1. Read through the passage printed below and then answer the questions which follow
it, using as far as possible your own words:—
The City of Youth
To my primly disciplined Scottish mind there was much about Australia, at first
sight and hearing, that seemed reprehensible; but one morning in Sydney my criticism
was all blown away by a great gale of pleasure.
It was, I think, a Saturday morning. I was, at any rate, in a hurry to do some
5 shopping and small business before office and magazine1 were closed. But Hunter
Street was crowded. Pitt Street was stormy with opposing tides of traffic, George
Street was a maelstrom of humanity. It would be impossible, I saw, to get my
business done and buy the shirts I needed; and my temper, which is short, began to
express itself in words as brief. But then, en-isled in turbulence, I had time to look
10 about me, and the crowds that thwarted me, I perceived, were strangely young and
uncommonly attractive: girls beyond counting, sunburnt and laughing, in bright
frocks that all looked made for holiday; young men, bare-headed and bold of
movement, with clear skins and confident loud voices; older men and women, stout
and prosperous, genial with good living. But the majority was young, and the smell
15 of salt water mingled with the scent of the girls in their summer frocks, as though
their brown arms and legs, dyed by the sun, were perfumed also by Pacific waves;
and their finery had not a costly, artificial look, but a natural gaiety like apple-blossom
in its season, and like orchard-bloom in a gale of wind it blew about the streets, a
storm of petals in Hunter street, a honeyed chaos in Pitt Street, and in George Street
20 a whirlwind from the Hesperides, where sea-spray tempers the sweetness of the air.
I forgot my business; I could do without shirts, I decided; and in a state of wholly
unexpected pleasure I let the tides take me this way and that, and wondered why girls
in Sydney should be more lightly built, more slightly fashioned, than girls in Auckland
and Dunedin. Few of them were distinguished by a memorable perfection of beauty,
25 but surprisingly many had the charm of prettiness, freshness, and physical assurance.
The young men were unlike the long, lean, heroically statured Anzacs of the first
great war but they were sturdy, light-footed, and though city-bred had a mountain-
glow or foreshore colour of health. And their elders were everywhere, it seemed, in
the minority. It was a youthful traffic, the youngest crowd that ever I was caught in.
30 I escaped at last, but carried with me the sensation of having walked through a
seaside orchard in a hurricane.
Eric Linklater.
1 magazine = shop.
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