Английский язык. Рассказы. Уровень В2+ - стр. 10

Training 2

He was in Norway because he was working as an archaeologist in Trondheim. It was the capital of Norway in the Middle Ages, when Norway had a large empire, which included the Shetland and Orkney Isles, Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. So, it was a very rich town. They dug it up, and there were a lot of old pots, and old leather and wooden articles left from those times.

Training 3

They found a lot of rune-sticks. Runes are a kind of writing which was used in Viking and mediaeval Norway. They are often thought to have been magical symbols, but primarily they were used for simple writing, as they didn’t have paper but had tons of wood. The symbols are made up of straight lines. Obviously, you couldn’t write books, but it was a good system of conveying messages.

Training 4

The content was often quite mundane or just the alphabet. Some of them were just wrong and gibberish, just letters that didn’t really mean anything. These were all found in the rubbish, and they thought that there may have been people learning there, in kind of runic schools, where people had to write the alphabet twenty times and things like that.

Training 5

They found a very nice thing one day. It was a little king from a chess set. It was really, really exciting to find the king, not a pawn or a bishop, for example. They were really lucky that it came out in a lump, and they didn’t scrape his head off. Somebody had cut off his nose by mistake, but the rest of him was intact. The find more than made up for Tomas’s losing his own king so many times!

When I was a teenager, my pals and I went off camping in Arran, which is an island off the west coast of Scotland. We arrived by ferry at Brodick and went off looking for a place to camp. We found a very nice place along the sea front to put up our tents, which was a peninsula, next to a golf course. We pitched our tents there, and spent some time beachcombing and playing football, if I remember well, and then when it got dark, we decided to go to the local town for a drink. We decided to take a short cut across the golf course, and it was completely black, and none of us had a torch. We set off anyway, across this completely dark golf course, which we didn’t know had some burns – ditches with little streams at the bottom – running across it. So we were marching along merrily towards the pub, when splish!, splash!, splosh!, we found ourselves knee-deep in water after falling into one of the streams. We dragged ourselves out and continued onwards to the pub.