguar parked in her garage, the cleaning lady who came on Tuesdays.

The rumor mill was ripe with theories, I deduced, because she was different. Because we all wanted to be with her all the time, and the other parents just couldn't accept that it was because we liked her. They couldn't accept that a woman just might be independently wealthy by honest means. It couldn't be a family inheritance or smart investments. No, they presumed, she was a prostitute. She had a secret sugar daddy. She had married one of her children's fathers and divorced him for a hefty alimony.

I never believed any of that was true. I was a kid, and I didn't care about how or why Carmen had money.

The rumors, obviously, were born out of jealousy. We lived in a small town, and Carmen stood out like a beacon. At the pool, she laid on her towel in a red string bikini, her body with no signs of birthing babies, youth having snapped her right back into shape. She would pile her hair haphazardly on the top of her head, and the messy pieces that fell down gave her a wildly sexual look. She would saunter up to the snack bar with a ten-dollar bill in her hand, and the heads of every middle aged dad and teenage boy would arc towards her. She would drop the money and tell the kid behind the counter to let us get whatever we wanted.

As we grew older, I saw less of Carmen. Tally was really more of my sister's friend, and the other girls were younger than I was. In high school, I no longer needed rides to the pool or school, but I still looked for Carmen anytime I was somewhere she might be. There was something delicious about her. The way she would break into a genuine smile and run over to you with her arms wide, with hugs and kisses and smelling your hair as though she were enfolding a toddler into her embrace. Her aura would pour into you like a personal serotonin boost.

Sometimes I try to remember the last time I saw Carmen, but memory is a funny thing and has a habit of conglomerating lots of instances into one giant blur. I've settled on running into her at Tally and my sister's high school graduation, one year after my own. In the milling sea of red and blue gowns on the football field, everyone posing for pictures, I spotted her with Tally and the girls. I grabbed my sister's hand, and we abandoned our own family and ran to Carmen's.

The night was ablaze with excitement, the celebratory vibe pulsing, and Carmen's unfolding of her arms when she saw us felt regal, familiar. We ran into her, crashing a little too hard, all of us shrieking and forming an awkward group hug that somehow felt perfect.

"My girls!" she said, cupping first my face and then my sister's. We shone under her attention, our faces beaming. This is how I remember her, when I think of her, the long red and white sundress she had on, the dark hair shimmering under the lights on the field, her gold-flecked eyes radiating love. She was pure joy.

It would be the last time I saw Carmen.

A few years later, my sister sent me an email, in which she told me that Tally had contacted her to tell that Carmen had cancer, of all things. Melanoma. It seemed strange, being barely in our twenties. We weren't quite at the stage that parents were dying. And Carmen was what? Thirty-six, thirty-seven?

Tally said its treatable with surgery, my sister wrote. So hopefully no big deal.

I accepted the news with concern, but not too much concern. I was starting out in the world, working my first job at an advertising agency, dating a cute guy that would one day become my husband. Though Carmen crossed my mind often, the news of her cancer wasn't something that took up much space. No one died of melanoma, right? Wasn't that one where they just cut off the offending mole or blemish?

But just six months later, my sister called me, in tears. Tally had reported that the cancer was Stage V and had spread, viciously and relentlessly. My sister choked out that Tally had insisted that if she was ever your friend, now is the time to come see her. Tally was telling her this was the end. In my head I was unable to accept that this was happening-it was as if my sister were talking about someone else, someone we barely knew. Or as if it was just a rough patch, and Tally was just being dramatic. Carmen would pull through. I was young and naïve, and I didn't really understand that when you had multiple types of Stage V cancer, you didn't just pull through. You died.

I didn't go say goodbye.

In hindsight, I don't think I was ready to accept that a woman so full of life could just up and die. It all seemed so incomprehensible to me. Carmen was the most alive person I knew. I had never even lost a grandparent, so I wasn't ready to accept that anyone died, let alone Carmen. Not Carmen, who danced to music after midnight and taught us how to shave our legs and let sleepovers be real sleepovers, where we stayed up until dawn talking. She was full of life.

On the quiet August morning when I sat in my office and saw that I had a new email from my sister, with Carmen as the subject, I froze. I didn't want to open it, didn't want to read the inevitable news, didn't want to confront the guilt I'd been laying on that I hadn't made a trip home to see her yet. I kept adding on the yet, as if I was going to go, any day now. If you're her friend, now is the time to come see her. She had been my friend, but so much more-and I hadn't gone.

The funeral was a week later, and I remember so very little of it. A blur of black, so many of us the kids, the people she'd touched when we were in the most formative years of our live. Tally and her sisters sat in the front row, and I remember staring at the back of their heads, all of them bearing long, dark waves that reminded me so much of Carmen. I don't remember the words that anyone spoke, only the way their hair reminded me of riding in the backseat of the Volvo, the wind whipping Carmen's long locks while music blasted from the speakers.

After the service, I found Tally outside. Off around a corner of the church, she was smoking a cigarette, looking as glamourous as a girl possibly could on the day of her mother's burial. Decked out in a black suit with an impossibly short skirt, Tally saw me and opened her free arm in the same characteristic welcoming gesture that her mother had had.

"Hey girl," she said. Her eyes were puffy but dry. We talked about mundane stuff for a moment, the dumb conversations you have when you don't know what to say. I wanted to say something about why I hadn't come, but I couldn't find the words. Instead, I commented on the crowd.

"It's like she raised a village, huh?" I said, nodding my head towards the young adults flocking the outside of the church, waiting for the signal that it was time for the processional to the cemetery to begin.

Tally snorted. "Well, we can't expect the older folk to attend the funeral of the town escort, can we?"

I shook my head. "I never understood that," I said. "Why people have to make up stuff just because they're jealous."

Tally gave me a side eye, and a wry smile. "Come on. You know it was the truth. That was common knowledge, no?"

I simply stared at her. I was speechless.

Tally shrugged. "I guess we didn't really talk about it, but I assumed we all knew. I mean all those dates, and never a boyfriend?" She gave a short laugh. "She was working."

"I didn't know," I said, swallowing thickly, trying to keep my face empty of shock, trying not to show the assessment that my brain was trying to make. Carmen as a woman who slept with men for money did not resonate with the Carmen of my childhood.

"She wasn't a hooker," Tally said, defensively. "She was an escort. She was company, mostly, for old guys with money who just wanted a date. She barely slept with any of them, not that it matters."

I just stared at her. I had no idea what to do with this new information, this new piece of Carmen that had apparently, always existed.

Tally shook her head and blew out a cloud of smoke. "Not that it matters," she repeated. "It never did, you know? That was her job. It wasn't who she was." Tally dropped the cigarette and twisted her toe over it, turning to stare pointedly at me.

" You know who she was," she said. The heavy sadness on her face was crushing, the mark of a woman who was, for all intents and purposes, an orphan.

I nodded, reaching out to embrace her. "She was everything," I whispered, feeling waves of regret for any moment of judgment that had crossed my face. "Everything."

It's been a long time since Carmen died, and just as long since I've seen Tally or her sisters. We keep in touch via social media, like everyone does these days. I've watched Tally and her sisters get married and start families, watched the tightknit unit of the three of them and their husbands and most importantly, their daughters. I see Carmen in every single one of them-in the long, dark hair, in the crazy family parties, in the way they all laugh the same, with their whole heads thrown back.

I think about how my mother and her friends were right, after all. That Carmen was a woman who had sex for money, sometimes. As if that was the whole of her, the entirety of her being, peppered with a history of being a teenage mother and having children from different fathers. As if it wasn't just a way to make a solid living. As if those things so exclusively defined her that there was no room for anything else, no room for truth or friendship or love.

But Tally was right. I knew who she was. I knew her as a mom who made our childhood feel magical, who listened to us in our teenage years, who spread joy wherever she went. I knew her as someone who did everything for her kids, her biological ones, and the rest of us who fell in love with her. I knew her as a person in the back of my mind, always, when I had my own daughters and began the hard work of raising girls. I thought of how easy she made it seem, as if all it took was giving in, pizza and soda, no bedtimes, no boundaries.

Mostly, I'm not a mom like Carmen. I'm a mom who sleep-trained babies, who had strict bedtimes and grounded a child who took out her bike without a helmet. I have rules and boundaries and schedules...but sometimes, I like to think pieces of Carmen invade me, loosen up my joints and my heart and my breathlessness at life.

Because what she really taught us was how to grasp the moment. How to say yes when my girls ask if they can make brownies for breakfast. How to sit and listen without turning every situation into a teaching moment. How to be silly and to have fun even if people look at you funny. How to hug someone so there is never a doubt how much you love them.

My daughters and their friends are close to the age I was during those magical years of pool summers and stargazing. I feel this pull to emanate Carmen when I drive them around, when I let them blast music with the windows rolled down. I feel her when I catch their faces in the rearview mirror, their beautiful, unabashed delight.

I can see myself in them, years ago, wild and free in the back of a Volvo, me and Tally and our sisters, singing along to Madonna. At the wheel, Carmen's hair flies around her like a halo, her gorgeous face in the rearview mirror, her voice the strongest and most beautiful of us all.

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Mothering - A Drama Short Story by Lindsay Flo - Reedsy Prompts

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Carmen invades my mind a lot, even years after her astonishing death. Life is strange like that, sometimes. How people who didn't necessarily have a starring role in your life sometimes have the greatest impact. As an adult, I think of Carmen as the mom I want to be.

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In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun
You find the fun and snap!
The job's a game

And every task you undertake
Becomes a piece of cake
A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see that

A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way

A robin feathering his nest
Has very little time to rest
While gathering his bits of twine and twig
Though quite intent in his pursuit
He has a merry tune to toot
He knows a song will move the job along - for

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way

The honey bee that fetch the nectar
From the flowers to the comb
Never tire of ever buzzing to and fro
Because they take a little nip
From every flower that they sip
And hence (And hence),
They find (They find)
Their task is not a grind.

Ah-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h ah!

A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way

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Read an encyclopedia entry on the Taj Mahal to practise and improve your reading skills.

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You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-27, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

How I was floored by a tick

When Allan Little began to feel ill, he knew almost immediately what it was - Lyme Disease. But getting a medical diagnosis, and treatment, took a lot longer. I'd been going for years to the same little town in New England and Lyme Disease is everywhere there. You can't walk more than a few hundred metres in the countryside without coming across a public health notice warning you not to get bitten by a deer tick.

So the intense headache, the aching limbs, the burning joints, the ferocious fever and night sweats that hit me in a matter of hours, a few days after I'd got back to London, were all consistent with what I'd read about the condition. I went to a London GP, who wasn't convinced. She took a blood sample and advised me to go home, rest, and take paracetamol. The next day, the blood test came back. It was negative for Lyme. My condition grew worse. I could hardly stand up. I called another doctor, who came to my house. He was also sceptical. He took another blood test. This too came back negative. But he gave me a prescription for powerful painkillers which made me feel well enough to get on a train to Edinburgh, my home town.
Within three hours of arriving at Waverley Station I was an in-patient in the Infectious Diseases Department of the city's Western General Hospital: diagnosis, Acute Lyme Disease. By now I had found the tick bite and the distinctive livid red rash, about six inches in diameter. (To be fair to those London GPs, I hadn't noticed it when I'd consulted them.)
"It's attacked your liver," the Edinburgh Consultant said. "You have three distinct kinds of liver inflammation". I made a lame sick-bed joke: "You're sure that's not like Lager-and-Lime Disease then?" She laughed politely and reassured me that that would look quite different. Why then had both blood tests come back negative? Dr Roger Evans of Raigmore Hospital in Inverness is one of the UK's leading Lyme Disease researchers. "In early Lyme Disease," he told me, "the test is not reliable because no antibodies have been produced. In the first few weeks of infection, you could test negative, but still have Lyme Disease."

