Enjoying yourself - Module 6B

B2 First · Multiple Choice Reading · First Expert Student's Resource Book, Pearson Education

You are going to read a newspaper article about a museum in New York. For questions 1–6, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

It is Saturday night at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, a large important-looking 19th-century building. Since six o'clock, entry to the museum has been free of charge. People are shouting in the galleries but the guards, who seem to be unusually relaxed, take no notice. On the ground floor, in the galleries devoted to African art, children are playing hide-and-seek while their parents sip beer from plastic cups. Some teenage girls wander by, leaving a trail of perfume, and head through the sculpture exhibition to a temporary dance floor where a DJ is playing reggae music. Watching the scene is Bryan, a young teacher from a local school. What brings him out tonight? 'I'm here for the reggae, of course,' he says. 'When I heard they were playing that, I thought, "I have to be there," and obviously, a lot of people feel the same way.' Besides the DJ, the museum has laid on gallery talks, a Martin Scorsese film, a puppet show and a samba band. The Brooklyn Museum of Art wasn't always so trendy. For decades, it put on excellent exhibitions that few came to see. Guidebooks described the enormous building as 'an undiscovered treat'. Had it been over in the city's fashionable Upper East Side, of course, the museum would have been packing them in. Even when they put on dull exhibitions, New York's top museums can count on a steady stream of visitors – mostly tourists. But Brooklyn, one of New York's toughest districts, isn't on the standard tourist route. When the museum was built, it was in a wealthy suburb but these days the surrounding streets are home to recent immigrants – mostly poor folk from the Caribbean. Two years ago, in an effort to revive itself, the museum appointed a new director, Arnold Lehman, who was born in Brooklyn. Lehman was convinced that the museum should forget about trying to attract visitors from the other side of town and try to appeal instead to people from the surrounding area. 'The neighbourhood's changed,' he explains, 'but this is where the museum is and we can't – and won't – pretend we're somewhere else.' The free evening events, called 'First Saturdays', are Lehman's way of reaching out to people. They are certainly popular: the crush of visitors has forced the museum to move the dance floor from the entrance hall to the car park. Lehman is delighted with the result: 'It's remarkable to hear people say, "I live four blocks away and I've never been in this building before". The great thing for me is when you see teenage boys looking at art in the galleries without being handcuffed to their parents,' he says. What's more, the annual number of visitors to the museum has roughly doubled – from 250,000 to half a million – since the scheme was introduced. Similar institutions across the country are now calling, wanting to know how much it costs 'to throw a good party'. The answer, incidentally, is about