My Home is my Castle
Lead-in
1
The title above is
taken from an English proverb.
What do you think it means?
2
a. Which of the houses in the pictures:
has:
five storeys and a house on top; a fibreglass
shark; brick walls; a thatched roof; a chimney; a rock
on the roof; wooden stairs up to the front door; stone
walls; a pitched roof; a tiled roof?
is:
built underground; a castle; built on stilts?
b. Use the adjectives to describe each house. Give reasons.
economical impractical cold spacious
cramped
airy comfortable attractive eccentric
House A is economical to maintain because it doesn’t cost very
much to heat and cool.
c.
Which house would you/wouldn’t you like
to live in? Give reasons.
I’d like to live in the hut on stilts because it looks very attractive tome.
Think!
5
10
15
20
25
30
Reading
Read the text quickly to get a general idea
of what it is about. Look at the first part of the
question, then find the part of the text the question
refers to. Go through the choices and choose the
answer that best fits. Keep in mind that the
information may be rephrased. Even if you think you
know the correct answer, always check that the
others are not appropriate. Check your answers
against the text.
3
a. Look at the title of the article. What do you
think it is about? Where might you read it?
Say words you expect to find in it.
How would you like to live in a castle, a tree house or
even underground? This might not be as unusual as you
think. It seems that these days more and more people
want to live somewhere special and
out of the ordinary
,
and if they can’t buy what they want they are quite
prepared to build it
from scratch
.
For John Mew and his wife Josephine their home really
is their castle. They have built their own English castle in
the Sussex countryside. The building is
brand new
with
all the luxuries you would expect from a house that cost
more than í350,000 to build. However, when you first see
it from the outside it would be easy to think that you are
looking at an ancient monument. The building has a lot of
the features of a traditional castle, including a
keep
, a
moat
and a
drawbridge
. “My choice of house is
somewhat eccentric and building it was very hard work,
but we’ve got the perfect place to live,” Mew says.
Although some would say that the building is impractical
and may be cold in harsh British winters, he certainly has
got a unique and spacious home.
If you don’t look carefully, you might not even see the
home that Jonathan Ridley-Jones and Shanon Ridd built
at all! That’s because the house is a converted
underground water tank. The only thing that can be seen
from the surface is a door leading into the hillside. “We’ve
never wanted to live in an ordinary house,” Shanon says.
“Living below ground means that our home is quiet and
very cosy – none of the usual
draughts
. It doesn’t
damage the local surroundings and has very low
fuel
bills
. Some of our friends find it dark and feel shut in when
they first visit, but they soon get used to it!”
A
B
C
6