This is a problem for GPs, especially in urban centres where Lyme Disease is unfamiliar. Lyme is not a viral infection. It's bacterial. GPs will not prescribe antibiotics if they think you're showing symptoms of a viral infection - and it does look and feel like a bad case of flu, or chronic fatigue syndrome, neither of which can, or should, be treated with antibiotics. "In the early weeks of infection, when the blood test is not reliable," says Evans, "the GP needs to assess the patient clinically, looking for other symptoms that identify Lyme Disease." In other words, symptoms that distinguish it from flu.

If you have been bitten:

Remove the tick as soon as possible - the safest way is to use a pair of fine-tipped tweezers, or a tick removal tool

Grasp the tick as close to the skin as possible, pull upwards slowly and firmly, as mouthparts left in the skin can cause a local infection

Once removed, apply antiseptic to the bite area, or wash with soap and water and keep an eye on it for several weeks for any changes

Contact your GP if you begin to feel unwell and remember to tell them you were bitten by a tick or have recently spent time outdoors

Catching it early is vital. Angela Howard fell ill with Lyme Disease in the 1990s. She had never heard of it. Her doctor, she says, told her to go home and see whether her symptoms persisted. It was only when a visiting American friend saw the distinctive rash - concentric red rings around the place where the tick bite had occurred that she realised she might have Lyme Disease. She says her doctor was still reluctant to diagnose Lyme. "Doctors say you can only get this abroad - that it comes from overseas. But I hadn't been abroad. I'd been picnicking in Wiltshire." She was not treated early and her symptoms have persisted for years.

There is an accumulation of anecdotal evidence that Lyme Disease often goes undiagnosed. One problem is that no-one knows how prevalent it now is. It is not a notifiable disease in the National Health Service - doctors are not required to inform a central database when they diagnose it. So there is no reliable evidence of how widespread it is, or where in the country you are most likely to get it. Roger Evans at Raigmore Hospital wants to remedy that.

"We're using Scotland as a pilot study," he said. "We're trying to create maps of areas where there's a risk of tick exposure. We're using satellite data from the European Space Agency to create an app that will give information, but which will also be interactive, so that users can put in information about where they've been bitten and whether the Lyme Disease rash has appeared." Why has Lyme, which 30 years ago seemed largely limited to a small area of New England - Lyme is the town in Connecticut where it was first identified - now so prevalent across the continental USA and in Europe? One theory is climate change: that small gradations in climate can create new habitats for micro-organisms, or keep them alive and active for longer.

I was struck, at the time of my own treatment, that awareness was far greater in Scotland than in England and Wales. And awareness of the condition is vital to catching it early. For when you catch it early, treatment is easy and in most cases successful. It floors you though. It took me four or five months to get my strength and stamina back. It is a debilitating and dangerous illness and there is no doubt that it is getting more common. You can get it in the Scottish Highlands, in Devon and Cornwall, in Richmond Park in London and probably in your own back garden - anywhere where there are small furry animals on whose skins a deer tick can live. If you get it, you can get treatment. But take it from me: it really helps if you know what it is you've got.
Questions 15-22
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 15-22 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

Questions 23-27

Complete the sentences below.

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 23-27 on your answer sheet.

23. Angela's friend recognized the Lyme Disease as soon as she saw the rash.

24. One problem is, it's unknown how Lyme Disease is nowadays.

25. Roger Evans says that they try to create maps of Scotland where there's a risk of .

26. The one possible reason for Lyme Diseaes to move all over the world is .

27. You can catch the disease even in your own back .

Show answers

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IELTS Academic Reading free samples. Sample 9.2 - IELTS-up

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IELTS Academic Reading practice: sample 9, section 2. Read the text and answer the questions online. Finish full IELTS Reading sample to get your score.

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These Super-Scary Stories Will Keep You up at Night

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Past simple

We use the past simple to talk about past events in chronological order; i.e. for the story's main events.

We also use the past simple to talk about past habits or past states.

Past continuous

We use the past continuous the set the scene in a story.

The sun was shining and lots of tourists were lying on the beach. Suddenly ...

We use the past continuous for actions in progress in the past or longer actions interrupted by shorter actions in past simple.

Past perfect simple

We use the past perfect simple to talk about an earlier past: events which happened before the main event.

Earlier single events

We use the past perfect simple to talk about earlier events and experiences, or single actions completed earlier in the past.

We use the past perfect simple (and not continuous) to say how much or how many we had done of something earlier in the past.

Duration from earlier in the past (stative verbs)

We use the past perfect simple with stative verbs to talk about states or situations that had started earlier in the past. We often use how long, for or since, always, etc.

Past perfect continuous

Duration from earlier in the past (dynamic verbs)

We use the past perfect continuous with dynamic verbs to talk about l onger continuous actions that started earlier in the past than the main events of the story.

Repeated actions from earlier in the past (dynamic verbs)

We use the past perfect continuous with dynamic verbs to talk about repeated actions from earlier in the past.

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Narrative tenses - all past tenses - Test-English

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Revise the use of narrative tenses in English. Revision of past simple, past continuous, past perfect simple and past perfect continuous

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Past simple

We use the past simple to talk about past events in chronological order; i.e. for the story's main events.

We also use the past simple to talk about past habits or past states.

Past continuous

We use the past continuous the set the scene in a story.

The sun was shining and lots of tourists were lying on the beach. Suddenly ...

We use the past continuous for actions in progress in the past or longer actions interrupted by shorter actions in past simple.

Past perfect simple

We use the past perfect simple to talk about an earlier past: events which happened before the main event.

Earlier single events

We use the past perfect simple to talk about earlier events and experiences, or single actions completed earlier in the past.

We use the past perfect simple (and not continuous) to say how much or how many we had done of something earlier in the past.

Duration from earlier in the past (stative verbs)

We use the past perfect simple with stative verbs to talk about states or situations that had started earlier in the past. We often use how long, for or since, always, etc.

Past perfect continuous

Duration from earlier in the past (dynamic verbs)

We use the past perfect continuous with dynamic verbs to talk about l onger continuous actions that started earlier in the past than the main events of the story.

Repeated actions from earlier in the past (dynamic verbs)

We use the past perfect continuous with dynamic verbs to talk about repeated actions from earlier in the past.

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Narrative tenses - all past tenses - Page 2 of 3 - Test-English

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Revise the use of narrative tenses in English. Revision of past simple, past continuous, past perfect simple and past perfect continuous

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No Text Content!

CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15 CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18 CHAPTER 19 CHAPTER 20 CHAPTER 21 EPILOGUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT

For Sophie

To Whoever Reads This Note, My name is Nine and I need you to do me a favour. Go down Whinney's Passage until you reach the tumbledown terrace. Knock on the third door and say, "No strawberries today". Tell Pockets that Nine sent you. Tell the old weasel-faced devil he will never see me again. Why? Because he's wrong - sometimes life does bring you strawberries. Sometimes you are a whisper away from magic without even realising it. And that's exactly what happened to me. Nine

Nine crouched down behind the stacked fish crates at the bustling market. Dead fish always look so surprised, she thought. Surprised to be dead? Surprised to be caught? Well, no one would surprise Nine, anyway. She had no intention of being caught, or of dying, thank you very much. Even though she ran the risk of both every day of her life. Nine brushed her fingertips against the empty satchel slung across her body. It wouldn't be empty for long. Focus. She closed her eyes for a heartbeat, then opened them again. Just like a cat: sighting her prey, stalking it quietly, pouncing at the right moment. But instead of bringing a mouse back to her owner, Nine was after a different type of gift. She was falling out of favour with Pockets, the old gang-master. She needed to prove herself to him. Prove she was worth the roof over her head and the pathetic amount of food the old devil gave her each day. And this was her opportunity. Everyone was busy at the market, moving and chatting. It was the perfect place for a pounce. Barrows rattled, traders shouted, wagons rolled. A

shawl-wrapped fishwife was at the far end of her stall, yelling to the crowd about the Catch of the Day, which, as far as Nine was concerned, was just an extra-large, extra-surprised-looking fish. Nine ducked down behind the crates and peered around. A horse and cart clattered over the cobbles, obscuring her view. When it passed, she smiled. Her prey. A young lady stood with her back to Nine. She guessed, by her height and build, that the lady was only a few years older than herself, but she was beautifully dressed. She had a puffed-out scarlet dress and, more importantly, a fancy, beaded handbag. Nine's senses were on alert. Her muscles tensed. She moved into position, clenched her fists, stretched her fingers - her pre-pounce ritual. The scarlet lady was heading for the fabric shop across the street. Perfect. When she went to open the door - that moment of distraction - Nine would crash into her and snatch the bag. She was on in three... Oh, she loved the thrill. Two... Focus on the prey. One... The young lady was nearly at the door... Go! Nine sprinted over the cobbles, aiming for her prize- THWACK. Nine ran straight into her, clasped the bag- The shopkeeper opened the door right at that moment and his eyes fell on Nine and her outstretched hand. No! This was not good. Nine released the handbag. This was definitely not good. The scarlet-dress lady shrieked and stumbled backwards. With a flash of panic, Nine dashed back towards the fish baskets. She could duck and weave through the crates and- "HEY!" Nine gasped as two large hands slammed down on her shoulders. "I saw that, missy. What's your game?" growled the shopkeeper in a deep voice. "It's called 'catch'," said Nine. Then she twisted around, grabbed the Catch of the Day and threw it at his face. The shopkeeper staggered backwards, looking even more surprised than the fish. Nine shoved over the piled-up fish crates as hard as she could - dead fish oozing like spilled guts across the street - and the shopkeeper crashed into the stall. Nine took a

moment to appreciate the fishwife pounding him with a prize lobster, then ran through the streets, dodging people, horses, the huge steaming piles of - Squelch. Nine stopped, looked down at her filth-caked shoe and wrinkled her nose. "Oi!" Looking back, she saw the lobster-beaten shopkeeper running towards her. She huffed, then bolted as fast as she could through the market. She needed to disappear - to find protective walls to hide behind until he gave up the chase. Nine darted past shop windows and houses, longing for a glimpse of the one place she could go, the one place where she would always be safe. Ah! And there it was! Her muscles relaxed just a little. The tall, somewhat derelict building was the safest place in the world. Two of its windows were now boarded up, roof tiles were missing, but its faded, peeling blue door was ajar and waiting. Nine quickly glanced over her shoulder, and saw the shopkeeper still pushing past people and dodging stray dogs. A tiny smile escaped her, and Nine pushed open the door and slipped inside the library. The hinge squeaked as she closed the door behind her. Shhh. She mustn't be heard. Mustn't be seen. While she was here she would creep in, snatch a book and leave unnoticed. It was good practice, after all. A damp, musty smell hung in the air. A handful of ladies and gentlemen were dotted around the silent room, flicking through books and magazines, their backs towards her. No sign of the librarian. So far, so good. Nine stepped forward. A floorboard creaked. She held her breath. Nothing. She crept towards her favourite, but half-empty, shelf: mystery tales. Stories where answers were hidden and secrets unravelled and where, perhaps, for a moment, anything was possible. She trailed her fingertips across the soft, dark binding of the books as she passed. She loved books. One of the older thieflings had taught her to read before he'd flown the Nest. He was the only one in the Nest who had treated Nine as a person, rather than the muck now smeared on her shoe. Nine was so grateful. Inside every book was a world: a world to which she could escape. Her fingers stopped at a brown spine with gold lettering. The Mystery of Wolven Moor by Horatio Piddlewick. She stretched her fingers around the

