B2 First (FCE) Reading and Use of English – Practice Test 1 — Part 5 – Reading: multiple choice

The last bookshop on the hill — an extract from a novel

When Nora inherited her uncle's bookshop, everyone told her to sell it. The building was old, the street was quiet, and people bought their books online now. She listened politely to all of them, nodded, and then did the exact opposite, which was, her friends agreed, entirely typical of her.

The truth was that she had no clear plan. She simply could not imagine the shop belonging to anyone else. As a child she had spent every summer there, hiding between the shelves while her uncle served customers with the slow patience of a man who had nowhere better to be. He never once told her to be quiet or to buy something. He just let her read, and that, she now understood, had been a kind of gift she had never properly thanked him for.

The first winter almost defeated her. Some days no one came in at all, and she would sit behind the counter watching the rain and doing sums that never quite worked. She thought about the sensible advice she had ignored, and for the first time wondered whether her friends had been right. But she did not put up a "for sale" sign. Something stopped her, though she could not have said exactly what.

Then, slowly, things began to change — not because of any clever idea of hers, but because she started doing what her uncle had done. She learned the names of the few regular customers. She kept a chair by the window and let people sit and read without buying. She began writing short notes about her favourite books and leaving them on the shelves. Word spread, in the quiet way that word does in small towns, that the bookshop on the hill was worth the climb.

By the following spring, the shop was not exactly busy, but it was alive. Nora still could not have called it a good business decision. What she could say, with complete certainty, was that she had never once, on any morning, dreaded opening the door.