1 Bachillerato

Unit 2 Its Raining Cats and Dogs

WEATHER VOCABULARY
1. Read this short story about the British Weather.

I left the house with a brolly in my bag because the weather forecast had predicted
light showers and, sure enough, as soon as I got outside I felt drizzle. I put up my brolly and
hurried along, but there was a huge gust of wind that blew it inside out. As I struggled to fix
the brolly the drizzle started to turn into a shower. I ran under a nearby bus stop to take
shelter and the heavens opened, it started pouring down, really bucketing down. My brolly
was beyond repair so I threw it in a nearby bin and just sat and watched the downpour. After
about five minutes it stopped and the sun came out so I carried on walking, but after about a
minute it started spitting again and I had to shelter in a shop. This time it was just a
quick shower and when I went back outside it was mild with a warm breeze. However as I
continued along the street a car run through a huge puddle in the road and splashed me, I
was soaked from head to toe.
Match these definitions to the highlighted words in the story.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

Very light rain: ..........................................................................

Rain for a short period: ....................................................
Umbrella (slang): ...............................................................
Very wet/covered in water: ..............................................
Heavy rain (phrasal verb): .................................................
One strong action of the wind: .........................................
Heavy rain (noun): .............................................................
Light rain at the beginning of a shower or downpour: .........................................
Light wind: ........................................................................
Body of water in the street: ..............................................
Rained heavily (idiom): .....................................................

http://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/british-weather-vocabulary-%E2%80%93upper-intermediateadvanced
2. Now try this simple weather vocabulary exercise:
1. We're in the middle of a heat- .......................... (streak/wave). It has been very hot for two
weeks.

2. It looks like the sky is ............................ (shining/clearing) up. It's going to be a beautiful
day.
3. That man was .......................................... (struck/beaten) by lightning twice in the past year.
4. A ...................................... (drought/draft) is a long period without any rain.
5. Summers in states like Tennessee are often very hot and very .................. (humidity/humid).
6. We got caught in the thunderstorm and got completely ............................ (socked/soaked).
7. The coastal areas of California have an ...................................... (ideally/ideal) climate.
8. Did you check the weather ............................ (forecast/foreplay) for tomorrow? Is it going to
rain?
9. Q: Was it cold in Canada? A: Yes, it was 20 ........................................ (under/below) zero.
10. Another word for "cloudy" is "......................................." (clouded/overcast).

3. Weather Words
In this exercise give a definition or a synonym in English for the following weather expressions.
Only give a translation as a last resort.
1. Chilly (adj) ...................................................................................................................................
2. A scorcher (n) .............................................................................................................................
3. A blizzard (n) ...............................................................................................................................
4. Boiling (adj) .................................................................................................................................
5. Changeable (adj) .........................................................................................................................
6. Unsettled (adj) ............................................................................................................................
7. Misty (adj) ..................................................................................................................................
8. Hail (v) .........................................................................................................................................
9. Freezing (adj) ..............................................................................................................................
10. A gale (n) ...................................................................................................................................
11. Sleet (v/n) .................................................................................................................................
12. Sunny spells (adj & n) ...............................................................................................................
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13. Muggy (adj) ...............................................................................................................................

14. Damp (adj) ................................................................................................................................
15. Frost (n) ....................................................................................................................................
16. Blustery (adj) ............................................................................................................................
17. An icicle (n) ...............................................................................................................................
18. Smog (n) ...................................................................................................................................
19. Wind chill factor (n) ..................................................................................................................
20. Rainfall (n) ................................................................................................................................

4. Weather Idioms
Match each idiom to its meaning:

1. Every cloud has a silver lining

2. Under the weather
3. A storm in a teacup
4. It never rains but it pours
5. Under a cloud
6. Have ones head in the clouds
7. I havent the foggiest idea
8. The calm before the storm
9. An Indian summer
10. The tip of the iceberg

a. It is only a small, easily visible, part of a problem.

b. When one bad thing happens, other bad things will inevitably
happen at the same time or quickly one after the other.
c. A period of warm sunny weather in late autumn or early
winter.
d. A big fuss made about something of little importance.
e. To be or feel ill.
f. Someone is suspected of having done something wrong.
g. To be out of touch with reality.
h. A quiet or peaceful period just before a period of great
activity.
i. Something good always comes from something bad, and
there is always a reason to hope, even in the worst situations.
j. Not know or understand something at all.

5. Look at the Met. Offices U.K. weather forecast and make sure you understand everything,
especially the accompanying video:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/forecast/five-day

PRE-READING
Consult the Met Office page and make notes about: i) The difference between weather and
climate; ii) What is climate change?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-guide

READING
In the following text, the headings of five sections have been removed. Choose the best
heading (A-F) for the five sections (1-5). There is one extra heading you do not need to use.