book, eased it out gently, silently and- "Caught you," whispered a man's voice in her ear. Nine's heart leapt into her mouth, her fingers fumbled at the book and it fell towards the floor. A hand shot out and caught it. Nine put her hands on her hips and whirled around to face a gingerhaired librarian, who stood tall and proud. "What?! No! I was silent as the grave, Mr Downes!" The librarian's eyes twinkled joyously behind his horn-rimmed spectacles as he waggled a finger. "Ah, the floorboard creaked." Nine rolled her eyes as Mr Downes reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notebook. He tucked the library book under his arm and turned to a heavily marked page in the notebook. "I believe the score is ... yes, twelve points to me, five to you." He beamed at Nine, then frowned suddenly and wrinkled his nose. "What is that smell?" Nine tucked her filth-caked shoe behind her other leg. "Can't smell anything." "Hmmm," said Mr Downes, twisting his mouth to one side. He untucked the book and glanced at the cover. "The Mystery of Wolven Moor?" "I've read it three times already. You really need to get some new books." The joyful look in the librarian's eyes faded away and worry lined his face. "You know the library cannot buy new books. There's not even enough to repair the building. It's a miracle we're still open!" "Well, then," said Nine quietly, snatching the book back and marching for the front door. "This one will have to do." "Nine," hissed Mr Downes as he scurried along beside her, "must I keep reminding you? Without a guardian's signature and a disclosed address, you cannot have an account, and if you do not have an account, you are not permitted to borrow books from this library." "It's for a friend." "And this friend, I presume, also does not have an account and is not permitted to-" Nine stopped just before she reached the front door. "You going to let me take it or not?" Mr Downes looked at Nine and raised a gingery eyebrow. "One week." Nine tucked the book into her satchel, gave the librarian a wink and walked out the door, smiling at the noisy, exasperated sigh from Mr Downes as she left.

As she stepped outside a grey-bearded man, staring down at the ground, almost walked into her. A protest was on the tip of her tongue, but Nine held it back, watching as he disappeared into the pawn shop across the road. Moments later he reappeared with a spring in his step and, Nine reckoned, a good deal richer. She kicked herself for not grabbing whatever valuable thing he'd been carrying before he went in. Pockets would have been pleased with her, for once. What had the man pawned? A family heirloom, perhaps? She thought of her most treasured possession - a little, worthless, silvery music box - the only thing in the world that was truly hers. At least it was only on Pockets' shelf and not in a pawn shop window. Pockets. Focus. Back to the market she went, her hunter's eyes searching for the perfect gift for the old man. The market was beginning to wind down for the day: the traders were shifting crates and loading carts as the last customers milled around the street. There was the young lady in scarlet again,

clutching her little beaded bag - that lovely, unusual bag. What treasures were inside? Gold? Jewellery? Nine smiled. A second chance was a rare gift. This time she wouldn't mess it up. This time she would show the old devil how good she really was. Just like a cat: sighting her prey, stalking it quietly, pouncing at the right moment. Nine moved into position, clenched her fists, stretched her fingers. She was on in three... Oh, she hated her life. Two... But she loved this thrill. One... Focus on the prey. And - GO! She dashed for the scarlet lady and grabbed her handbag, closing her fingers around the silky, expensive strap. But the lady held tight - she was ready this time. Unfamiliar voices shouted. "Oi!" "Hey, you!" Nine panicked and tugged. This really was turning into a rotten day. Something like a small, dark ornament flew out from the bag and tumbled across the cobbles. Nine saw her chance - she released her grip, grabbed the object from the ground and ran. Shouts and curses rang out behind her, but Nine only had eyes and ears for what was ahead. She sprinted over the cobbles, her satchel bouncing on her hip. She darted between carts, people- "Thief!" shouted an angry voice behind her. She glanced over her shoulder as she ran. A ruddy-cheeked butcher with a blood-stained apron was only a stone's throw away. In a second he'd be right on top of- THUD. She collided with a large barrel rolled by a lanky boy. The ground fell away from her feet as she flew over the barrel and crash-landed on the cobbles on the other side. Her left hand instinctively opened with the blow and the little dark object went spinning away. Sprawled on the ground, Nine's eyes searched desperately for her prize. There - on the stones, just within reach. Nine stretched out her fingers...

The lanky boy swore at her and rolled the barrel on, accidentally kicking the object farther away. Nine watched as it skipped across the cobbles, coming to rest between the hooves of a restless horse. "Oi, you!" came the butcher's voice. Nine scowled. The man was nearly on her. She glanced at the prize beneath the horse. Definitely some kind of ornament, sure to be valuable. She would not lose this. The blood-stained apron filled her vision, a hand extended to grab her- Nine rolled out of reach and scrabbled to her feet. She dashed towards the horse and cart, the butcher right behind her. His angry fingers clawed at her and Nine threw herself to the ground, hearing her jacket tear as she twisted out of his grasp. She rolled between the horse's stamping hooves, snatching the ornament as she went. "Got you!" she whispered. Nine stood up with the horse and cart safely between her and the butcher. As he turned to run around the horse, Nine stuffed the ornament into her satchel and headed for the nearest alley. The more she twisted and turned through the maze of narrow streets, the quieter the noise from the market. The shouts of the butcher were faint and infrequent now. Chest aching, she slowed to a walk until she reached a lifeless, dead-end alley. High, brick walls with occasional gates marked the back yards of houses on each side. Not the sort of place a person would, or probably should, linger. Nine promised herself a moment to catch her breath, then she'd head back to Pockets. To show the old devil exactly what she was worth. She sat on the ground, reached into her satchel for the valuable ornament and pulled out her prize... A house. A house? Small enough to sit in the palm of her hand; like a dolls' house from a dolls' house - but stranger. Its four narrow storeys were dotted with tiny windows and odd corners, that jutted out here and there. Tall, round towers capped with pointy spires stood on both sides. There was a slightly wonky chimney on top of a tiled roof and, at the bottom, a double-fronted blue door with a tiny doorknocker.

Nine stroked the door wistfully. A house. A home. What would it be like to live in a house, instead of Pockets' stinking Nest? She hooked her grubby little finger under the miniscule doorknocker ring, then let it fall back on the door. It made the tiniest little tap. "Nobody's home," she said softly as she stood up. The uproar in the market would have died down now. She could probably head back to- A tingling, buzzing feeling tickled Nine's palm. Odd. She glanced down. The little house was vibrating in her hand. Nine watched as it shook more strongly, the little doorknocker now clinking against the door. She plonked it straight down on the ground and stepped backwards. The house began rocking violently from side to side. Then, with a whoosh, it started growing - growing?! - upwards and outwards. Nine stared as the house filled every available gap in the alley, its shape contorting, lengthening and repeatedly rearranging itself to fit every inch of space. Storeys poked out above the rooftops of the other buildings until the house became an unbalanced, oddly shaped eight - nine - ten - elevenstorey building, surely threatening to topple over at any moment. Nine stared in shocked silence, trying to make sense of what had happened. Her eyes tracked the house from the blue front door with its notso-tiny doorknocker right in front of her, up through the eleven wonky, squished-up storeys, all the way to the top. The house was a copy of the little ornament, but now with new higgledypiggledy floors and windows. Something strangely stump-like was poking out oddly from the side of the roof. It was still shaking from side to side until there was a little pop! and a wonky chimney shot up. "What the-?" began Nine, but she didn't get any further. At that moment the front door opened. And there, framed by the doorway, stood a huge, ugly creature - like a cross between a walrus and a tree trunk - head and shoulders above the tallest man and twice as wide. It had bark-like grey skin, a ropey tail dangling between its legs, big yellow eyes, two tusk-like teeth... And was wearing a white, frilly apron with a feather duster tucked into the side. "Wh-?" said Nine, staring at the creature. Her legs had apparently forgotten how to move. "You late," rumbled the thing. "We waiting."

And with a large, rough hand, it grabbed Nine by the collar, pulled her inside and slammed the door behind her.

The creature gave a huge wonky, tusky grin as it plonked her, gently, on the floor. Nine immediately brought her fists up. She wasn't going down without a fight. The thing patted her head awkwardly. Nine lowered her fists slightly, more out of surprise than anything else. She hated being surprised. "Good ... dog," the thing said, picking her up again, this time by the jacket, and looking rather confused. "I am not!" Nine retorted, thrashing her legs wildly. "I'm not a dog, I'm a girl. And I'm definitely not good. Now leave me alone!" "You lady?" The thing frowned and peered closer. Standing with its back to the front door, it looked even more confused. Nine stood as tall as she could and thought about her wild, black hair and her ragged, stained trousers. "Yes," she said defiantly. "Sort of." The thing tilted its head, as if it was trying to understand what exactly it had just met. Nine knew she couldn't possibly understand what exactly she had just met. This couldn't be real. Maybe she had hit her head on the cobbles when she fell...? And this was a strange dream which her cobble-

bumped brain was making up...? If it was a dream, it was rapidly heading towards a nightmare. Nine glanced quickly around - she had to make her plan of escape. She was standing in a dark, plum-coloured hallway lit by a candelabra dangling from the ceiling and facing a dark, gloomy staircase. In the house which had just popped up... It couldn't be real. The thing that was blocking the door, though, did look very real - and very big. Focus. Escape. What about windows? No ... there were no windows. Which was odd, because there were definitely windows on the outside. Instead the walls were lined with heavy-framed portraits of important-looking people, hung crookedly around the hallway and up the stairs. They all seemed to share the same slightly flared nostrils. A wooden cabinet with glass doors and many trophies stood between two doorways. A blue and white coat of arms was mounted on one side of the front door, showing something like two sticks crossed above a large toad. On the other side was a hexagonal clock with fifteen numbers instead of twelve. It had four sword-shaped hands all pointing to '15' at the top. Wait. 15? Why would it-? The creature took a step towards Nine, bringing her focus back. "Don't you reckon on eating me," she said, raising her fists again. "I tell you now, I'm all bone." "Eat lady? Eat lady?" boomed the thing. It clutched its large, aproncovered belly and began to laugh a terrible laugh - a sound like two boulders being rubbed together the wrong way. Nine stared defiantly at the creature, feeling glad it couldn't hear how fast her heart was beating. She glanced sideways and saw a brass candlestick sitting on a tall, spindly legged table. "Stay back!" she warned in a shaky voice. She grabbed the candlestick and raised her arm, ready to hurl it at the creature. "Not that you can eat me anyway, since you're not real!" "EAT LADY!" guffawed the creature again. "Naturally, Eric would do no such thing," said a calm, well-spoken voice from the staircase. "He's a vegetarian, as the fragrance of the air so

thoughtfully reminds us every day. I assure you, Madam, the smell is very, very real." Nine looked round to see a tall boy coming down the plum-carpeted stairs. He had auburn curly hair, which puffed out from underneath his pointed indigo hat, and the same flared-nostril nose as the portraits. He wore a long, star-speckled, indigo gown, which flowed around him as he moved. Although the boy looked only a few years older than herself, there was something rather ... ancient about him. "But, what...?" began Nine, then watched as the boy made his way down the dark staircase. "Who...?" She looked at the apparently very real thing called Eric. "Why...?" "I am Flabberghast. High Wizard, Chair of the Tea Tasters Committee, World Hopscotch Champion 1835," he said, holding his head high. Then he stumbled down the last couple of steps. "Blasted gown," he muttered, staggering next to the tusky beast. "Eric, would you be so kind?" The creature called Eric grinned and reached out a thick arm towards the wizard. With a quick movement he tore the gown away, revealing what looked like indigo pyjamas and purple, fluffy slippers underneath. Eric threw the gown towards an empty umbrella stand in the corner of the hall. Nine gasped as a blue arm zoomed up from inside it, caught the cloak, then disappeared back into the stand taking the cloak with it. "Wretched gown. Only wear it for visitors, really. Plays havoc with one's hopscotch practice." "Hopscotch?" Nine said incredulously. Something fast-moving on the staircase caught Nine's eye. What appeared to be a wooden spoon with a face - and spindly arms and legs - slid down the bannister. It was wearing a kilt and brandishing a sword. The spoon whooshed off the end of the bannister and landed by Nine's feet. "About time, lassie!" it declared. "What took you so long?" "You talk," was all Nine managed. "That's ... incredible." "Trust me," said Flabberghast, "the novelty does wear off." He cleared his throat. "This is Dr Spoon, and-" "Dr Spoon? That's an odd name," said Nine. "Oh, aye?" said the spoon, pointing the sword at her. "And yours?" "Nine." The spoon raised an eyebrow. "We'll call it a draw."

