4TH INTERMEDIATE
NAME: DATE:
A) READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS BELOW. (8 points)
David Beckham
David Beckham, one of the world’s most famous footballers, was born in London in 1975 and grew up in the south of England.
Both his parents are football fans and support Manchester United, a very popular team from the north of England. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that Beckham grew up with a love of football and a dream that one day he would put on the famous red shirt of Manchester United.
As a young footballer he developed the characteristics that would later make him so successful. He played with a lot of energy and skill, and became especially good at kicking the ball very accurately over a long distance.
In 1989, his dream came true when someone from Manchester United saw him playing and asked him to become a junior player at the club. He began playing regularly for United’s first team in 1995, aged 20, and went on to help the club win lots of trophies. When he was 21 he played his first game for the English national team, and at the age of 25 he became captain.
His career has had some low points, however. During the 1998 World Cup, for example, he was sent off for kicking an opponent in a very important game for England against Argentina.
By the late 1990s, Beckham (or ‘Becks’, to use his nickname) had become a celebrity because of his good looks, his stylish clothes, and most of all his marriage in 1999 to the singer Victoria Adams (also known as ‘Posh Spice’) from the British pop group The Spice Girls. For years it seemed ‘Posh and Becks’ were on the covers of almost every gossip magazine.
In early 2003 Beckham had a bad argument with his manager at Manchester United, so later that year he left for Spain to play for Real Madrid. By this time he had become the ichest footballer in the world, not only because of his huge salary but also because he had advertising contracts for lots of different products.
He now