Old Ice Clues

History Repeating Itself
Fear For The Future
Super Fast Melt
Accurate Predictors
Fresh Input
When the climate began to warm during the last Ice Age about 23,000 years ago, much of the
Northern Hemisphere was covered in ice. In two new studies published this week in Nature
Geoscience, researchers describe how ice sheets behaved in the past could help scientists
better predict what might happen to them in a warmer world of our future.
1. ....................................
University of Wisconsin geologist Anders Carlson studies ice sheet melt from land and ocean
sediment cores. His study describes what prehistoric Earth was like in North America and
Northern Europe some 140,000 years ago.
"What we found in this paper was that ice that's resting on land it responded very quickly to
the warming climate, but then it didn't retreat really rapidly. It kind of chugged along and
slowly melted like an ice cube if you put a hair dryer on it, Carlson says, adding that was not
the case with ice sheets floating on the ocean. "Marine based ice sheets behave unpredictably.
They may not do anything for a while, and then they all of a sudden respond very abruptly.
They can rapidly disappear."
2. ...................................................
Greenland and Antarctica hold the Earth's last remaining ice sheets. In July, satellite data
showed that 97 percent of the surface of the Greenland ice sheet had turned to slush over four
days, a rate faster than at any time in recorded history. According to Carlson, it might be
responding rapidly to small changes in temperature, similar to what he saw in the prehistoric
record of ice sheets on land.

"But that said, they haven't catastrophically collapsed in the past either to rapidly raise sea
level in the time scale that humans would care about, that we would be hard pressed to adapt
to."Carlson says the Antarctic marine-based ice sheet is less predictable. "What this would
say from the past is that these ice sheets, well they may not do anything for a bit. But then if
you want to catastrophically raise sea level like on the orders of a meter or two in human
lifetime, there is prehistoric precedent for that happening."
3. .........................................
A second paper in Nature Geoscience looks back 12,000 to 7,000 years to when massive ice
sheets still covered the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. At that time, the global
climate was roughly comparable to what it is today and glaciers were melting. The study
describes abrupt sea level jumps - from one-half to two meters -from melting glaciers.
4. .........................................
"What happens when you suddenly drain these massive amounts of fresh water into the
ocean? It's going to change ocean circulation,"says co-author Torbjorn Tornqvist, an Earth
scientist at Tulane University in Louisiana. Today, rapid melting from the Greenland ice sheet
would send massive amounts of fresh water into the North Atlantic Ocean, changing the
marine environment.
"But it will also lead to potentially higher precipitation rates in the same region, which could
also lead to fresher surface waters in the North Atlantic," Tornqvist says. "So we need to
understand whether those types of changes could potentially be capable of triggering these
kinds of abrupt climate events."
5. ............................................
Tornqvist adds that understanding how abrupt climate changes affected Earth's geologic past
can help design climate models that can better predict the future.

Causes of Floods
Pre-reading exercise: Match the words to their definition.
crack
saturated
unleashed
to perfect
human error
upstream
dam
tidal wave
debris
widespread

over a very large area

opposite to the direction a river is moving
pieces of things remaining after destruction
to make 100% correct
a wall across a river to stop the water
a very large amount of water flowing over the land
small break or opening
let free
completely full
mistakes made by people

