INTERMEDIATE

Units 1–2
Reading and Speaking Martha Gellhorn

1 All these people work for newspapers. Do you know what the jobs are?
• editor • gossip columnist • war correspondent
• fashion editor • home affairs correspondent • travel writer
• foreign correspondent • sports journalist • business correspondent
Discuss your ideas.

2 Read the article quickly and answer the questions.

1 What sort of journalist was Martha Gellhorn?
2 Approximately how long was her career?
3 Which writer was she married to?

3 Circle the correct answers.

1 Martha Gellhorn worked all over the world / in Europe.
2 She did / didn’t do dangerous things.
3 She preferred to write about important / ordinary people.
4 She wasn’t / was asked to work after 1989.
5 Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway had / hadn’t been married before.
6 Her marriage to Hemingway was / wasn’t the most important thing in her life.
7 She turned down a job in Bosnia / Panama.
8 At the end of her life, she said she had been lucky / unlucky.

Vocabulary
4 Find words or phrases in the article which mean:
1 fights between countries
2 move from water on to the land
3 when an army from one country attacks another country
4 said no to what somebody offers you
5 natural ability to do something very well
6 have too many good or special things
7 be good enough to have or receive something

What do you think?

5 Look at the jobs in exercise 1 again. Number them in the order you would like to do
them. Compare your list with other students and explain your reasons.

Page 1 www.oup.com/elt/headway Headway © Oxford University Press PHOTOCOPIABLE

Reading and Speaking
Martha Gellhorn
One of the great journalists of the 20th century;
brave and completely committed to writing the truth.
Reading Martha Gellhorn
is an amazing experience.
A travel writer, a journalist
and a novelist, she was
one of the best witnesses
of the 20th Century.
Starting work in Paris in the
1920s, Martha Gellhorn was a
war correspondent who covered
some of the most important
conflicts of the 20th Century:
the Spanish Civil War, World
War II, Vietnam, the Six-Day War
in the Middle East and various
clashes in Central America.
Page 2 www.oup.com/elt/headway
INTERMEDIATE Units 1–2 Martha Gellhorn
A brave reporter, Gellhorn
would do anything to get a
story: she hid on a hospital ship
and went ashore as a hospital
worker, and she flew with fighter
pilots during World War II. She
always focused on the civilian
victims of war. ‘I talk to people,’
she said.
In 1989, at the age of eighty-one,
she was still travelling and
writing about conflict – this
time covering the American
invasion of Panama. She finally
turned down a job when war
came to eastern Europe (Bosnia),
saying that she was too old and
not active enough for war
anymore.
Headway © Oxford University Press
When she was reporting on the
Spanish Civil War she met and
married Ernest Hemingway, the
American writer. It was her
second marriage and his third.
They were married for five years,
until she left Hemingway. It
annoyed her that many people
remembered her for her short
marriage to a famous man and
not for her talent as a writer.
Reflecting on her long and
successful career, she probably
thought how lucky she was!
Gellhorn died at her home in
London on February 15, 1998, at
eighty-nine years of age.
PHOTOCOPIABLE