Flabberghast cleared his throat irritably. "And Eric, our troll housekeeper." "Hello, lady," said Eric, waving at her. "Troll," Nine said weakly, "housekeeper." Surely those words didn't belong next to each other? "Yes, yes, troll housekeeper," said Flabberghast impatiently. He put a hand up to his mouth and whispered to Nine, "Not a very good one. Never eat the pancakes." "Pancakes?" Nine stared at them all and blinked. They couldn't be here, talking to her about pancakes. None of this was real. Was it? Nine swallowed hard and faced the truth: even with all the books she read, she could not have made this up. So if this was real, and there truly was a housekeeping troll, a sword-waving spoon and a hopscotching wizard, then it almost certainly wasn't wise to hang around. "Well... This has been nice," she said, trying to sound like this sort of thing happened every day, "but I really can't stay." She patted her satchel loudly to drown out the heartbeat thumping in her ears. "You know, places to go, people to rob... And, thanks to you, I need to find someone a new present because you seem to be living in the old one." She strutted towards the front door trying not to show the wobble in her legs. Before she'd made it even a few steps the wizard dashed in front of the door, blocking her way. The spoon leapt up onto Nine's shoulder and held the blade of his little sword against her throat. She gasped. "So," said Flabberghast fixing his eyes on Nine, "there's good news and there's bad news." He steepled his fingers together. "Which do you want first?"

Nine felt a rising sense of panic in her chest. She grabbed a quick, shallow breath. As strange - as terrible - as this all was, she had to stay calm. "Fine. The bad news?" she said. "Apart from the fact there's a wooden spoon about to kill me." "Oh, that's not news. That's entirely to be expected, Madam," said the wizard, as Nine raised an eyebrow. "No, the bad news is that this house is under a curse. We cannot even step outside." Nine gave a puzzled frown, but only for a moment. After all, considering everything that had happened in the last ten minutes, was a cursed house so unbelievable? "And the good news?" Flabberghast clapped his hands together childishly. "You are the one to break it. Oh, we have been waiting for you for a very long time. The one who knocks on the door!" The wizard and the troll grinned at her. Big, wide, fixed grins... Nine thought quickly. They needed her. So ... surely, they wouldn't hurt her. She only hoped they'd remembered to tell the spoon that bit of

information. Remembered to tell the spoon? Why was she even thinking this? No. This was ridiculous. She threw her hands up in the air. "Everything about this is madness! Everything about you is madness!" She waved her hand at the spoon. "And is this really how you treat your guests?" Flabberghast gave a little, nervous laugh then glared at the spoon and gestured at him to lower his sword. The spoon huffed loudly, muttered something about incompetent wizards and jumped down from Nine's shoulder. "That's better," Nine said, hoping she sounded calm and in control, because she really wasn't - not any more. "Yes, I can fix your curse. Watch this." She walked towards the wizard and troll, who exchanged nervous glances before stepping aside. Heart thumping, Nine grabbed the door handle, yanked open the door and stepped outside onto the uneven cobbles. "Outside. See? Not difficult. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be off." She took a step away from the house- "NO!" The utter desperation in their voices stopped Nine in her tracks. She turned around slowly to look at them. The troll was wringing his tuftyended tail, the wizard was wringing his hands, and the spoon looked like he wanted to wring her neck. The wizard held up his hands in surrender. "Just ... step back inside, Madam," he said carefully. "You can leave the door open and I will demonstrate exactly what the matter is." Slowly, Nine stepped back inside the house, eyeing the wizard warily as she did so. She could always run for it if she needed to. The spoon hastily hopped halfway up the staircase before turning around to watch. He clung to his kilt and looked nervous. Nine moved next to Eric, who shook his head sadly and slowly. He leaned forwards and stretched out his arms. "Wh-what are you doing?" hissed Nine. "Eric catch," said Eric. "Catch?" said Nine. "Catch what?" "Madam," said the boy sharply, "observe." He rolled up his indigo sleeves, took a deep breath and went to take a step outside. There was a BOOM - a soundless BOOM. More a feeling of having been BOOMed. A ripple of energy washed over Nine and her satchel flapped up

and hit her on the nose. The candelabra flickered and went out, and the wizard was thrown backwards, landing in the arms of the troll. He scrambled back down to the floor and smoothed his pyjamas indignantly. The candelabra relit itself with a gentle whoosh. Nine opened her mouth to speak but had no words. "You see, Madam," Flabberghast snapped. "The indignity of it! The sheer spite! I thoroughly dislike flying in all its forms." "Lady help?" said Eric, with a pleading look in his eyes. "Aye," said the spoon, looking Nine up and down. "Desperate times call for desperate measures." Nine shuffled uncomfortably. "Help? Well ... don't you have a back door?" "Oh, if only we'd thought of that!" hissed the wizard through clenched teeth. "Of course we have a back door. The problem is the cursemaker thought of that, too..." Flabberghast shepherded Nine down the hallway and the spoon jumped from the bannister onto Eric's shoulder as the troll followed. As Nine passed the staircase on the left, she noticed the cupboard under the stairs had a sign pinned on it: NEVER OPEN THIS DOOR. There were several rooms on the right-hand side, which was odd. Nine was sure the layout of the house on the inside didn't match the squashed-up, eleven-storeyed house on the outside. Nine tried to peer inside the dark rooms as she passed - she could have sworn one of them was whispering and had purple sparks flying around inside - but Flabberghast quickly moved her along and into the kitchen at the hallway's end. Nine glanced around, keen to be aware of her surroundings in case things turned bad, which she assumed was quite possible in the company of a long-tusked troll and a clearly agitated - if not entirely unbalanced - wizard. The kitchen was filled with random cupboards of all sizes, with a back door on the far wall. A tall hat stand was next to an arched, wooden door on the right-hand wall. On the left was a crockery-filled dresser and a large bricked fireplace with a black cauldron suspended above it. In the middle sat a wooden table and three elaborately carved wooden chairs, with which Nine could probably do a fair amount of damage, if she needed to. She should surely, at least, be a match for a wooden spoon.

Near the arched door, a slimy orange drip plopped noisily into a bucket. Nine looked up to see a damp patch on the ceiling. She opened her mouth, then decided that some questions were best left unasked. Apart from that the kitchen looked normal enough. But then, the umbrella stand at the front door had looked normal enough before a blue arm had zoomed out of it... "Eric," The wizard stood by the table. "If you would be so kind." The troll's long toenails scratched along the brick-paved floor as he lolloped towards the back door. He turned and beckoned her. Slowly, Nine followed him. "Lady open," Eric said as the spoon pointed his sword at her, then at the door. Nine put her hand on the handle, wondering when the chair-bashing should begin. But Nine had never been able to help her curiosity, which was why she found herself pulling the handle down and quickly opening the door...

Six heavily armoured, ferocious-looking, human-ish creatures stood there, brandishing spears and jagged, black swords. They towered over Nine, were grey as slate, bug-eyed and had saliva dripping from their fangs. They roared and waved their weapons. Nine stared at them blankly for a moment, trying to make sense of anything. Swiftly deciding this was a waste of her time, she shut the door in their faces. Nine pressed her lips tightly together, then whirled around to face the others. "And I suppose those creatures live in your garden, day and night!" she said. "Don't be ridiculous, Madam," scoffed Flabberghast. "Only on Tuesdays." "Is Monday dragon, Tuesday goblin, Wednesday..." Eric said, counting on his fingers. He kept mumbling away but Nine marched back to Flabberghast.

"Well, I can get out of this house and that is exactly what I'm going to do." She headed for the hallway but the wizard caught her arm and spun her around to face him. He looked her up and down. "Madam, I presume since you dress in this odd, bedraggled attire, you have very little in the way of wealth-" "Odd, bedraggled attire?" protested Nine. "-and I can offer you riches, Madam, riches beyond your imagination." Oh. Wait. Riches? Nine narrowed her eyes, thoughtfully. "Just so you know," she said, softening her voice a little, "my imagination is very good." The wizard smiled and released her arm. "Come with me." He wandered back down the hallway, stopping at a silver-painted wooden door on the left. Nine looked at Eric, who nodded enthusiastically. She walked over to Flabberghast. "Madam," he said as he opened the door, "behold." A strange red glow from the room lit up his face. Nine gave him a suspicious look. What was he playing at? But curiosity once more got the better of her and she peered inside. The room was no bigger than a large cupboard and suspended in the air was a red glowing ball. "What is it?" murmured Nine. "A jewel of immense monetary value is encased within this orb," said Flabberghast. "My inheritance from a relative I held in great esteem. People would pay a vast amount to possess it. It holds great personal value but the curse has encased it in this orb, beyond anybody's reach. See for yourself." Nine looked at Flabberghast doubtfully, but he nodded. She edged towards the floating red ball, slowly stretching out her hand and, with the very tip of her finger, she went to touch it. A fizzing spark of red shot out with a loud hiss. Instantly Nine pulled her hand away. "Once the curse is lifted, the imprisoned jewel will be accessible once again. Madam, it can be yours if you will break the curse which binds us." A jewel of immense value. She could fly the Nest. Never have Pockets sneering and shoving her again. Unable to resist, Nine stared at the beautiful red ball - a thing that could transform her whole life. Then she looked at the front door, trying to decide which truly held the most appeal. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the wizard and the troll. She turned to look at them standing side by side with wide, frozen, desperate grins on

their faces, and the spoon between their legs scowling and pointing his sword towards her. "No," she said decisively, "this is still madness. I'm leaving." She marched towards the front door. "Nononononono!" Flabberghast dashed ahead of her and blocked her way. Nine folded her arms. "Say you'll think about it, Madam? Come back tomorrow." She drummed her fingers on her folded arm. "The immeasurable wealth could transform your life! Lift you from the depths of wretched peasantry-" "Peasantry?!" Nine narrowed her eyes and flung her arms by her side. "My life is perfectly fine, thank you very much. I don't need you - or anyone - to fix it. Move." Flabberghast groaned, slumped his shoulders and moved away from the door. He stood next to the troll who patted the top of the wizard's pointy hat too hard, crumpling the point and shoving the rim down over his eyes. Nine yanked open the door. "Immeasurable weeeeeealth!" a voice pleaded behind her. But Nine stepped outside onto the cobbles without so much as a BOOM, and slammed the door behind her. She took a deep breath and looked up at the wonky too-many-storeyed House towering behind her. It was, without question, the most ridiculous, most unbelievable, most definitely-not-real place she had ever been in her life, filled with the most ridiculous, most unbelievable and most definitely-not-real beings she had ever known in her life. And there was nothing that would ever make her step foot inside it again. "PERFECTLY FINE," she called pointedly to the House, then stormed off into the dusk to the place she hated to call home.

