Modelo examen 8 – Reading – Part 2

Read the text. Use the sentences to complete the text. Choose the correct sentence for each gap. There are two extra sentences you will not need.

Bacon’s emerging homosexuality severely strained relations with his family and, by his own account, he was expelled from the household in 1926, 1.)________________________________. Bacon’s humiliation was heightened by a strong physical attraction towards his father, first realised through sexual encounters with stable hands.

The 16-year-old Bacon went to London with no clear idea of what he wanted to do. During the autumn and winter of 1926 he simply drifted, 2.)___________________________________ and furtive encounters with older men. ‘I can’t say I was what’s called moral when I was young,’ he recalled, and he certainly had few qualms about engaging in petty theft or riffling through the pockets of a casual pick-up.

3.)___________________________________. He arranged for Francis to accompany a friend and relation on his wife’s side, a certain Harcourt-Smith, on a trip to Berlin in the spring of 1927. Eddy Bacon seems to have hoped that the ultra-masculine Harcourt-Smith would iron out his son’s effeminacy. Instead the sexually voracious guardian took advantage of his charge, 4.)_____________________________.

Berlin was Bacon’s first overwhelming cultural experience. He savoured its opulence, experienced at first hand in the Hotel Adlon, and its squalor, 5.)________________________________. The erotic life of the city was startlingly uninhibited and artistically it thrived with new developments in architecture, painting and cinema. It may have been in Berlin that Bacon first saw Battleship Potemkin (1925) by the Soviet filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein. Its full impact on the young man would not surface for several decades.

A. After Major Bacon caught his son trying on his mother’s underwear

B. Bacon’s father made one final attempt to influence his son’s life and it was exceedingly inept

C. Altogether, the whole childhood reeked of desperation and sadness, nothing he couldn’t handle properly.

D. Kept afloat by a modest (£3 a week) allowance from his mother a series of odd jobs

E. A turn-around Bacon later recounted with considerable mirth.

F. Felt in the poverty of the surrounding streets.

G. Bacon had the peculiar knack of meeting people who could help him develop his talents.