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2. Reading A

You are going to read a magazine article about an English woman living in Paris. For questions 16-23, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fłts best according to the tcxt.

I have lived in Paris sińce I was eighteen, and I'd been on exchange visits from the age of fourteen. So

when I left the Central School of Speech and Drama in London (I went to study stage management but

they refused to let me take the acting course and I got thrown out) I thought fd try my luck in France. I

went as an au pair but won an audition to drama school, where I was always the ugly duckling because of

my funny French acccnt. But I got my first job in my second year and did all my early work in French.

Sometimes my mother, my two sisters and my two brothers come to stay and I always return to England

at least once a year. I'm not homesick. I love Paris for all the reasons everybody loves Paris - the art, the

architecture, the food, the elegance. And I love the Parisian attltude. The city is smali, the Metro is the

easiest way of getting around and the shops are fantastic. When I was a student I used to spend my life

wlndow shopping with my eyes out on stalks.

We live in a lovely Art Nouveau apartment with marble fireplaces, parquet flooring, gilt mirrors and moulded ceilings between the l.uxcmbourg Gardens and the Sorbonne. My husband, Francois, has lived herc sińce he was four and my mother-in-law now has another apartment in the same błock. Because I've decorated it myself, people say how English it looks, but it doesn't really because it's fuli of bright colours - the hall is yellow, the dinlng room is red.

Francois is an obstetrician and has to be at the hospital by cight o‘clock, but the children (Hannah, five and two-year-old Joseph) tend to wake us about six anyway. We all have breakfast together (usually just toast and coffee for me) then the nanny arrives to take Hannah to school and Joseph to playgroup and I lock myself away to take phone calls, arrange meetings and read scripts. Mornings tend to get frantic but I always break for lunch, which I sometimes eat with the children and sometimes with friends at a favourite restaurant. I'm an absolute foodie. When Hannah finishes school at 3 p.m. we might go to the Luxembourg Gardens or to the Louvrc. I've got a wonderful pass which you get with your first child in France and which allows you to go to the front of the queue in museums, administrative buildings and cven at bus stops. If I go out alone I often end up in the hardware department of a shop callcd BHV where I linger lovingly over nuts and bolts, washers and taps. I'm a great DIY-er - I can fit washers, put up shelves and even manage a bit of rewiring.

The evening starts with the battle of the bath at six o'clock. I usually cook - something simplc with salad, though the salad is never served with the meal, not in my house anyway. And we don't always drink winę. We rarely watch telcvision. Then its a herb tea, usually a camomile or lemon balm infusion, and early to bed. I like to be aslecp by ten. Weil, it C3n be quite exhausting, life in Paris.