Roadmap™ B2 Mid-course test (Units 1–5) Listening

13 Read the travel blog again and write true (T), false (F) or no information (NI).
1 The author has never been abroad. T
2 The author has flown only once before.
3 The author has never learnt to drive.
4 According to the author, people usually
post positive travel experiences on social
media.
5 The author does not travel because he lost
his passport.
6 The author often contacts the people who
post their travel stories on social media.
7 The author mentions the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
8 The author doesn’t stay in hotels.
9 The author says the Caribbean is the most beautiful place that they’ve seen.
10 The author used to be in debt.
11 The author cannot remember places he
recently visited online.
/10


I’ve never been there!
I love travelling around the world and I’ve visited so many countries, I’ve lost count. It’s been amazing to see such wonderful places and have so many fantastic experiences. It blew my mind to see lions while on safari in South Africa and I couldn’t believe my luck when the boat came across a group of whales in New Zealand. But I’ve never actually been on a boat or a plane and I hardly ever get on a train. When I do, it’s just to visit family members that don’t live far from me. And even though I am old enough to drive, I don’t have a car. The thing is, all the travelling that I do is virtual.
Thanks to social media and the adventurous travellers who are kind enough to post their videos, photos and stories online, I get to ‘do’ things and ‘go’ places – at least virtually – that I never imagined possible. But even better, I get to choose when and where I go, and what I see and read about are usually the very best bits of someone’s travel experience. It’s nearly always the case that the things people post online are the positive experiences of their trips. They rarely write about when things go wrong or aren’t as enjoyable as expected. So I don’t find out about any poor customer service they might have had when booking flights or have to deal with rude staff at cheap hotels. I don’t have to be able to cope with emergency situations. I don’t get my wallet stolen or have an accident skiing and spend a week in hospital, and I don’t have to wait for a flight that has been delayed because of stormy weather. There’s no losing my passport, because I don’t have one and never have had. No, all that I get to experience is the good stuff. I’ve been up close to poisonous snakes and lots of scary animals, in fact as close as the person holding the camera is bold enough to get, but without it ever being dangerous for me.
I’ve been riding on a camel in the desert in Morocco one minute, and just a few mouse clicks later, I’ve been standing halfway up a snow-covered mountain in Argentina, or simply lying on a beach in the south of France. What more could I want?
OK, it may be true that I can’t actually taste the beautiful, exotic dishes that are filmed close up, or smell the brightly coloured spices in the market in India, or feel the warm, vivid blue waters of the Caribbean Sea, but I can imagine these things. And consider the money I’m saving! I don’t splash out on flights or hotels. For me there’s no getting into credit-card debt or paying back a loan for an expensive holiday in a faraway place.
I suppose the one disadvantage is that I go to so many places that it’s probably not as memorable as experiencing the real thing, as doing the actual travelling. In fact, I can’t really recall where I virtually went yesterday, after being to so many different places already today!