136 EXAM PRACTICE Read the text about Lavasa, a new city in India. Answer the questions (1–8) using a maximum of four words. Write your answers in the spaces provided. The first one (0) has been done for you. READING 1 India invents a city At first glance this could be Italy – the promenade, the cafés and ice-cream parlours, the terraces of little apartment houses. Even the name of the place, Lavasa, sounds vaguely Italian. But look again and it clearly isn’t Italy. It’s too clean, too new. And there are hardly any people. What makes it all the more improbable is that Lavasa is in India, the land of autorickshaws and slum dogs, of sweat and dust and litter. With only a handful of residents, Lavasa is a city-in-waiting. But its corporate backers believe it will soon represent a new model of urban development and governance in India – a country where the term ‘city planning’ has long been a contradiction in terms. Lavasa lies in the mountains some 130 miles southeast of Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital, and 40 miles west of Pune, a growing hub of software programming and computer animation. If all goes according to plan, Lavasa will eventually house more than 300,000 people. It will have a worldclass medical campus, luxury hotels, boarding schools, sports academies, a space camp, and, its developers hope, animation and film studios, software development companies, biotech labs and law and architectural firms – all of the knowledge industries at the heart of the ‘new India’. Lavasa is the brainchild of Ajit Gulabchand, a high-profile billionaire industrialist and the chairman of a conglomerate known for megaprojects like bridges and dams. It’s the first city in India to be planned according to the principles of ‘New Urbanism’, which advocate walkable cities that mix business and residential development, offer mixedincome housing and preserve green space. Lavasa will provide centrally pressurised running water, reliable electricity, sewage treatment, garbage collection and even fiberoptic connections in every home. These things are so alien in India that when prospective house buyers first saw Lavasa, many asked why they couldn’t see water tanks on the roofs and whether the price included a septic tank. Perhaps the most radical thing about Lavasa is the fact that it is built and governed by a private corporation. Most Indian cities are run largely by regional states, so urban development falls to overstretched bureaucrats or state politicians chiefly interested in winning over rural voters. The Lavasa Corporation has hired You can find the answer key to the following tasks online. Go to www.oebv.at and type in this code: vv66cd. Exam practice Reading LESEN B2+ Ich kann ein breites Spektrum an Texten (auch literarischen) auch zu weniger vertrauten Themen verstehen und die Hauptaussagen sowie spezifische Informationen und implizite Bedeutungen erfassen. !! Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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