Mother’s Day
Today is Mother’s Day in the UK. Here is a B2 level Use of English test PDF that you can download and share with your students to mark the event.
Photo by Kelvin Agustinus, Pexels
You may 1)___________ wondering why we are talking about Mother’s Day so early in the year. In fact in the UK we celebrate Mother’s Day (or Mothering Sunday) on 2)___________ fourth Sunday in Lent, which usually falls in the middle of March).
Some people point 3)___________ that the British version of Mother’s Day is far older than the American version, which was started in 1907. However, this isn’t quite true. In fact, back in the middle ages, Mothering Sunday was a very different event. It was a day 4)___________ Christians would head back to their ‘Mother Church’, the church where they were baptised.
In 1913, Mothering Sunday was revived by an English writer named Constance Adelaide Smith. Her idea was 5)___________ extend the celebration to take in ‘mother nature’ and the ‘mothers of earthly homes'. The people of the UK really took to the idea of celebrating 6)___________ mothers - partially inspired by the example of the United States, where Mother’s Day first took place in 1907.
The day was usually marked by a gift of violets (small purple flowers) and the baking of a special cake, 7)___________ these traditions have largely been forgotten. Nonetheless, Mothering Sunday has carried on. Critics now complain about how commercial the day has become, but it is still a chance for families to get together and 8)___________ the day with the people they love.
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