Prime Time 7, Coursebook plus Semester Self-checks

5 Fight for survival Before you read Can you imagine that people want to be alone, to get away from their families, their friends, their background? Make a list of reasons why people would want to do this. Reading: The story of Christopher Johnson McCandless a) Read the text about a young man who died in Alaska. First decide whether the statements (1–5) are true (T) or false (F) and put a cross ( ✘ ) in the correct box. Then identify the sentence in the text which supports your decision. Write the first 4 words of this sentence in the space provided. There may be more than one correct answer; write down only one. The first one (0) has been done for you. Into the wild 1  2  In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. His name turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. He’d grown up, I learned, in an affluent suburb of Washington, DC, where he’d excelled academically and had been an elite athlete. Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four- thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged edge of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, exceptional experience. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska. Working on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word article, which ran in the January 1993 issue of the magazine, but my fascination with McCandless remained long after that issue of Outside was replaced on the newsstands by more current publications. I was haunted by the particulars of the boy’s starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own. Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year following the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his journeys with an interest that bordered on obsession. In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the powerful attraction high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you. I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless’s strange tale struck a personal note that made a dispassionate description of the tragedy impossible. Through most of the book, I have tried – and largely succeeded, I think – to minimise my presence as an author. But let the reader be warned: I interrupt McCandless’s story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the mystery of Chris McCandless. He was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not go together readily with modern existence. Long captivated by the writing of Leo Tolstoy, McCandless particularly admired how the great novelist had 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 74 Extreme situations Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv