There was a great, smooth swell upon the sea. The wind blowing steady and gentle from the south, there was no contrariety between that and the current, and the billows rose and fell unbroken.

(2) Had it been otherwise, I must long ago have perished; but as it was, it is surprising how easily and securely my little and light boat could ride. Often, as I still lay at the bottom, and kept no more than an eye above the gunwale, I would see a big blue summit heaving close above me; yet the coracle would but bounce a little, dance as if on springs, and subside on the other side into the trough as lightly as a bird.

(3) I began after a little to grow very bold, and sat up to try my skill at paddling. But even a small change in the disposition of the weight will produce violent changes in the behaviour of a coracle. And I had hardly moved before the boat, giving up at once her gentle dancing movement, ran straight down a slope of water so steep that it made me giddy, and struck her nose, with a spout of spray, deep into the side of the next wave.

(4) I was drenched and terrified, and fell instantly back into my old position, whereupon the coracle seemed to find her head again, and led me as softly as before among the billows. It was plain she was not to be interfered with, and at that rate, since I could in no way influence her course, what hope had I left of reaching land?

(5)I began to be horribly frightened, but I kept my head, for all that. First, moving with all care, I gradually baled out the coracle with my sea-cap; then getting my eye once more above the gunwale, I set myself to study how it was she managed to slip so quietly through the rollers.

(6) I found each wave, instead of the big, smooth glossy mountain it looks from shore, or from a vessel's deck, was for all the world like any range of hills on the dry land, full of peaks and smooth places and valleys. The coracle, left to herself, turning from side to side, threaded, so to speak, her way through these lower parts, and avoided the steep slopes and higher, toppling summits of the wave.

(7) 'Well, now,' thought I to myself, 'it is plain I must lie where I am, and not disturb the balance; but it is plain, also, that I can put the paddle over the side, and from time to time, in smooth places, give her a shove or two towards land.' No sooner thought upon than done. There I lay on my elbows, in the most trying attitude, and every now and again gave a weak stroke or two to turn her head to shore.

From the last paragraph, write down the new skill Jim tries

This is an extract from an article about the round-the-world

(1) The Vendee Globe is one of the toughest sporting events in the world – if you can call it a sport. 26,000 miles around the world, sailing single-handed on a 60-foot yacht would be enough to put most people off, but not Ellen McArthur. “If you have a dream, you can make it happen.” Those were her words after finishing the 2000-2001 race with her yacht kingfisher in second place overall, becoming the youngest person and the fastest woman to circumnavigate the globe.

(2) What McArthur didn’t realise was that her toughest challenge was yet to come – learning to deal with all the media attention she would suddenly be receiving.

(3) Well known in France before the vendee globe began, reports of her success during the race soon filtered across the channel, and when it was reported that she was challenging for the lead, the British press stepped up its coverage. Thousands of people kept track of her progress on the Internet, while others waited for regular news updates on her position, her schedule and the situation with the weather.

(4) When she finally arrived at Les Sables d’Olonne on the Bay of Biscay, a crowd of 200,000 people lined the harbourside, waiting to greet her. Fireworks and flares lit up the sky like the gunfire of some great sea battle at night. But for MacArthur the real battle was over , and this moment was about celebration.

(5) Her voyage itself hadn’t been so grand. Three days after leaving port , on November 5th 2000, one of her fingers became infected , MacArthur had to lance it herself with a red hot needle. By the 30th day, an exhausted McArthur woke to find ‘Kingfisher’ within 15 metres of an iceberg as she neared Antartica.

(6) In the winds that reached 45 knots, MacArthur was forced to climb the 90ft mast to make urgent repairs to the mainsail, after ‘Kingfisher’ had been knocked onto her side. The effort nearly killed her.

(7) MacArthur’s troubles didn’t end there. Ten days before the end of the race, ‘Kingfisher’ struck an object under the water, snapping the daggerboard from the hull. The daggerboard is a special board lowered through the keel of the boat to prevent it drifting off course, towards the side sheltered by the wind. One and a half times MacArthur’s weight , it took her a whole day to pull it on board, but she refused to give up, and eventually got tit on board the boat.

(8) To most of the British media, this was a perfect story – plucky little English girl defies the odds to win fame and success at sea. The fact that she was a woman, only 24 and 5 feet 2 inches tall (or 3 inches, depending on which newspaper you read) seemed to be more important than her actual achievement

(9) But to the sailing community, MacArthur's success was a lot less a surprise than the hype suggested. Her determination to sail has always been evident. After a sailing trip aged eight, MacArthur knew she wanted to sail. At school, she saved up her dinner money for three years in order to buy an 8ft dinghy. At 18, she sailed around Britain single-handed, and was named Young Sailor of the Year for 1995. In 1997, she travelled to Brest, where she bought and refitted a 21ft boat, ‘Le Poisson’, living underneath it to save money. Then she took part in the Mini-Transat race between Brest and Martinique in the Caribbean, completing it in 33 days. And all of this was achieved without major sponsorship

(10) Recognising this, the British sailing community named her Yachtswoman of the Year in 1998. In 1999, she won her class in the Route du Rhum transatlantic race, coming fifth overall. This success made her hugely popular in France, where she became known as “sailing’s young hope”. It also represented a change in her financial situation. With £2m sponsorship from the Kingfisher group, MacArthur was now in a position to plan for the Vendee Globe.

