I. Read the text “The Last frontier”.

     The tourists are coming! Bar the gates, lock up your daughters! Here at my home in Wales hust now, like many another honest citizen across half of Europe, I am standing to arms as the annual migratory horde spills once again out of the mountains to the sea. With its vast convoys of family cars, its terrible encampments of caravans, its generic concomitants of mess, wine and ugliness, it really does suggest to me, every summer, the arrival of a scavenging medieval army out of some ghastly hinterland.

     As you perhaps detect, I hate mass tourism and almost everything to do with it. It is a sterile industry. It creates nothing. It degrades all it touches. It encourages pretence and phoney traditionalism. It brings out the worst in its practitioners and it reduces the mighty works of art and architecture, fateful processes of history, the noblest expressions of faith, the most magnificent scenes of nature, to the level of commercial gimmicks.

     One of the miseries of tourism is that, almost by definition, it attacks everywhere most beautiful. The Côte d’Azur, Yellowstone, the Italian lakes, the Barrier Reef, the Greek islands, Venice and Sausalito, Prague and Cordoba - during the time of the mass migrations all such prodigies are as overwhelmed by the onslaught of the barbarians as is our own lovely corner of Cardigan Bay.

     Of course they are not all barbarians, not all ‘monster of the sea’, as a Venetian monk chracterised the crowds thronging the Piazza San Marco in the Middle Ages. Of course they aren’t. Some of my best friends are tourists.

     But such is the scale of the modern holiday industry, so violent are its assaults and so relentlessly distributed across the face of the whole planet - even into Antarctica or the dread Sahara - that for me (and perhaps for you?) the very word ‘tourist’ has become a kind of shorthand for all things unlovely.

     Many tourists these days don’t even particularly care what country they are in - if indeed they know. Many more have long been acclimatised to the tourist version of travel. ‘If today is Thursday’, as an American movie title had it long ago, ‘we must be in Belgium’.

     I must not, however, be entirely negative. There are useful spin-offs from tourism. There are opportunities for local employment, though not half as many as the planning applications pretend. Shopkeepers or hoteliers who dislike tourism about as much as I do nevertheless get custom from the horde.

     Many people in far-away places would never have tasted fish-and-chips were it not for tourism, and here at home I admit that satisfying the needs of tourism has sometimes provided happy advantages for local people- concerts, plays, amusements of one sort or another which otherwise would never have happened in a month of Sundays.

     It can be said for tourist, too, that at least it draws the nations together, and tells them the truth about one another. Most inhibitions are shed when a sitizen becomes a tourist, and I can imagine that if mass holiday had been happening on the present scale in 1939, there might not have been a Second World War. Surely the peoples of Europe would have been too familiar with each other’s pot-bellies to take very seriously the idea of a war against a neighbour!

II. Answer the questions.

1. Why does the writer compare the arrival of tourists to a medieval army?

2. Why does the writer hate mass tourism?

3. According to the writer, what has one result of the modern holiday industry been?

4. What does the writer imply about the way many tourists travel?

5. How have the local people benefited from tourism?

6. According to the writer, why does tourism bring the nations together?

 

III.

     The writer of the text lives in a small town in Wales, which receives large numbers of tourists every year. Identify the extended metaphor used by the writer to refer to the effects of tourism. Underline the words which helped you decide.

 

IV.

     Which parts of your country are particulary affected by tourism. Make a list of the positive and negative effects of tourism in these places.

 

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