What I do for a living is unique: I teach people how to disappear- 2011

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What I do for a living is unique: I teach people how to disappear. My clients range from the paranoid to the extremely wealthy. Many people contact me thinking I’m going to provide them with a fake passport and a whole new identity, but only the government can do that. What I do is make people hard to track down using a three-step process: misinformation, disinformation and reformation. The first step means erasing available information on a person. The second, disinformation, means creating and spreading false clues about his whereabouts. I might take your debit card and have different people around the world make transactions so it looks like you’re living in different places.

The third step is reformation – getting the person I’m disappearing to a destination without anybody finding out. I’ll teach the client how to live a different life, open accounts abroad, use only prepaid phones and create complicated phone and email control systems. I have a partner and she helps me disappear people. We have a rigorous method. She goes over my tracks, seeing if she can find my client. We do that until she can’t find anything. I rarely hear from my clients ever again. Payment is in advance.

At the moment we’re working on one of the biggest cases we’ve ever handled. This is the gist: A Spanish billionaire who’s getting divorced claims he’s lost all his money, so he won’t pay his wife anything. My client is the wife. We’re pretty sure the husband still has the money; he’s just moving it around, making it look like he doesn’t. He is criminally connected, so she’s worried that if he’s forced to give her a large amount of money, he’ll try to have her murdered. So she can’t stay in Spain after the trial.

READING COMPREHENSION

1. Write a summary of the text in English, including the most important points, using your own words whenever possible (maximum 50 words).

The writer talks about his job, which is to make people disappear. He describes how he does this / the techniques / procedures he uses for this, and tells us about the specific case he is working on at the moment.

2. Find words or phrases in the text that correspond in meaning to the words and definitions given here.

• a) Not genuine: fake
• b) Lines or marks left by a person, animal or vehicle in passing: tracks
• c) The central idea: gist
• d) Practically certain: pretty sure

3. Complete the second sentence of each pair so that it has the same meaning as the first one.

• a) My clients range from the paranoid to the extremely wealthy.
• Some of my clients are paranoid; others are extremely wealthy.
• b) At the moment we’re working on one of the biggest cases we’ve ever handled. 
• The author said that at that moment he was working on one of the biggest cases they had ever handled.
• c) I’ll teach the client how to live a different life
• The client will be taught how to live a different life.
• d) He is criminally connected, so his wife is worried that he’ll try to have her murdered.
• Because he is criminally connected, his wife is worried that he’ll try to have her murdered.

4. Answer the following questions in your own words.

• 1. Why does the writer need a partner in his business?
• The writer needs a partner to help him (to) disappear people / to make people disappear / to make sure that the people he disappears cannot be traced / to go over his tracks, seeing if she can find his clients …
• 2. Why is it difficult for somebody to disappear?
• Because a person creates / leaves a lot of information about him/herself which has to be eliminated /destroyed. 
• Because there is a lot of information about a person in many different places. 

WRITING 

5. Where would you go if you wanted to disappear? Explain your choice. (Approximately 120 words).

I think that if I wanted to disappear I would go to a South American country like Argentina, perhaps. I would go there for several reasons. First, because they speak Spanish there, so I wouldn’t have any problems with the language. Secondly, in South America there are many people who originally came from Spain, so I wouldn’t have to change my appearance very much, as I would do if I went to China, for example. China might seem a good choice, too, because there are lots of Chinese people and it is an enormous country, but I would have to change my appearance quite a lot in order not to be noticed as a foreigner. And in the third place, I’d really like to see South America. I have a friend who went to Argentina on holiday with his parents last year, and he says it’s awesome.

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 Source: CiUG