Reading

The story bellow is about a person who can't resist the temptation to travel. Search in the text for the answers to the following questions.

a) At what age are people likely to get infected with the vi­rus of restlessness?

b) What serves as a signal to set off on a journey?

c) What is a journey compared with?

From Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am 58 perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle will raise the hair on my neck and set my feet tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum, always a bum.

I fear the disease is incurable. When the virus of restless­ness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must place his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay.

Once a journey is designed, equipped and put in process, a new factor enters. A journey has personality, temperament, in­dividuality, uniqueness.

A journey is a person in itself, no two are alike. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel bet­ter now, having said this, although only those who have experi­enced it will understand it.