AUTHENTIC READING 02

Task 1. Six sentences have been missing in this text. Fill in each missing blank with the
correct response

Good morning, Vietnam

Every morning, thousands of Hanoi citizens start the day with a steaming bowl of 'pho' - the
street food at the heart of Vietnam's life and culinary renaissance after years of war and famine.
Is this the best soup in the world?

At 7am on a cold morning in Hanoi's old town it's not hard to find one of the world's great
breakfasts. You simply keep an eye open for a doorway full of steam and a cluster of people on
ankle-high stools. These are sure signs of a good place for Hanoi's noodle soup - pho.

The aromatic fog that wafts like a banner from the soup cauldron and over the customers is the
stall's advertisement. 1

You could bottle that incense and drink it. Under the base of meat or
fish stock, there are whispers of liquorice, onion and cinnamon, smells with the promise of
2 warmth and comfort. Pho is much more than just breakfast to the north
Vietnamese: it is 'the soul of the nation', a 'contribution to human
happiness' and an addiction 'worse than tobacco'. (It's also an enduring inspiration to Vietnamese
writers.) Pho is a full-on sensual experience - when Vietnamese talk of pho they think of sex.
'We say that rice is a spouse, whereas pho is a lover,' says my friend Huong. When she was an
adolescent, during Vietnam's famine years, pho was an unaffordable luxury.

I get up early for my first pho. 3 On this principle, by Dong Xuan market
in the city's medieval merchant's district, I find Thao Van's
portable restaurant. She has set it up on the steps of a shuttered shop, and around her are gathered
a dozen customers, each of them sitting on a tiny plastic stool of the sort you might see in a
kindergarten. Behind these people others queue patiently for their turn. Nearby are motor-
scooters, hovering to deliver takeaways.
4
She carries this load through the narrow streets on a yoke across her
shoulders before dawn every morning. In one basket bubbles the cauldron of stock, over a
5
charcoal-fired stove. A smaller pot within the cauldron holds boiling water. This stove is said to
give pho its name - the word is pronounced like feu , the French for fire, and may have come
with the French colonialists from coffre-feu , a portable stove. Picnic gear like that is one of the
very few good things the French brought to Vietnam.

In Thao Van's other basket are the accessories, piles of chopped coriander, mint and spring
onion; huge hanks of fresh rice noodles, white as marble. In bowls are slivers of beef, two types.
6 The other is little shavings of bloody fillet - the word for the raw and
tender red beef is tai , which is the same word used rudely for Westerners.
(Ordering yourself pho bo tai , raw beef noodle soup, at a street stall is a foolproof way of getting
a laugh out of the locals.)

(Excerpt from The Guardian)

A. Though every Hanoi resident has a favourite pho spot, the best advice is to stop at a
stall with a large crowd round it.
B. There are slices from a hunk of the long-boiled shoulder that bolstered the stock.
C. The centrepiece of Thao Van's soup stall is two huge, saucer-shaped wicker baskets.
D. The pho vapours are, as one Vietnamese poet puts it, 'like the clouds of incense that
make us quicken our steps and climb the mountain in order to arrive at the pagoda'.
E. It is the smell of a national obsession.
F. Another is great bread.

*
Task 2. Read the next part of the article and fill in the missing blanks by supplying the
correct form of the words in bold

Thao Van squats between the two baskets with a little 1

(serve) table in front of her. It holds the plastic bowls,
china spoons (pho is never eaten with a metal spoon), and the seasonings: lime chunks, chopped
red chilli, ground pepper and a scary looking ketchup of chilli mixed with fermented fish sauce.
2 With all her ingredients and cooking systems (ergonomic)
arranged, stoves at her left elbow, bowls, noodles, meat and
herbs to the right, she looks like a jet pilot in the cockpit. From this hot seat she serves up 100
bowls of noodles and broth before 9am, which seems to be about one every two minutes.

I sit on the steps to watch Thao Van in action. Next to me is Mai Hoay, an 81-year-old man
busily sluicing his pho through a few black-stained teeth with the help of shots of a clear liquid
he keeps in a Fanta bottle by his feet. This is a gullet-searing rice wine, and Mai Hoay is very
3 (generosity) with it. He explains that he enjoys Thao Van's
noodle soup so much he has been coming here for 20 years
and eating it three times a day. This gets lots of laughs from round the stall: the old man is Thao
Van's father and he gets to eat her noodle soup free.

Thao Van is busy with the 4 (dexterity) hand-jive that marks

pho production. One arm 5 grabs a (fist) of noodles
while the other finds a little sieve: the noodles are
dunked in the smaller pan of boiling water for five seconds. Then the noodles slide into the bowl.
One hand artfully arranges little bouquets of coriander, mint and chopped spring onion on top of
the noodles: in Vietnam, even street soup is served to please the eye as well as the stomach. Next
into the bowl are some slices of beef: I ask for some of the well-boiled and some
6 of the raw,
which the crowd thinks is (greed). And last of all, a great ladleful of the stock
from the seething pot that is the real event. Then the bowl is thrust at me with battered wooden
chopsticks and a porcelain spoon.
7
Crouched on a stool, my pho moment has come. It's
(beauty). The gentle greens, the pinks and rain-cloud greys in the bowl are the stuff of
watercolours. The vapour curls around my face like Vick under a towel. I inhale. There's that
same sweet, come-hither smell that drew us to Thao Van's stall from the top of the street. Those
Christmas cake flavours again - cinnamon and ginger.

I try a sip of the clear soup. It is shockingly sweet at first - a fizzy drink gone flat in the sun. But
then the depths and riches of the flavour come through - down to the oaky, beef-stock base.
Much 8 (subtle) and more complex than the alcohol-heavy
guay tieow noodle soups of Thailand and southern China. I
dig with my chopsticks and come up with a tangle of noodles, a sliver of the raw beef that has
poached itself just enough in the stock to go pearl-coloured, a crunchy shoot of spring onion. It is
very good indeed. For the next bite I shake in a bit of chopped chilli and a squeeze of lime to
give some edge to the sweetness and very soon I am looking at the bottom of the bowl. Mai
Hoay applauds - you're supposed to eat fast. In five minutes the noodles become waterlogged and
lose their texture - and he offers me another teacup of rice wine to celebrate.

Task 3. Write a paragraph to describe one of the best dishes that you have ever tasted

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