A treasure-hunter’s find – answers and vocabulary notes
A find – noun – a discovery; a good or valuable thing or a special person that has been discovered but was not known about before. Eg This quiet beach is quite a find – and no-one seems to know about it! A recent find of Saxon pottery is on display at Halifax museum. To make quite a find – to make a considerable discovery
1 2000. (2000 ancient Roman coins buried in a field in East Sussex.)
2 As the most valuable archeological find of their kind in Britain for 50 years.
3 "It sounds like a Gothic tale."
4 It was one Boxing Day (26th December, the day after Christmas Day), it was getting dark about 4 o’clock, as cold as hell, and it was raining.
5 ‘To hell with this, (I’ll go back to the car) ….’
To hell with – informal – expression indicating irritation about sth, and that you have no intention of accepting or continuing sth. Eg "To hell with my exams, I’m going out dancing." "To hell with what Raymond wants, I’m going out with my friend Mavis."
metal detector – noun – machine that you move over the ground or a surface to discover if there is metal there: eg He goes round fields and beaches with his metal detector, hoping to find buried treasure.
detector – noun – device used to find particular substances or things, or measure their level: eg a metal / bomb / smoke detector
6 "I can’t be bothered!"
7 Brownish and clay-covered / covered in clay.
8 In / into his pocket – he chucked it (informal) in his pocket.
9 No, not for a couple of months / only after a couple of months / not until a couple of months later.
10 About 247 AD.
11 This indicated they had not fallen out of someone’s pocket ("you don’t have coins that fall out of a pocket that land on each other – the fact that the 2 coins were stuck together indicated that they were placed there / stashed together.
to stash – verb – to store or hide something, especially a large amount. Eg The stolen money was stashed (away) in the basement of a London flat.
stash – noun – plural stashes– a collection, sometimes hidden; a reserve for later use – eg We have a stash of groceries in the cellar. They discovered a stash of fake passports hidden at the back of a drawer.
12 To go back (to where he found the coins) because there was (a) treasure there.
13 No. Because he couldn’t remember where he had found them – he had never been to that place before or since he did – it was off his usual patch = not his usual spot.
14 ‘Months had gone by’.
15 Because in it the prospector dies before finding the gold he was looking for, and Tim was imagining never remembering the spot where he had dug the coins up.
(The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is an old film classic (1948) about 2 men who go to Mexico to search for gold, and join up with an old prospector there, called Howard.
Howard: "I know what gold does to men’s souls. …. As long as there’s no find, the noble brotherhood will last but when the piles of gold begin to grow… that’s when the trouble starts…..")
16 It was 1) completely unremarkable 2) in the middle of a field, 3) up a slope , 4) 100 yards from a river and 5) there was no reason why someone should have buried it there.
17 As jumping up out of the ground – coming up in bunches of tens, twenties, eighties, two hundred at a time.
18 15 kilos.
19 He had to stagger back (i.e. to his car).
to stagger – to walk unsteadily, because of illness, dizziness, old age or, for instance the weight of something you are carrying.
20 He found a pot which had another 1000 coins in it.
21 Look! ("I said look, I was cutting across to get out of the rain and found these 2 coins.)
‘Look!’ indicates that you are making a concession to help someone, or simplifying or explaining sth. "Look, have a cup of tea, and then ‘phone the bank manager!" Look here means something like ‘why don’t you….?’. "John, I can’t do this report by 4 o’clock!" "Look, I’ll help you."
22 The person who owns the land where they were found and Tim. The owner of the land and Tim share it between them.
23 3 years – because it took that long to catalogue 15kg of Roman coins – because there were so many of them.
24 Cagey – they are being very cagey.
If you put sth out to someone – phrasal verb – you contract it out to people outside your own organisation. Eg The library has put the canteen out to a local restaurant.
25 ‘Many many thousands of pounds’ was all you could draw him on
To draw someone on a topic – to try to persuade someone who is reluctant to tell you about something they know.
‘Many many thousands of pounds’ was all you could draw him on = he was reluctant to be any more precise than this, this was all he was prepared to say (even though he probably knew the facts….)