Nine headed through the winding streets towards a row of tumbledown terraced houses with boarded-up windows. She reached the third door and her shoulders tensed. "Wretched peasantry," she muttered to herself, then pounded on the old wooden panels and said "No strawberries today!" The door creaked open and an arm appeared in the gap and yanked Nine inside, pulling her roughly off her feet. The door slammed behind her as she regained her balance inside the dark hallway, lit only by a flickering candle. A short, grubby piece of rope dangled from the ceiling. "Jim, I told you a million times!" she ranted at the shadows. "DON'T TOUCH ME! Just open the blimin'-" A hand shot out of the shadows and pulled the rope. "-doooooooor!" The ground beneath Nine disappeared as a trapdoor swung open. There was a smarting thump as Nine's bottom hit the metal of an old coal chute. The trapdoor slammed shut as she hurtled down in the blackness

until, with a thud, she tumbled into the candle-lit Nest of a Thousand Treasures. Heart still racing, Nine stood up on the damp cellar floor. Mary, Annie and Tom, the other thieflings, glared at her from their sackcloth beds. Nine glared back. Worn boots came softly behind her. "You's late," grizzled Pockets' voice in her ear. His breath stank like rotten onions and month-old dead rat, which was quite possibly his last meal. "You're revolting. Clean your teeth," said Nine as Pockets moved in front of her. The old gang-master glared down at her, his white-whiskered jaw jutting to one side. "You better have something pretty-shiny for Pockets' Nest," he said. Nine thought of the scarlet lady and the failed pounce and said nothing. She knew she was falling from favour faster than a stone-stunned sparrow. "Course she ain't," said Annie. "She's losin' her touch," Mary added. She sucked her dirty hair and shot an evil look at Nine, who gladly returned it. "You's useless! Pockets is kind enough to share his Nest with you!" hissed Pockets, gesturing at the cold, gloomy cellar. "And it's such a charming place," said Nine. She closed her ears to Pockets' disgruntled rantings and looked around. Every nook and cranny of the room was filled with Pockets' beloved curios. Dangling from bent nails in a ceiling beam were rabbits' feet tied with string, broken lockets, onceshiny chains and a cracked - but working - pocket watch. The flickering candlelight half-revealed ugly toby jugs grinning from nooks like gargoyles. And there, on the shelf, surrounded by old tankards, was her little, shining music box. The only possession she had when Pockets found her... Her oldest memory. She had been only three years old, alone and cold in a doorway. She didn't remember who left her there, or why, but she remembered the beautiful shining music box she held in her little hand. It had seemed much bigger back then. She was sure the music box was the only reason he had taken her in. "Nine" he had called her as he'd taken her hand and dragged her away. She didn't even know her real name: she was just the ninth broken foundling to come to the Nest. And instantly her treasure - the only thing in this world

that was special to her - had become his. Nine blinked away the memory and gazed at the music box longingly, her fingers aching to hold it. The old man's voice grumbled on. "All Pockets asks is that his children bring him a gift or a bit of coin! Because, you miserable thieflings, we is on our own here!" Nine rolled her eyes and sat down on the damp floor. This could take a while. He raised his arms, then slammed them down to his sides in defeat. "What does Pockets always say?" "Life don't bring you strawberries," Nine droned along with the other thieflings. "Life's turned its back on you!" Pockets said, pointing at them and clambering onto a tea chest. Oh, good grief. Not the tea chest. "If Pockets hadn't..." muttered Nine to herself. "If Pockets hadn't took you in," said Pockets. "All of you'd..." "All of you'd be on the streets by now!" "No freedom..." "No freedom, no life," Pockets ranted. "Nothing," said Nine, scanning the cellar with empty eyes. "Nothing!" Pockets finished triumphantly with an arm flourish so forceful he lost his balance and toppled off the tea chest. Tom snorted a repressed laugh but Nine only scowled at the old man. She hated Pockets. But if he hadn't taken her in... She didn't even like to think about where she'd be now. Annoying as it was, she owed him. Nine stomped away to her corner, hidden by a couple of rickety crates. Just as well she liked to be alone. It was better, safer, alone. As she went, her hand lightly brushed the shelf and she snatched her little music box. It would be back before he missed it. She eased down on her thinning, frayed sackcloth bed and felt the familiar cold seep through from the stone floor. She stared at the box and felt a deep urge to turn the tiny handle. To hear that beautiful, tinkling song. That song that said once - just maybe - she was loved. But she couldn't, not without being caught. She glared at Pockets. The only time she could hear it now was when he touched it. Anger prickled up and down her spine. "My life is perfectly fine," she hissed to herself, willing the words to make everything different.

She knew the words couldn't change a single thing. Yet there was something that could ... the House. The curse. That glowing red ball with the jewel inside... NO. She was never going back to that ridiculous place. Tiredness seeped into every bone, every muscle. She pulled The Mystery of Wolven Moor out of her satchel, but she was in no mood for reading. She turned over on her side and pulled a thinning, grey blanket over herself, curling tight into a ball around the music box. The heavy dullness of sleep crept over her before she could fight it. Her dreams were wild and bright. She was edging down a dark corridor towards the floating red ball, her hand outstretched. Getting closer ... closer ... daring to touch it, but as she stretched out her fingers, the ball exploded into red smoke and a distant, female voice began to laugh- Nine jolted awake, the faraway voice still ringing in her head. She looked down and saw the music box still in her hand, and a shock of panic exploded in her chest. If Pockets found out it was gone... Suddenly wide awake, she pushed back the blanket and stumbled to her feet. Nine crept silently across the cellar to the trinket shelf. She curled her hand around her treasure for just a moment before placing it back. "Don't you never touch that again," growled Pockets. Nine froze for a second, then looked over to where Pockets lay sprawled on his pathetic excuse for a bed made of sheets stuffed with wool and rag and fleas. "You always was a miserable thiefling. That's the only thing worth having I ever got from you. Bring it to Pockets." Nine clenched her jaw and snatched up the box. She took it to the old man and pushed it forcefully into his outstretched palm. In a sudden rush of movement, he grabbed the front of her jacket and pulled her down towards him. "It's mine now. Keep yer hands off." Every muscle in Nine's body tensed. She stared at him fiercely, willing her eyelids not to blink, glad he couldn't hear her heart racing. Never show him weakness. Never. She'd done that once when she was small - cried as Pockets' filthy fingers turned her little music box handle. Pockets had given her some bruises to stop her crying, to toughen her up. It had worked. She hadn't cried since.

"Pockets got plenty other thieflings to keep him happy!" hissed Pockets through blackened teeth. "Plenty," muttered Mary from the shadows. "He can live without a Nine. But you'll be starving on the streets in a week without a Pockets." The old man released Nine roughly, pushing her backwards. He examined the precious box in his hand. The silvery metal gleamed. He spat on it and polished it with his grubby sleeve. "I hate you," whispered Nine. Her hands balled into fists. "But you stay. 'Cos you need Pockets. You all need Pockets!" He glanced around the Nest, a cold smile spreading over his life-stained face. He stared back at Nine. "Don't you?" He slowly turned the handle of the music box and a stuttered, melancholy tinkling filled the quiet cellar. Nine swallowed hard, fists still clenched. She was powerless. The voice of a ridiculous wizard pleaded in her head. "Immeasurable weeeeeealth!" She could not bear the thought of returning to that strange, strange House. But ... immeasurable wealth? No freedom, no life, nothing... A volcano of frustration erupted inside her. Her life wasn't perfectly fine. And there was only one way to change that. Throwing her satchel over her shoulder, Nine stormed over to another dark corner. A long piece of rope dangled from a ceiling beam. Up she scrambled, ignoring the harsh rope burning her palms, and the glares of the other thieflings. She squeezed herself through the dark hole at the top and pulled herself onto gritty floorboards. Nine got to her feet in the darkened upstairs lobby and straightened her satchel. A hand shot out of the shadows. In a blurry rush, she was grabbed by her jacket, whirled around to face the front door, then thrown out into the street. She growled as the door slammed behind her. It was the early morning light, Nine was certain, which made her eyes burn and prickle and threaten to water. She swallowed hard and pushed the horrible feeling away. She hated the old man who had saved her. She hated this life. And she hated that her only way out was to return to the ridiculous House at the end of the alley. She sighed loudly and began to walk.

Nine marched back down the twisting lanes and back down the alley where the House stood. She passed a couple of people who seemed blissfully unaware of this strange House that had appeared from nowhere. Couldn't they see it? More magic. More ridiculous, unreasonable magic. But Nine could see it. And she glared at the absurd, squashed-up building with its annoying turreted towers either side of the utterly stupid front door, its slightly wonky chimneypot, its pathetic windows that weren't even on the inside because they were that pathetic. Chest heaving, jaw clenched, she thought of Pockets holding her beautiful music box and pummelled furiously on the front door - then gave it a kick for good measure. There was something cream and papery poking out of the black letterbox mounted on the wall next to the door. She plucked it out - a blank envelope - and stuffed it into her satchel. As Eric opened the door, wearing that pointless feather duster tucked into his pointless white apron, a look of delight bloomed in his completely ridiculous, yellow eyes and his stupid, wonky-tusky grin. Nine had only one word for him.

