EXERCISES ABOUT THE TOPIC OF WATER

LISTENING EXERCISES

READING EXERCISES

EXERCISE 1

Read the text and answer the questions which follow it.

Finding the oceanic whitetip shark is an experience I won’t forget. This is one of the most dangerous sharks in the world, but its numbers are falling. They used to be common around the Bahamas, but most people say they haven’t seen them for years. Just as we arrived there, some sports fishermen in the central Bahamas saw some oceanic whitetips when they were fishing for tuna. So I planned sixteen days to go searching for them.

For the first few days out of Palm Beach, we didn’t see a thing. Then, on the fifth day, I was looking out from the bridge when I spotted a shark on the surface. The white tip of its dorsal fin was sticking out of the water, so I knew we had an oceanic whitetip. I quickly put on my wetsuit and jumped in the water. The shark was very curious about me and swam right up to me. It was about three metres long and it even stayed around while we were putting the cage in the water for the scientist. I got some great pictures! That was really the high point of the assignment.

At the end of the assignment, after a year of work, we were going after the great hammerhead shark. This species is so elusive that there are hardly any pictures of it. For the entire first week, the weather was appalling and it was impossible to dive. It was very frustrating. Then, on the eighth day, my assistant had to fly home because his mother was seriously ill.

Suddenly, I was working alone as well as trying to deal with the bad weather. That was definitely the worst moment on the assignment. It is so important to have a really good assistant with you. Without him there, my workload more than doubled. While I was trying to decide what to do, the weather unexpectedly improved and I got a couple of not-bad days! And on one of those days, everything clicked and I got some great pictures of a hammerhead. I was lucky.

EXERCISE 2

Hurricanes are giant, wet and windy tropical storms. They bring winds of over 250 kilometres an hour and the hurricane clouds can carry enough water for more than nine trillion litres of rainfall in a day. Now, if you’re thinking that you don’t know the difference between hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, don’t worry. They are actually the same thing. The different names just come from the different parts of the world – cyclones start in the Indian Ocean and typhoons in the western Pacific Ocean. Hurricanes begin in the Atlantic Ocean and there is an annual season from mid-August to late October.

One of the wettest and most destructive hurricanes in recent history was Hurricane Mitch. It hit the Caribbean and Central America in November 1998. By the time Mitch reached the coast, most people had already left the area. When the danger had passed and people had returned home, they couldn’t believe what had happened. In Honduras, farmland had turned into desert. Bridges and roads had disappeared. Rivers had changed course. As Mitch passed over Honduras, so much rain fell that some rivers flooded to six times their normal size. In one day, the area had the equivalent of 200 days of rainfall. In places where there had been rivers with lines of trees, now there was nothing. The trees had all washed away. This kind of thing is not so unusual during hurricanes, but the power of Mitch was extreme. The tremendous winds had picked up sand and carried it for many kilometres before dropping it in a new area. Suddenly, there was a desert where people had had farms. Mitch had completely changed the land and, of course, the lives of the people who lived there. It took them many years to recover.

And although there will be hurricanes in the future as powerful as Mitch, the World Meteorological Organization decided the name Mitch will never be used again.

Choose A, B, or C as the best answer for the following questions.