Floods are second only to fire as the most common of all natural disasters.
They occur almost everywhere in the world, resulting in widespread damage and even death.
Consequently, scientists have long tried to perfect their ability to predict floods. So far, the
best that scientists can do is to recognize the potential for flooding in certain conditions. There
are a number of conditions, from deep snow on the ground to human error, that cause
flooding.
When deep snow melts it creates a large amount of water. Although deep snow alone rarely
causes floods, when it occurs together with heavy rain and sudden warmer weather it can lead
to serious flooding. If there is a fast snow melt on top of frozen or very wet ground, flooding is
more likely to occur than when the ground is not frozen. Frozen ground or ground that is very
wet and already saturated with water cannot absorb the additional water created by the
melting snow. Melting snow also contributes to high water levels in rivers and streams.
Whenever rivers are already at their full capacity of water, heavy rains will result in the rivers
overflowing and flooding the surrounding land.
Rivers that are covered in ice can also lead to flooding. When ice begins to melt, the surface of
the ice cracks and breaks into large pieces. These pieces of ice move and float down the river.
They can form a dam in the river, causing the water behind the dam to rise and flood the land
upstream. If the dam breaks suddenly, then the large amount of water held behind the dam
can flood the areas downstream too.
Broken ice dams are not the only dam problems that can cause flooding. When a large humanmade dam breaks or fails to hold the water collected behind it, the results can be devastating.
Dams contain such huge amounts of water behind them that when sudden breaks occur, the
destructive force of the water is like a great tidal wave. Unleashed dam waters can travel tens
of kilometres, cover the ground in metres of mud and debris, and drown and crush everything
and creature in their path.
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Although scientists cannot always predict exactly when floods will occur, they do know a great
deal about when floods are likely, or probably, going to occur. Deep snow, ice-covered rivers,
and weak dams are all strong conditions for potential flooding. Hopefully, this knowledge of
why floods happen can help us reduce the damage they cause.
1. Which of the following words are natural disasters? (More than one answer may be correct).
a. flood
b. earthquake
c. airplane crash
d. typhoon
2. Which of the following are included as causes for floods in the reading passage?
a. droughts
b. large lakes
c. poorly built roads
d. melting snow
3. How does deep snow cause flooding?
a. melting snow causes flooding
b. too much rain causes flooding
c. sudden warm temperatures combined with heavy rains causes flooding
d. freezing water causes flooding
4. A broken human-made dam is compared to what?
a. a tsunami
b. a tidal wave
c. a broken ice dam
d. overflowing
5. Which of the following best describes how a frozen river can cause a flood?
a. The ice in the river melts too quickly and causes a flood.
b. The ice in the river cracks causing the water to overflow.
c. The ice in the river cracks into pieces that eventually create a dam causing the water to
overflow.
d. The water behind the ice dam collects and when the dam breaks, it causes flooding
upstream.
6. How far can dam water travel when it is unleashed from a broken dam?
a. less than 10 kilometres
b. tens of kilometres
c. thousands of kilometres
d. tens of thousands of kilometres downstream
7. Why does saturated ground contribute to flooding problems?
a. the ground cannot absorb more moisture
b. the ground is too hard, so the water runs off
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c. the ground forms a kind of dam

d. it remains frozen
8. What kinds of problems can floods cause?
a. death
b. widespread damage
c. destruction of plants and animals
d. all of the above
9. What is the most common natural disaster?
a. flood
b. fire
c. wind damage
d. rain
10. How does melting snow cause problems related to flooding?
a. it makes the rivers run too fast
b. it makes the water too cold
c. it causes pieces of ice to block the river
d. it makes the level of the river rise

Choose the best word from the list to complete the following sentences.

combine

dams

devastating flooding
prevent snow

human-made
widespread

pieces

potential

Floods cause ............................damage. Unfortunately, there is little we can do to

............................. flooding in some situations. There are several causes
for ..................................... including deep ........................ melt, icy rivers, and
broken .......................... . First, when deep snow melts it creates large amounts of water. When
heavy rain and sudden warm temperatures ............................ with the deep snow, floods can
occur. Second, rivers that are covered in ice can cause floods when the ice melts. The
ice .................................form dams which break and cause flooding. Third, ........................
dams can break and cause ...........................damage. The water from these dams can be as
powerful as a tidal wave. Our best plan of attack against flooding is to recognize
the ........................... for flooding in certain conditions.

A tongue twister
"Whether the weather is warm, whether the weather is hot, we have to put up with the
weather, whether we like it or not."

LISTENING & SPEAKING

1. Global Warming - National Geographic. Watch, listen and answer the multiple choice
questions on this web site:
http://www.eslvideo.com/esl_video_quiz_high_intermediate.php?id=555

Convert Fahrenheit to Centigrade:

First, take the temperature in Fahrenheit and subtract 32.
Then, divide by 1.8.
Finally, the result is degrees Celsius.
What about you? What do you or your family personally do to prevent global
warming? Put the following suggestions in order of importance, then compare your
priorities with your colleagues:

walk instead of drive

use 50% less water
stop eating meat
grow your own food

use energy-saving light-bulbs

turn heaters and AC down
invest in solar energy
turn off electrical goods at night

2. An Inconvenient Truth. Watch this short trailer to former US presidential candidate Al

Gores now famous film about global warming. Make notes and after listening say to what the
following figures make reference:
2005

75 years ago

a decade

20 feet

60 million

a hundred million

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnjx6KETmi4
What do you think? Is this approach to the topic too sensationalist?

3. Listen and read. A text entitled Nations Preparing to Deal with Climate Change
http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/nations-preparing-to-deal-with-climatechange/2589000.html
Whats your opinion? Is the world doing enough? How could we do more?
4. Arctic Ice Shrinks to Record Low. More reading and listening exercises:
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/1208/120829-arctic_sea_ice.html
WRITING
Write an essay entitled Climate Change is an Undoubted Reality and We Must All Change the
Way We Live
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