"MOVE!" She stormed inside and slammed the door behind her. She stood on the doormat in the entrance hall, every muscle tense. The troll lolloped over to the safe distance of the staircase and stood on the bottom stair. He grabbed his long, thin tail and brought it in front of his stomach. He fiddled with the tufty fur at the end of the tail, wringing it and eyeing Nine nervously. "WHAT?" said Nine, daring the troll to so much as breathe in her direction. "Lady sad," said Eric quietly. For a split-second, Nine faltered and caught her breath. She shuffled uncomfortably on the doormat. "No." "Lady sad." "NO!" shouted Nine as the horrible prickling feeling built up behind her eyes. She thought again of what happened last time she had cried and the anger swelled. "And stop wearing that ridiculous apron. You look ... ridiculous!" A door clicked open on the right. "Ah, Madam," came a smooth, wellspoken voice from inside the room. Flabberghast appeared, wearing the same hat, indigo pyjamas and fluffy purple slippers. Nine closed her eyes and took a deep, slow breath, wondering what the chances were of getting through this without breaking someone's nose. "I thought I heard your euphonious voice." The chances grew smaller. "Of course, Madam, I knew you would see sense. Realise the error of your-" "I need your floaty red ball ... thing. I need the money, the immeasurable wealth. That's the only reason I'm here. Not for you." Nine swallowed. "For me. Let's break this curse, get that jewel and then I never want to set eyes on any of you again." Flabberghast raised an eyebrow and cleared his throat. "As you wish, Madam. After you." He gave an awkward bow and gestured with his arm towards the kitchen. Nine looked around for any sign of the spoon, and was relieved that there were no spindly limbs, kilts or pointy swords in sight. She had marched about halfway down the long hallway when a small explosion came from

somewhere upstairs, rattling the candelabra and the trophy cabinet. Nine paused for a moment - tense, listening - then turned round to look at Flabberghast and the troll, who appeared entirely unbothered by the explosion or the smell of rotten turnip now wafting down the stairs. Flabberghast gave a wide, unconvincing smile. "Do proceed, Madam." Nine raised an eyebrow at him, but continued into the kitchen. She pulled out one of the carved wooden chairs at the kitchen table and flopped into it. She folded her arms and glared at the bucket collecting the orange ceiling slime, drop by drop. But slowly, very slowly, her rage began to calm. "Perhaps some tea before we begin?" suggested Flabberghast, giving the troll a sideways glance. The troll looked doubtful and wrung his tail again. "Tea," Flabberghast repeated, more sternly. Eric lolloped over to the dresser and began rattling some crockery. Flabberghast walked over to a shoulder-height cupboard and stroked it thoughtfully. Eric clattered a tea tray down onto the table and began unloading three delicate cups and saucers decorated with golden stars, a matching milk jug and a sugar bowl. Nine was looking back towards Flabberghast and the cupboard when she saw a small movement out of the corner of her eye. "That sugar bowl's lid just moved," she said, snapping her attention back to the table. Slowly Nine leaned forward and lifted the slightly chipped lid open a crack. There was a little muffled explosion and a cloud of green smoke puffed over Nine's face. She froze for a moment and then slowly replaced the lid. The sooner she got out of here, the better. Eric hung a black iron kettle over the fire. He and Flabberghast looked at each other nervously across the kitchen, then looked at Nine. "Madam, if you'd be so kind?" Flabberghast beckoned Nine with his finger. She hesitated, then reluctantly walked towards him. Flabberghast smiled, nodded enthusiastically and clasped his hands together. "The tea's in there. Open the cupboard." He leaned forwards and whispered. "With the handle." Nine glared at him suspiciously and looked at the handle of the cupboard. It was made of green crystal, with many tiny, different sides. She slowly reached her hand out ... then paused. She sensed something odd behind her. She turned around to look. Flabberghast and Eric were leaning forward eagerly, though Eric was nervously twisting his tail in his hands. Nine frowned and turned back to the cupboard, touched the crystal handle and-

ZAP! A strange, tickling buzz crackled up her hand. She snatched her hand away from the handle and screamed. Her hand - in fact all of her - had suddenly sprouted brown fur. "What the-!" "Don't worry," sighed Flabberghast behind her. "It will go back to normal in a few seconds." "But what just-?" she began, turning around. "Oh." Eric was wearing a beautiful pink tutu and clutching a sparkly wand. Flabberghast had sprouted a dragon's tail and a fluffy white beard. Both of them looked bitterly disappointed. A mouse poked its head out of Flabberghast's beard, changed its mind and dashed back inside. The wizard looked on the verge of tears. "We thought now you were here, there was the smallest chance we could open the tea cupboard again. It's been three years since the curse. Three years since I've had a cup of tea! I love tea." The magic faded and all three of them returned to normal. Nine examined her hands in relief. Then she frowned. "You mean - so, you can never open the cupboard and if you try..." She touched the handle. ZAP! Nine's skin had turned blue and she had the trunk of an elephant. Her satchel grew a stripy tail. She turned around. Eric was magically suspended upside-down by one of his huge feet, his apron flapping over his face and trailing on the brick floor. Flabberghast had become an oversized yellow spotty teapot wearing his wizard's hat. The magic faded and they returned to normal. "You mean every time I-" ZAP! Eric was a chicken with sapphire eyes. Flabberghast was giftwrapped in turquoise ribbon. Nine had three heads. "Something incredible-" ZAP! Eric became a beanpole version of himself. Nine's legs turned to springs. Flabberghast was sprawled against the ceiling, facing the ground. "Madam!" he barked. "Kindly desist!" The magic wore off and he plummeted to the ground with a grunt. He picked himself up and Eric gave him a quick brushing-down with his feather duster. Flabberghast glared at Nine, who couldn't quite keep the smile from her lips, then went over to the table.

"Just a nice cup of tea." He slumped into a chair. "Fine, you don't get your tea," said Nine, back to business. "That's heartbreaking, but I need that jewel. So, let's get on with it. How do I break this wretched curse?" "Now that, Madam," declared Flabberghast, steepling his fingers together in a way that was now quite ominous, "is the really interesting part."

Oh no," said Nine. A terrible sinking feeling hit her stomach. "You don't know, do you?" She put her hands on her hips. "You don't know!" "Madam, I have no clue. No clue ... and no tea." Flabberghast slumped forwards into a heap on the table. Nine marched over, grabbed a handful of the boy's curly hair and lifted his head. "Right. Tell me about this curse." She dropped his head back down then, throwing herself in the chair opposite him, she folded her arms and glared. Flabberghast sat up and fell backwards in his chair. "There was," he sighed, "a witch-" "Witch clever," interrupted Eric as he reached over and sadly reloaded the cups and saucers onto the tray. "And, with good reason, mind, I had a slight disagreement with this witch." Eric noisily stacked the crockery back into the dresser. "As a result of this slight disagreement, she most maliciously shrank our House to a tiny size, so easily overlooked, and placed it under a terrible,

terrible curse, only to be broken by one who knocks on the door." Nine looked at the back door. "So you can't get out the back door, or the front door, open your tea cupboard-" "The socks!" Flabberghast hissed, making Nine jump. He pushed back his chair and slammed his purple-fluffy-slipper-wearing foot onto the table. He hitched up his indigo pyjama leg to reveal a pink sock with unicorns on. He slammed his other foot onto the table and revealed a sky-blue sock with silver triangles. "The laundry basket is cursed, so regardless of how carefully you pair your socks -" his voice became strangely high-pitched - "you can never find the one that matches! Pure evil." Nine looked at Eric, who was nodding sympathetically. "Gets worse," he said. "And the pictures!" spluttered Flabberghast, a look of desperation on his face. He leapt to his feet and ran to the hallway. Eric lolloped after him. Nine pushed back her chair and followed them. "Look what she's done to the pictures!" Flabberghast reached out and straightened the portrait of 'Sir Ignatius the Permanently Late (1589-1641)'. It remained straight for a hopeful two seconds before swinging back to hang crooked. Flabberghast shook his fists at the air and let out a strangled roar. "Poor Flabby." Eric put a comforting arm around him and patted him slightly too hard. Flabberghast huffed. "Flab-BER-GHAST." But Eric just looked at Nine, his big yellow eyes full of pity. "Gets worse." "She's taken the toad's tongue, so the House can't move-" "Move? Toad? TONGUE?" frowned Nine. "I've missed three years of Hopscotch Championships!" "Gets worse." "And you can never find the toilet when you need it. It was last seen disguised as a pot plant on the eighth floor-" "And worse..." droned the troll. "She changed Eric's cookery books into Dwarvish!" Flabberghast shook his hands in rage. "Dwarvish! An unreadable, unspeakable language! Even the dwarves gave up!" He pointed upstairs. "And the library where the books were carefully arranged, alphabetically and in categories? No matter

how long I spend rearranging them, by the morning they are all jumbled up and I can't find a blasted thing!" Flabberghast grabbed fistfuls of his curls. "Last month I found a book on transdimensional travel in the knitting section! The knitting section! UPSIDE DOWN! Admittedly, the library was always a little on the emotional side - The Hopscotch Guide for Idiots has never quite forgiven me for accidentally dropping it down the toilet - but I tell you this: since the curse, the library has been in a permanently atrocious mood!" Eric patted Flabberghast's back, sending him stumbling forwards a step. "More worse." "Yes. Because worst of all," said Flabberghast darkly, "my magic has been stolen." "Stolen?" said Nine. She jumped as Flabberghast thrust his hands towards her. He wiggled his fingers. "See? Nothing!" he hissed. "We have no idea how to break the curse. We're trapped in this House of chaos with no freedom, no magic and no tea!" No freedom, no life, nothing... Nine shook Pockets' voice from her head. Eric lifted the bottom corner of his apron and wiped Flabberghast's eyes. Then he covered Flabberghast's nose with the apron. The wizard blew heartily. "Well, there was something in your letterbox," said Nine, reaching into her satchel and holding out the crumpled blank envelope. "Maybe it's a clue?" Flabberghast snatched it from her. As he held it in his hands, swirly scarlet writing appeared on the envelope. 'LET'S PLAY.' "That is not normal," said Nine, keeping her voice oh-so-steady-and-notat-all-panicky. "How did that just appear?" Flabberghast gulped and looked up at Nine. "The witch," he whispered, looking over both shoulders then taking the envelope back into the kitchen. "Witch clever," said Eric, as he and Nine followed the wizard. Flabberghast quickly placed the envelope on the table and stared at it nervously. He gave it a little poke with his finger.

"Hello?" he whispered. "Come on then - open it," said Nine irritably. "It's not going to bite you." Flabberghast looked at her darkly and raised an eyebrow. "...is it?" asked Nine. "Who knows what bedevilled mischief lies within this envelope!" "Eric scared." Nine huffed loudly, snatched the envelope from the table and hastily stuffed it into Flabberghast's hand. "Open it," she growled. The wizard glared at her, took a sharp intake of breath through his nose, flaring his nostrils, then he turned the envelope over. Eric covered his face with his apron, then peeped with one eye. Nine clenched her fists and tensed her legs, ready for whatever was coming. Flabberghast lifted the envelope's flap, quickly looked around, and pulled out a piece of parchment. He flinched, but nothing happened. "Was that it then?" Nine realised she was holding her breath and let it out. Everything seemed fine. "Everything seems fine," said Flabberghast. WHOOMPH! A red, glowing streak, about the width and length of Nine's arm, shot out of the envelope. Nine gave a yelp as it whizzed up and down, here and there, faster than Nine could watch it: knocking Flabberghast's hat into the cauldron; shooting over to the dresser and smashing plates and cups; twisting and whooshing around Eric's tail; sending the bucket and its orange, slimy contents all over Flabberghast; upturning the table; darting - whooshing - whizzing - smashing - whirling - left - right - up - down - Until it came to a stop. Nine froze. The streak was right in front of her face. It hovered in the air like some devilish giant, red tadpole. Nine tried to stare it down, though her heart was thumping in her ears. "Madam," whispered Flabberghast, retrieving his now-dripping hat from the cauldron. "I strongly suggest you do - not - move." Nine had no intention of moving, largely because her legs had forgotten to do so. But on hearing the wizard's voice, the red streak seemed to look in his direction, then shot down the hallway. Releasing her breath, Nine followed the others as they dashed after the streak.

