Reading comprehension. Choose one correct answer. Choose one correct answer. My Grandfather’s Place 1 . Whenever I breathe the salty odor of sea air, I recall my grandfather and his house by Penobscot Bay in Maine. I was only seven the summer I spent there, but I clearly remember his small white house. My parent’s Boston apartment was not that far away—only several hundred miles—but in Maine I felt as if I were in another world. 2 . My memory of my grandfather is inseparable from that of his surroundings. Like the shaggy pine trees by his house, my grandfather looked large and windblown. Because he spent the bulk of the day outdoors, my grandfather seemed to be part of the landscape. In the front of the house, facing the road, my grandfather had planted many flowers shrubs, and trees. On a typical day he would spend the morning tending his roses. He moved so smoothly and made so little noise that chickadees and blue jays would come to drink from a birdbath right next to the roses as if my grandfather wasn’t even there. He spoke very little as he gardened. When he did speak, I could hear the pleasing tunefulness of his Italian accent. 3 . As soon as my grandfather had completed his gardening chores, he would take me down to the beach. The grass along the way felt stubbly and hard under my feet. A set of wooden steps led to the beach which was peppered with pebbles, rocks, and boulders. At first, the pebbles hurt my feet, but my feet soon toughened, and I could walk barefoot with ease like my grandfather. 4 . We usually spent most of the day by the water, with my grandfather showing me many wonders. He pointed out starfish clinging to the undersides of large rocks. He showed me mussels whose shells were rainbow colored inside and a huge purple jellyfish that had washed up on the beach. As we walked along the shore, we would look for our marker—a large rock fifty feet from our sea wall. At low tide, the rock looked like a buffalo rising out of the water. Its craggy hump was covered with thousands of rough barnacles and with strips of curly black seaweed. 5 . My grandfather’s daily rituals were not complete until we had watched the sunset. We would walk to the end of the jetty and sit gazing out at the water until the sun rested on the surface of the water, then disappeared. 6 . After my grandfather died, I learned that he had come to the United States when he was thirteen years old. Before that he had lived in a town in southern Italy that overlooked the Mediterranean Sea. I went there years later. Staring out over the shimmering blue expanse of water, I realized that my grandfather had r e- created in America some of the beauty he had left behind in Italy.