(11) Given the history, then, it is much less of a shock result than the media would have us believe. Indeed, it only seems to have been a shock because most of the media had never noticed her before. MacArthur is clearly one of the best sailors that Britain has ever produced, male or female. The fact that reports and comment kept returning to MacArthur’s gender says more about the media in general than it says about her or her achievements. Instead of looking for a sporting angle, they were looking for ‘human interest’ – hence the emphasis in most reports on MacArthur’s diminutive size as well as her gender. The plain truth is MacArthur’s success in the Vendee Globe had nothing to do with her size or her sex, and everything to do with her commitment and drive.

(12) At least the media were celebrating a British sportsperson, rather than cursing another overpaid and underrated star. Infact, that’s probably the most inspiring thing to come out of MacArthur’s success – the thought that there are still some talented, committed individuals out there who are motivated by the love of their sport, rather than any financial rewards it may bring them. Not only is she clearly a fine sailor at the peak of her form, but she also genuinely loves what she is doing. It is for these reasons, not for any factors of gender or size, that Ellen MacArthur is someone to look up to, and perhaps even to envy.

Caroline Frankevich is from a Ukrainian family who moved to Britain in 1951. She was born in 1968. This is an extract from ‘In the Old Country’, a book in which she describes her first visit to the Ukraine in 1992, shortly after the country gained independence from the Soviet Union.

There was honey, bread and milk set out on the table for breakfast. Sonya wouldn’t sit down - “What on earth would I want to sit down for?” – and got on with packing garlic sausage, bread and a jar of pickled gherkins for my aunt and me to eat on our journey. The boys stared glumly while we ate, until Sonya sent them outside to wash.

Uncle Vassil had already put my aunt’s Opel behind the barn and brought round his Lada. He was going to drop us in the next village with his cousin, who would drive us to Lviv so we could catch the night train to Kiyiv. We kissed everyone three times and we were gone.

The cousin was a vodka-alcoholic: a young man with a decrepit body who wore a blue polyester shirt and a thick gold chain. My aunt gave him two hundred Marlboro. Cousin Shirt started the Lada. All the cars were Ladas because, in Soviet times, Ladas were the only kind of car you could buy. From Leningrad to Vladivostok, Ladas swarmed over the old Soviet Union. The state of the Ladas was an excellent guide to the state of the nation.

The engine half-died after less than a kilometre, and then staggered on. My aunt said, “It’ll be fine when we get to the main road.” I thought maybe Cousin Shirt’s car disagreed with the potholes and clenched my teeth..

When we got to the main road, Cousin Shirt’s car had died completely. He tried to give some of the cigarettes back and then asked for money. My aunt gave him five dollars. I thought he wanted the money to fix his useless car, but he walked down the road to a traffic policeman and gave it to him. The policeman took the five dollars and waved it at a car. The driver stopped and started insisting that he hadn’t been speeding. The policeman gave him the five dollars and told him to drive us to Lviv railway station. We gave the policeman some of the cigarettes and said goodbye to Shirt. Everyone was happy.

It was forty kilometres to Lviv. After twenty-five kilometres, the exhaust pipe fell of the back of the Lada. The driver stopped the car and reversed down the dual carriageway to a lay-by. The other cars took this in their stride and steered round us. At the lay-by, the driver reversed his car up the ramp provided for the convenience of the poorly maintained cars, and tied the exhaust pie back on with a bit of rope, The engine was making a horrible noise, but the exhaust pie no longer dragged along the ground so we drove on.

Vassil and Sonya’s village had been just as my grandfather, and storybooks full of talking animals, witches and beautiful stepdaughters, had taught me to expect. The shoddy cars, faintly corrupt policemen and alcoholic Shirt were all part of the new, shaky but interesting, newly independent Ukraine. The railway station, on the other hand, was pure Soviet might. It was a vast building with a sweeping roof of steel and glass. In the whitewashed façade, mean little windows peered over the gaping doors. We thanked the man with the broken exhaust and went inside to find another cousin who worked for the railways.

He insisted we leave our bags in his control room and come to the station restaurant with him for a drink before we got on the train. The food was bleak, but there was vodka, so the new cousin, Andrei, ordered a bottle. Andrei spoke Ukranian with an accent that I found impenetrable, so though I admired his gold tooth, I found it hard to sustain interest in the conversation and looked about. The room was four or five stories high and the walls were covered with Soviet mosaics showing the Ukraine’s wealth – grain, fruit and vegetables, coal, steel, crude oil – and happy workers digging the stuff out of the ground. The mosaics didn’t show the happy workers queuing for bread because all the Ukranian grain had been shipped to Moscow , or the happy workers dying of lung diseases because they had worked all their lives in the polluted industrial towns of the East.

The station suddenly struck me as an unbelievably gloomy pace. I asked my aunt whether there was some trouble with the power supply. Was electricity being rationed in the new republic? She passed the question on to Andrei, who giggled and poured another round of vodkas.

“Oh no,” he said, “nothing like that. I just wanted you to have a drink in peace. I’m the chief electrical engineer, so I pulled the plug on the station. Cheers.”

As we walked up the platform the lights came on and the station came back to life. The train left half an hour late, but arrived in Kiyiv next morning exactly on time.

How is the 'newly independent Ukraine' different?

'Treasure Island' and the Ellen MacArthur article are very different texts.