B2Reading and Use of EnglishParte 6
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You are going to read an article. Six sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A-G the one which fits each gap (1-6). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.
The boat had been lying upside down behind my uncle’s garage for as long as I could remember. When he died, my aunt asked if I wanted it, and before I could think of a sensible reason to say no, I had agreed. It was a small wooden sailing boat, built about sixty years ago, and almost every part of it needed repair.
Luckily, a friend of my aunt’s knew a retired boatbuilder called Owen Pritchard, who lived in the next village. I went to see him with a few photos on my phone, expecting a polite refusal.
“She’s worth saving,” he said finally. “But it’ll take you a year, not a summer.”
He was right about that, as it turned out, and about most other things. Every Saturday that winter, I drove to his workshop, where the boat now sat on two wooden supports. Owen never did any of the work himself.
At first I found this frustrating, especially when he watched me make a mistake that he had obviously seen coming. Later I realised that I remembered those mistakes far better than anything he could have told me.
The hardest job was replacing the planks near the bottom of the boat, which had gone soft with age. Each new piece of wood had to be bent to exactly the right curve.
The first time I tried it, the plank cracked loudly down the middle, and I stood there feeling like a fool. Owen just handed me another one.
Slowly, the boat began to look like a boat again. By spring, the new planks were in place, and we had spent three weekends sanding the old paint off the inside.
Owen chose a deep green for the outside, the same colour, he said, that most boats in the area had been painted when he was young. I would have preferred blue, but I knew better than to argue.
We put her in the water on a cold morning in June. My aunt came, and so did half of Owen’s village, which surprised me until I realised that most of them had known my uncle.
When I asked him what she had been like back then, he smiled and said, “Slower than she’ll be now.” I climbed aboard and pushed away from the shore. A moment later the wind filled the sail, the boat leaned gently to one side, and I heard Owen, behind me on the beach, laugh out loud for the first time since I’d met him.
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