SMASH! There went the trophy cabinet, showering tiny shards of glass everywhere and sending all the trophies plummeting to the carpet. The red streak zig-zagged across the hallway at a furious pace, knocking all the portraits and the coat-of-arms by the door upside down. Then it hurtled towards the hexagonal clock mounted by the doorway and, with another strange WHOOMPH, it shot inside the clock and disappeared. For a moment, the clock face glowed red before returning to normal. Silence. Nine, Flabberghast and Eric looked at each other, and then looked back at the clock. There was a loud clunk, then three of the four sword-shaped hands started whizzing around at different paces. Backwards. With another decisive clunk the fourth - smallest - hand moved to the 14. "I have a most horrible feeling about this," said Flabberghast. "That clock has not been functional since the curse. Eighteen times I've been late for breakfast because of it." Dr Spoon came sliding down the bannister, sword drawn and eyes wild. Black smudges were dotted over his face and there was a definite smell of singed wood. "Are the green-horned Minotaurs attacking again? What the devil's going on?" "'What the devil' is right, Spoon." Flabberghast looked at him and then at the clock. "The witch." Spoon looked grim. "Courage, laddie." Nine looked at the crumpled-up parchment in the wizard's hand. "Is this letter going to destroy the entire House?" "I honestly don't know," said Flabberghast. He straightened out the first page, cleared his throat nervously and began to read. "Dearest Flabberghast, I can only assume that if you are reading this letter, then your miniscule House has been found by some poor, unsuspecting fool-" Spoon pointed his sword at Nine. "The lass," he said. Nine frowned. "And so, Flabberghast, the game begins!" the wizard continued. "The curse cannot, and will not, be lifted until you say the magic words. You have until the clock strikes fifteen to find those words, speak them aloud and break the curse. If you do not, then this time your House will shrink and shrink, but will not stop. Everything and everyone inside the House will shrink and shrink and will not stop, until you shrink beyond reality and vanish. Then you, Flabberghast, and everyone inside that ridiculous House

-" Flabberghast looked at the others with wide eyes - "will CEASE TO EXIST."

There was a sharp intake of breath from everyone in the room. "Cease to exist?!" cried Flabberghast. "No shrink! No vanish!" "Read on, laddie!" "But I am not an unreasonable creature," Flabberghast continued, followed by a snort and the raise of an eyebrow. "Obviously someone as pathetically hopeless as yourself will need all the help you can get from your ridiculous companions. Since even that may not be enough to compensate for your continuous stupidity, you will need a clue; so the magic words are..." He turned over the page. Then flapped it back over again. His shoulders slumped and he covered his eyes with his hand. "What?" said Nine, moving closer to look. She snatched the letter from him and read the bottom of the parchment. "The magic words are..." She turned over the page. It was blank. "And there was nothing else in the envelope?"

Flabberghast shook his head and Nine glanced up at the clock. The hands were still whizzing backwards, the shortest inching towards the 13. "There doesn't need to be anything else!" snapped Flabberghast. "The magic words are right there!" He jabbed his finger below the final words. Nine squinted at the blank space on the parchment and frowned. "But-" "It's a game! The words are there! Hidden from view! Made secret!" Flabberghast wiggled his fingers wildly at the letter. "My magic could have revealed them! But she stole my magic. And I can't get my magic back until I reveal this secret. It's impossible! The witch is impossible! It's ALL impossible!" Flabberghast snatched the parchment from Nine and shook it furiously. With a spike of fear, Nine could feel the floaty ball, the jewel, this one chance of freedom, slipping away. "That witch is clever," said the spoon. "SHE IS NOT CLEVER!" bellowed Flabberghast. "Stop shouting!" shouted Nine. "That's not going to solve anything!" "I'm not shouting, you are!" "I. AM. NOT." Eric whimpered and put his yellow-nailed hands over his ears. "Eric shrink!" Nine refused to acknowledge the stab of pity that she very nearly felt. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Focus. Calm. Panicking would not help anything. "Look," she said. "No one is going to shrink beyond reality. We're closer than we were. At least now we know you have to say some magic words to break the curse. We even have the words." She looked at the parchment in her hand. "We just can't ... read them." "And time, Madam, is running out," hissed Flabberghast, pointing at the clock. "You've stepped into our House, our world. You made me open this envelope and begin the countdown. So you, Madam, had better have some answers! Soon! And you -" he pointed at Eric, whose tail drooped considerably - "you are meant to be a housekeeper, are you not? Clean up this blasted mess!" Then he snatched the parchment out of Nine's hand, turned on his purpleslippered heel and marched into the nearest room. The wooden door slammed shut behind him then instantly melted into nothing, leaving a doorway-shaped, star-speckled blackness in its place.

Nine gasped and cautiously went over to the doorway. Silence and stillness appeared to pour from the hole, if that was even possible. Did she ... dare? Slowly, Nine stretched out her left hand and reached for the doorway. Her hand extended towards the nothingness- Spoon landed on her arm with his spindly legs and rapped her hand with the flat of his blade. "It means 'Do Not Disturb'," he said firmly, pointing the sword at her. "Now if you'll excuse me, I've important work to be doing." He sheathed his sword and sprang back upstairs. Eric lolloped over. "Flabby sad. Flabby think." "Flab-BER-GHAST!" yelled a muffled voice from the other side of the star-speckled blackness. Nine looked at the front door and felt a strong desire to be on the other side of it. She looked at the troll, unsure what on earth to do. Eric reached into the front pocket of his frilly apron, pulled out a brown-and-white striped boiled sweet and offered it to Nine. Was this some kind of nasty trick? Eric smiled his wonky, tusky smile. "Make happy," said Eric, still holding out the sweet. Nine faltered for a moment, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, thank or scold. And there was a strange, warm feeling in her chest, which was beautiful and terrible at the same time. "Well," snapped Nine, decisively, "don't." Nine took the sweet anyway and stared at the gift. The last time someone had given her a gift was the music box - her music box. And she'd sworn never to feel so deeply about anything ever again. She dropped the sweet inside her satchel, refusing to look at the troll. Then, largely for an excuse not to say anything more to the creature, she marched down to the kitchen, righted the table, put the (somehow) stilllidded sugar bowl back on top and flopped down in a chair. She heard the troll's long toenails scraping along the bricked floor and the sound of the slime-catching bucket being righted. Then she heard him rummaging in the cupboards and, a moment later, he slopped down a silver spoon and a steaming bowl on the table in front of Nine. "Lady hungry. Lady eat." Nine tried to remember when she had last eaten something hot. Her stomach rumbled. "Food help. Lady think. Make plan." Cautiously, she picked up her spoon and stared at the brown slime. An

eyeball bobbed up to the surface and stared back. Nine put the spoon down again. Flabberghast stomped into the kitchen clutching the witch's letter. He went over to a wooden board hanging on the wall. At the top were painted the words 'TO DO' in golden, sparkly letters. The wizard carefully held the letter so it was nearly - nearly but not quite - touching the board. Suddenly a little fanged mouth sprang out of the wood with a snarl and clasped the parchment firmly and safely in its jaws. Flabberghast moved his hand away quickly, but not quickly enough. "Wretched thing!" he grumped, sucking his finger and shaking it in the air. Nine tried to resist a tiny smile as Flabberghast collapsed into the chair opposite her. He said nothing and stared at the table. Eric slopped another bowl in front of him, and put a little napkin beside it. "Nice soup," he said sadly. He pulled the feather duster from out of his apron. "Eric tidy." Nine chanced a quick glimpse at the troll. Even his ears were drooping now. He sloped out of the kitchen. Maybe she would brave the soup. She'd eaten plenty of things in the Nest that looked just as bad and probably tasted worse. Picking up her spoon, she dipped it into the bowl as far away from the eyeball as she could manage and brought the soup slowly towards her lips... There was a sudden loud roar from above them. "What on earth?!" said Nine, sitting upright in her chair and clattering the spoon back into the bowl. "Yes, that's correct." "What?" snapped Nine. "Nerth. The roaring. It's Wotnerth," said Flabberghast. "A rather undomesticated pet. We picked him up in a swamp just before the curse." He slurped a spoonful of the eyeball soup. "We have no idea what on earth he is. Hence the name. He's just grumpy because it's bath day today. We simply cannot wash away the stench of the swamp." "Why did you pick him up? Why do you pick up anyone ... or anything?" Flabberghast blushed slightly and fiddled with his hat. "Oh, well, it happens like that sometimes. But that was before the curse, when the House moved." Flabberghast gave a little smile. "We had the freedom of the

worlds. And the forgotten places between the worlds. Places you could not imagine. Oh, they are truly marvellous." Nine stared at his eyes. They had changed - they were sparkling with hundreds of silvery flecks, as if tiny shards of diamonds were embedded inside. For that moment something deep and wise and beautifully ancient shone through the boy's eyes - a thousand adventures, a thousand secrets, a thousand years... Then the silvery sparks faded away and the wizard's eyes became blue once more. "I know I might regret asking this," said Nine, "but how exactly does a toad's tongue move the House?" "Ah, a most ingenious device on the coat of arms," said the wizard, brightening a little. "You simply pull out the toad's tongue, release and then off the House pops." "Right," said Nine slowly. She opened her mouth to ask what the toad thought about it all, but Flabberghast's expression darkened. "She stole the tongue, stole my magic, stole my freedom." He shifted in his chair and looked away. "Eat up." Nine looked down at the eyeball in her slime. It blinked. "I'm not hungry," she said, pushing the bowl away, a teeny, tiny part of her hoping Eric wouldn't notice how full it was. "You can thank the Dwarvish cookery books for Eric's culinary delights," Flabberghast grumbled. "Still, we should be thankful it's not pancakes. They really shouldn't be furry." He took a mouthful and his eyes widened in alarm. He paused for a moment - then swallowed very hard. Nine could see a spherical lump move down his throat and she couldn't help but smile. Cookery books. A spark of inspiration lit up Nine's mind like a candle in a cellar. Her smile grew as a rather good idea clicked into place.

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Check Pages 1-50 of The House at the Edge of Magic in the flip PDF version. The House at the Edge of Magic was published by maye kassar on 2023-01-13. Find more similar flip PDFs like The House at the Edge of Magic. Download The House at the Edge of Magic PDF for free.

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Find out about World War Two with BBC Bitesize History. For students between the ages of 11 and 14.

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Relationships

In this pre-advanced vocabulary lesson, you will learn a wide range of terms and phrases related to relationships, from the intricacies of romantic attractions to the dynamics of friendship. Check the pictures below and read the definitions and sentence examples to deepen your understanding of these concepts.

If you 1 fancy someone, it means you are attracted to them in a romantic way.

If 2 someone turns someone else on, this other person feels physically attracted to them.

If you 3 chat someone up, usually someone you don't know well, you start a conversation with them in a friendly way because you are attracted to them.

If you 4 flirt with someone, you behave playfully as if you were attracted to each other.

If you 5 fall for someone, you have strong romantic feelings for them very quickly.

If you 6 fall head over heels for somebody, you fall madly in love with them very quickly.

When you 7 go on a date with someone, you meet them because you have or want to have a romantic relationship

If you 8 are seeing someone, you are in a romantic relationship with them and are not dating anyone else.

To 9 two-time someone means to have a romantic relationship without your partner knowing.

If you 10 split up with someone, you end a romantic relationship with them.

To 11 dump someone means to end a relationship with them in a sudden or unkind way.

When people 12 drift apart, they gradually lose interest or affection towards one another.

When you 13 make up with someone, you become friendly again after a disagreement.

When you 14 worship someone (a god or respected person), you respect and admire them.

If you 15 idolise someone (or idolize), you admire them excessively, often in an obsessive way.

When you 16 look up to someone (usually an older person), you admire them.

If two people (or a relationship) 17 go back a period of time ( years, 20 years, etc.), they have known each other for that time.

When you 18 hit it off with someone, you like them and become friends immediately.

