ingilizce hazırlık unit 12 / 232
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Listen to the reading passage

                                    The Cat Among The Pigeons - A
1 Meadowbank School for Girls was one of the best prep schools in England. The summer term just started and there were new students, teachers and a member of staff. Miss. Bulstrode was the popular headmistress of this school for a long time and she wanted to get retired. Miss. Chadwick helped Miss. Bulstrode to found the school thirty years ago. So she wanted to be headmistress after her. However, Miss. Bulstrode wanted someone creative to encourage innovation and improve the education at school after herself. Miss. Vansittart was her second assistant. She was very suitable for the post or Miss. Rich could be another option for the job. Miss. Rich was an open-minded, hardworking teacher too.


2 That day a parent, Mrs. Upjohn visited headmistress Miss. Bulstrode. She was a member of military intelligence for a long time. Mrs. Upjohn tried to inform Miss. Bulstrode about someone who was an attacker in the garden. While Mrs. Upjohn was speaking, somehow Miss. Bulstrode wasn’t able to concentrate on her talking. Although nothing important escaped her attention, she couldn’t understand the importance of the conversation. Then, she felt anxious.


3 There were newcomers as well as old teachers at school. They were the French teacher Angèle Blanche, the gym teacher Grace Springer, Miss. Bulstrode’s new secretary Ann Shapland, and the gardener Adam Goodman. Meadowbank was an expensive girls’ boarding school. Students were from rich families. Princess Shaista and Jennifer Sutcliffe were new students. Princess Shaista was from Ramat*. Jennifer was an easy going girl and a talented tennis player. Jennifer and Julia Upjohn became close friends. Julia loves observing the people around because of being much more intelligent and much more careful. At school some strange events began to occur.


4 First someone threatened Miss. Springer's life in the gym and suddenly she disappeared. Then, an inspector begun to inquire about the case. Meantime, Jennifer Sutcliffe complained about her racquet deformation and wrote to her mother asking her for a new racquet. She was an experienced tennis player. Julia Upjohn and Jennifer Sutcliffe gave their racquets to each other. Shaista’s uncle sent a man to take her home for the weekend. Most of the girls spent the weekend with their families except Julia. After exchanging the racquets, Julia took it to her room and discovered that there were jewels in the handle of the racquet. At that moment, someone tried to unlock the door quietly to open. She pushed the cupboard in front of the door to stop the attack. Julia's “aha” moment came while shivering with fear in her room after the attack at the weekend. She decided to tell her story to detective Hercule Poirotthe next day because Meadowbank girls’ boarding school couldn’t provide a safe place for the students anymore. Detective Hercule Poirot was one of her mother’s friends from military intelligence.


5 In the following days, a strange lady visited the school and gave Jennifer a new racquet and said that Aunt Gina sent it as a present. Then, the lady took Jennifer’s old one to return it to Aunt Gina. Additionally, Adam Goodman gave his true identity away to Miss. Bulstrode, while Inspector Kelsey was interviewing everybody. He wasn’t a gardener, he was a British agent. A few days later Aunt Gina wrote that she sent neither a racquet nor anything else. That weekend someone attacked Miss. Vansittart with a rabid squirrel as a weapon and she was fainted from shock. While she was lying on the ground in the gym, she became lost in a few minutes. The next day Julia escaped from the school to talk to Detective Hercule Poirot. For the police, the suspicious person was Miss. Blanche, new French teacher, whereas she was innocent, she did nothing. Only she knew who committed the crime. While trying to blackmail the attacker, Miss. Blanche disappeared at the gate.