Reading & Use of English 3 part 5

You are going to read an extract from an article about a car rally in the desert. For questions 31-36, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

In the exam, you mark your answers on a separate answer sheet.

Shirley Ford, voiceover artist

Clive Gartside meets the voiceover artist Shirley Ford, whose voice is familiar from advertisements, cartoons and other recordings. During our first, hour-long conversation, Shirley Ford speaks to me in the voice of a cheeky 8-year-old boy, the boy’s tired mother, an amusing elderly Scottish woman and a very fast-talking alien. Her voices – I struggled to keep count of them all – are recognisable to viewers of children’s TV and cartoons, and to people who have seen computerised employee programmes about health and safety. ‘I’ve just done a voiceover about back injuries,’ she says, ‘so I had to learn quickly how to pronounce loads of medical terms.’

Shirley talks about what it takes to do voiceovers.
‘Lots of actors, some very highly regarded, reckon they can do funny voices and, actually, many of them probably can,’ she says. ‘There’s more to it than that, though. You have to bring the script to life for an audience who can’t see you. You wouldn’t believe how many household names are desperate to do voiceover work. Thinking of the publicity, producers will invite them to auditions, but often they don’t get offered parts because they’re too used to acting with their whole bodies.

After school, Shirley enrolled on a drama course with a standard acting career in mind. During the course, she had some occasional work singing jingles for TV adverts. ‘One day,’ she says, the man who ran the recording studio suggested I try out for the part of a rabbit in the soundtrack for a cartoon. It seemed ridiculous – I hadn’t studied drama to play rabbits – but I tried it for a laugh and, amazingly, ended up getting a major part.’ Shirley realised she could do voices and that voiceover work might be the way to go.
Adult female actors are frequently asked to provide the voices for small boys and girls. Their voices are lighter than those of male actors, and in the recruitment of child performers there are complex procedures and endless forms to deal with, which production companies on tight schedules would