16. Put these words in order to make a correct

In Search of Good English Food
by Verona Paul and Jason Winner
1. How come it is so difficult to find English food in England?
In Greece you eat Greek food, in France French food, in Italy
Italian food, but in England, in any High Street in the Land, it is
easier to find Indian and Chinese restaurants than English ones. In
London you can eat Thai, Portuguese, Turkish, Lebanese, Japanese,
Russian, Polish, Swiss, Swedish, Spanish, and Italian — but where
are the English restaurants?
2. It is not only in restaurants that foreign dishes are replacing
traditional British food. In every supermarket, sales of pasta, pizza
and poppadoms are booming. Why has this happened? What is wrong
with the cooks of Britain that they prefer cooking pasta to potatoes?
Why do the British choose to eat lasagne instead of shepherd’s pie?
Why do they now like cooking in wine and olive oil? But perhaps it
is a good thing. After all, this is the end of the 20th century and we
can get ingredients from all over the world in just a few hours. Anyway,
wasn’t English food always disgusting and tasteless? Wasn’t it always
boiled to death and swimming in fat? The answer to these questions
is a resounding ‘No’, but to understand this, we have to go back to
before World War II.
3. The British have in fact always imported food from abroad.
From the time of the Roman invasion foreign trade was a major
influence on British cooking. English kitchens, like the English
language, absorbed ingredients from all over the world — chickens,
rabbits, apples, and tea. All of these and more were successfully
incorporated into British dishes. Another important influence on British
cooking was of course the weather. The good old British rain gives us
rich soil and green grass, and means that we are able to produce some
of the finest varieties of meat, fruit and vegetables, which don’t need
fancy sauces or complicated reci pes to disguise their taste.
4. However, World War II changed everything. Wartime women
had to forget 600 years of British cooking, learn to do without foreign

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imports, and ration their use of home-grown food. The Ministry of
Food published cheap, boring recipes. The joke of the war was a dish
called Woolton Pie (named after the Minister for Food!). This consisted
of a mixture of boiled vegetables covered in white sauce with mashed
potato on the top. Britain never managed to recover from the wartime
attitude to food. We were left with a loss of confidence in our cooking
skills and after years of Ministry reci pes we began to believe that British
food was boring, and we searched the world for sophisticated, new
dishes which gave hope of a better future. The British people became
tourists at their own dining tables and in the restaurants of their land!
This is a tragedy! Surely food is as much a part of our culture as
our landscape, our language, and our literature. Nowadays, cooking
British food is like speaking a dead language. It is almost as bizarre as
having a conversation in Anglo-Saxon English!
5. However, there is still one small ray of hope. British pubs are
often the best places to eat well and cheaply in Britain, and they also
increasingly try to serve tasty British food. Can we recommend to you
our two favourite places to eat in Britain? The Shepherd’s Inn in
Melmerby, Cumbria, and the Dolphin Inn in Kingston, Devon. Their
steak and mushroom pie, Lancashire hotpot, and bread and butter
pudding are three of the gastronomic wonders of the world!

2. Put the words in the order to say that a period of time is short or long. Start from the word for the shortest period and move to the longest:

1) a year 2) an hour 3) a day 4) a minute 5) a month

3. Put the words in order to make a sentence:

1) never 2) to 3) I’ve 4) been 5) France

4. Put the words in order to make an English proverb:

1) in 2) its 3) season 4) everything 5) is good