B1 Preliminary (PET) Reading – Practice Test 1 — Part 3 – Reading for detail and opinion

The summer my bike broke down — by Nadia Farrell

The summer I turned sixteen, my bicycle stopped working in the middle of a country road, eleven kilometres from home. I had no phone signal and no money for a bus. I remember standing there in the sun feeling completely useless, because I had ridden that bike every day for three years and had no idea how any part of it worked.

An old man cycling past stopped and looked at the chain for about ten seconds. He turned it, pushed something with his thumb, and it worked again. Then he rode away before I could properly thank him. Those ten seconds annoyed me more than the two hours I had lost. I decided that I would never stand at the side of a road like that again.

At home I found a box of my grandfather's tools in the garage and took my bike completely apart on the kitchen floor. My mother was not pleased. I could not put it back together, and for four days I walked everywhere while I read about gears and brakes online. When it finally worked, it worked better than when I had bought it.

After that, friends started bringing me their bikes. I fixed them in the garage for nothing, because I liked the puzzle more than the money. By September, there were nine bicycles waiting, and my mother told me — quite reasonably — that the garage was not a shop. So I asked the owner of the café at the end of our street if I could work there on Saturdays instead. He said yes, as long as I fixed his delivery bike too.

People sometimes ask whether I planned to become an engineer, and the honest answer is no. I did not fall in love with bicycles that summer. What I fell in love with was the feeling of understanding a thing that had always looked complicated from the outside. Twelve years later, that is still the only reason I choose any job at all.