If you 19 get along with someone, you have a friendly and harmonious relationship with them.

When you 20 have it in for somebody, you are determined to make life difficult for them.

If you 21 don't see eye to eye with someone, you have very different opinions.

When you 22 have a lot in common with someone, you have similar interests or circumstances.

When a couple 23 have ups and downs, their relationship goes through good and bad patches.

If you 24 keep someone at bay, you prevent them from getting closer to you or affecting you.

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Relationships - B2 English Vocabulary - Test-English

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Learn verbs, phrasal verbs and idioms about Relationships with this vocabulary lesson that includes exercises, definitions, examples and more!

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Relationships

In this pre-advanced vocabulary lesson, you will learn a wide range of terms and phrases related to relationships, from the intricacies of romantic attractions to the dynamics of friendship. Check the pictures below and read the definitions and sentence examples to deepen your understanding of these concepts.

If you 1 fancy someone, it means you are attracted to them in a romantic way.

If 2 someone turns someone else on, this other person feels physically attracted to them.

If you 3 chat someone up, usually someone you don't know well, you start a conversation with them in a friendly way because you are attracted to them.

If you 4 flirt with someone, you behave playfully as if you were attracted to each other.

If you 5 fall for someone, you have strong romantic feelings for them very quickly.

If you 6 fall head over heels for somebody, you fall madly in love with them very quickly.

When you 7 go on a date with someone, you meet them because you have or want to have a romantic relationship

If you 8 are seeing someone, you are in a romantic relationship with them and are not dating anyone else.

To 9 two-time someone means to have a romantic relationship without your partner knowing.

If you 10 split up with someone, you end a romantic relationship with them.

To 11 dump someone means to end a relationship with them in a sudden or unkind way.

When people 12 drift apart, they gradually lose interest or affection towards one another.

When you 13 make up with someone, you become friendly again after a disagreement.

When you 14 worship someone (a god or respected person), you respect and admire them.

If you 15 idolise someone (or idolize), you admire them excessively, often in an obsessive way.

When you 16 look up to someone (usually an older person), you admire them.

If two people (or a relationship) 17 go back a period of time ( years, 20 years, etc.), they have known each other for that time.

When you 18 hit it off with someone, you like them and become friends immediately.

If you 19 get along with someone, you have a friendly and harmonious relationship with them.

When you 20 have it in for somebody, you are determined to make life difficult for them.

If you 21 don't see eye to eye with someone, you have very different opinions.

When you 22 have a lot in common with someone, you have similar interests or circumstances.

When a couple 23 have ups and downs, their relationship goes through good and bad patches.

If you 24 keep someone at bay, you prevent them from getting closer to you or affecting you.

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Relationships - B2 English Vocabulary - Test-English

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Learn verbs, phrasal verbs and idioms about Relationships with this vocabulary lesson that includes exercises, definitions, examples and more!

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A. Christie Hercule Poirot The Affair At The Victory Ball

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Unforgettable Story of The Butterfly and The Cocoon - Struggles Give Us Strength

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Read Section 1 and answer Questions 1-14
EMERGENCY PROCEDURES
Revised July 2011

This applies to all persons on the school campus

In cases of emergency (e.g. fire), find the nearest teacher who will: send a messenger at full speed to the Office OR inform the Office via phone ext. 99.

PROCEDURE FOR EVACUATION

1. Warning of an emergency evacuation will be marked by a number of short bell rings. (In the event of a power failure, this may be a hand-held bell or siren.)

2. All class work will cease immediately.

3. Students will leave their bags, books and other possessions where they are.

4. Teachers will take the class rolls.

5. Classes will vacate the premises using the nearest staircase. If these stairs are inaccessible, use the nearest alternative staircase. Do not use the lifts. Do not run.

6. Each class, under the teacher's supervision, will move in a brisk, orderly fashion to the paved quadrangle area adjacent to the car park.

7. All support staff will do the same.

8. The Marshalling Supervisor, Ms Randall, will be wearing a red cap and she will be waiting there with the master timetable and staff list in her possession.

9. Students assemble in the quad with their teacher at the time of evacuation. The teacher will do a head count and check the roll.

10. Each teacher sends a student to the Supervisor to report whether all students have been accounted for. After checking, students will sit down (in the event of rain or wet pavement they may remain standing).

11. The Supervisor will inform the Office when all staff and students have been accounted for.

12. All students, teaching staff and support personnel remain in the evacuation area until the All Clear signal is given.

13. The All Clear will be a long bell ring or three blasts on the siren.

14. Students will return to class in an orderly manner under teacher guidance.

15. In the event of an emergency occurring during lunch or breaks, students are to assemble in their home-room groups in the quad and await their home-room teacher.

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IELTS General Reading free samples. Sample 2.1 - IELTS-up

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IELTS General Reading practice: sample with auto-correction and answers 2.1.

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What rules do parents make? How effective are they? What training do parents have in your country? Do you think it is sufficient? Do you think people should have to pass a test before they become parents? Would you like somebody to judge your parenting skills? Have you ever been on a parenting course? Would it be useful? Can we learn to be parents from a stranger?

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What rules do parents make? How effective are they? What training do parents have in your country? Do you think it is sufficient? Do you think people should have to pass a test before they become parents? Would you like somebody to judge your parenting skills? Have you ever been on a parenting course? Would it be useful? Can we learn to be parents from a stranger?

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B1 Reading Test

Read a text about health in different countries, and for questions 1 to 6, choose the correct answer.

The unhealthiest places in the world

According to a study by Clinic Compare, the unhealthiest country in the world is the Czech Republic. The study, which compared data on alcohol, tobacco consumption and obesity in 179 countries, found that Czech Republic residents are among the world's heaviest drinkers. Indeed, nine of the ten unhealthiest countries are located in Eastern Europe, where smoking is more common than in the rest of the world and is increasing among teenagers. The only one outside this region was the USA, where 36 per cent of the population are obese. Obesity levels are lower in the Czech Republic but are the highest in Europe.

The study must be taken with a pinch of salt, however. According to the rankings, the healthiest country in the world is Afghanistan due to its low obesity and alcohol consumption. In second and third place are Guinea and Niger. But that doesn't make them healthy places to live. Indeed, four countries listed among Clinic Compare's top ten healthiest countries, Guinea, DR Congo, Malawi and Mozambique, were among the least healthy nations in another study, the Global Competitiveness Index.

High consumption of alcohol, tobacco and food are diseases of affluence; that is, they are common in wealthy countries. However, many countries, especially in Africa, are still struggling with diseases of poverty. For example, the average life expectancy in DR Congo is just 53 years old. Here, many people die from diseases which could be treated in other countries. In Malawi, tuberculosis and HIV are common. These countries lack basic medical facilities and trained doctors. In Mozambique, where 30% of people cannot access health services, lack of nutrients in the diet is a far more common medical problem than overeating.

Moreover, Nepal, listed by Clinic Compare as the fourth healthiest country, is the tenth most polluted country and Afghanistan the fourteenth. Air pollution is a killer, with 7 million people dying worldwide each year from diseases associated with it. It is not just vehicle fumes and industries which are the problem. Around 2.4 billion people worldwide are exposed to dangerous levels of household air pollution while cooking on fires or stoves fuelled by kerosene, wood, dung and coal.

According to a different study, which measured factors such as the cost of staying healthy, life expectancy, air pollution, obesity, sunlight hours and crime rate, the healthiest country is Spain. This is most likely due to its traditionally healthy diet, clean air, the number of people walking to work (37%), and free healthcare. Interestingly, another study, the Global Health Security Index, ranks the USA as the healthiest nation. This was because its high standards in research, safety and communication allow it to detect and respond to pandemics the most effectively. This contrasts with the Clinic Compare survey, which ranked it the tenth unhealthiest country, primarily because of its high obesity rate.

The countries with the highest levels of obesity, however, are in the Pacific islands. In countries such as Nauru, Tuvalu and Palau, over half the population is obese. This is a relatively new trend, as, before the 1950s, locals consumed a traditional diet that included bananas, coconuts, yams and seafood. Since then, incomes have increased, making imported convenience foods more affordable. This new scenario causes people to make poor food choices despite the availability of healthier, locally-grown options. In many regions of the USA, healthy choices just aren't available, or they are too expensive. In addition, this country's driving culture means that many people don't get enough exercise.

Reading comprehension test

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The unhealthiest places in the world - B1 English reading test - Test-English

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Boost your reading skills with our English reading test on the world's unhealthiest places. Comprehension questions with feedback included!

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Asking questions in English - Question forms - Page 4 of 4 - Test-English

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Question forms. English grammar and exercises. If we want to ask a question in English, the order is QWASI: Question word, Auxiliary, Subject, Infinitive.

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War and peace

In this pre-advanced vocabulary lesson about War and Peace, you will explore essential terms related to conflict, peacekeeping, and diplomacy, enhancing your understanding of global affairs. Check the following pictures and read the definitions.

Nouns and noun phrases

A 1 ceasefire is an agreement between two fighting parties to stop fighting temporarily. A ceasefire can occur for many reasons, often to allow civilians to evacuate an area before fighting resumes.

In a country under foreign occupation or ruled by a harsh government, 2 the resistance is a group of people who secretly fight against those in power.

A 3 civil war is a war between two organised groups within a country or state.

4 Sanctions are actions that countries use to punish and isolate another country when it breaks international rules.

5 Disarmament is the act of reducing the number of weapons, especially nuclear weapons, that a country has.

6 Humanitarian aid is assistance that is given to groups of people who are suffering as a result of warfare or natural disasters. This assistance usually consists of the provision of food, shelter, or medical care and is carried out by humanitarian organisations.

Without humanitarian aid , these people have little hope of survival.

A 7 refugee is a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape persecution or war.

A 8 peacemaker is a person or party that tries to intervene and make peace between fighting countries, states, or parties.

9 Military intervention is the interference of a state or group of states in the political affairs of another through the use of military force.

11 Peace negotiations are formal discussions between countries, states, or groups involved in a military dispute to try to bring about peace.

13 Civilian casualties is a term that refers to members of the public (civilians) who suffer or are killed as a result of wartime acts such as bombings, shootings, or raids.

A 14 peacekeeping mission is when a group of military personnel is sent to a war zone or country where there is fighting to try and prevent more violence.

A 15 peace treaty is a written agreement between two hostile parties, countries, or states that formally ends the state of war between them.

Verbs, phrasal verbs and verb phrases

1 Overthrow means to remove a government or leader from power by force. Civilians sometimes attempt to overthrow a leader or government that is oppressive.

If a war, conflict or fight 2 breaks out, it starts.

If a conflict, fighting, etc 3 escalates, it intensifies or becomes worse very quickly.

If you 4 capture someone or something, you catch them, especially in a war.

When an army 8 retreats, it moves away from enemy forces in order to avoid fighting them.

The verb 9 carry out means to perform a planned action, so carry out a ceasefire means to go through with a ceasefire as planned, and carry out a military operation means to conduct a military operation.

If troops (soldiers) 10 stand down, they withdraw from military operations, or reduce their military activity.

When police or other authorised individuals 14 break up a protest, they bring the protest to an end, often forcibly.

If a group of people 15 ambush their enemies, they attack them after hiding and waiting for them.

If someone 16 blows something up or if something blows up, it is destroyed by an explosion.

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War and peace - B2 English Vocabulary - Test-English

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Master your English vocabulary on War and Peace with our fun lesson with exercises and games, definitions, examples, pictures and more!