Читать книгу English for Life Grade 12 Learner’s Book Home Language - Lynne Southey - Страница 3

Introduction

There are still sceptics who don’t believe that climate change is happening, or that it is happening at an ever-increasing rate. They say that changes in weather patterns have always happened. One way to silence unbelievers is to confront them with facts. You will come across several facts to support your argument in this cycle. You will read an article with definitions, and listen to a text about how research is carried out. You will also read a cartoon, a poem and extracts from a novel. You will write sentences, a formal and an informal letter, work with genres and the parts of a book, practise different voices, and brush up on your editing skills by doing some proofreading.

Reading for comprehension

You have heard the phrases ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ bandied about in many contexts: news reports, ordinary conversations, informative articles you may have read, and in learning areas. But can you explain it clearly to a 10-year-old? To do that, you would have to understand it very well yourself. Here is an article that will help you.

Activity 1.1 - Reading about climate change (individual and pair)

Pre-reading:

 Think about your purpose and audience before you read: you are going to have to explain climate change to a 10-year-old.

During reading:

 As you read, try to grasp the points made.

What is climate change?

Climate change is a lasting change in weather patterns over periods of millions of years. It may be the average weather conditions that change, or there may be more or fewer extreme weather events: hurricanes, heat waves, cloud cover, storms, floods, droughts, tsunamis, and so on.

Climate change is caused by several factors: processes in the sea, such as the way the water circulates; variations in the amount of sun radiation received by the earth; movement of the tectonic plates of the earth’s crust; volcanoes and changes in the natural world caused by humans.

There are scientists who work specifically with climate change, and who try to understand what has happened in the past and what will happen in the future. They make observations and measurements of, for example, the temperatures in boreholes, what can be found in cores extracted from ice, types of flora and fauna, the processes by which the glaciers melt, types of sediment in rock and changes in sea levels. Modern instruments also provide them with much information.

Humans cannot do much about the natural causes of climate change. They can monitor them and try to predict them. However, global warming, one of the contributors to climate change, is a different story. The activities of humans are responsible for global warming, which is one of the causes of climate change and refers to a rise in the temperature of the earth’s surface. This has resulted from an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, water vapour, methane, ozone and nitrous oxide. The surface temperatures of the earth have risen by about half a degree Celsius since the 1970s, an irregular increase that cannot be explained by the natural causes of climate change.

It is only an increase in greenhouse gases that can explain these abnormal increases. Human activities that cause these greenhouse gases include things like deforestation, burning of fossil fuels, changes in wetland construction, and so on. These will lead to the following:

 Increased surface temperatures

 Rising sea levels

 Melting of glaciers and sea ice

 Changes in rainfall

 Increases in intensity of extreme weather events such as heat waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, and heavy rainfall

 Longer, more severe droughts

 Expansion of subtropical deserts

 Loss of animal species and biodiversity

 Melting of permafrost (which speeds up global warming)

 Drops in agricultural yields

 Spread of vector-borne diseases because of increased range of insects

 Acidification of oceans causing loss of fish

 Death of coral reefs

These are serious problems, more serious than global warming (i.e. a rise in earth’s surface temperatures) which will be less disruptive and destructive than the other changes mentioned above. Likely a combination of all of these solutions must be tried if we are to protect our planet from the most severe of the predicted effects of climate change.

[Rewritten with information from http://www.ecolife.com/define/climate-change.html]

Post-reading:

 With your partner, discuss the differences between what is meant by ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’. Discuss what causes each. You will need to link the two to do this.

 Now each write a paragraph in answer to the 10-year-old’s question: what is climate change? This should be a slightly simplified summary of the information in the text. Use the writing process: plan, draft, write, edit.

 When you have finished, swap your paragraphs with those of another pair. Check each other’s. Then discuss the differences in understanding if there are any, and anything else you pick up in your classmate’s paragraph.

 Your teacher will ask several of you to read your paragraphs to the class for general discussion and feedback.

A visual text

satire: use of ridicule, sarcasm or irony to comment critically on something

Cartoonists often use satire to comment on social situations and political issues. A visual such as a cartoon can say with a simple drawing what would usually require many words to express. When we ‘read’ a cartoon we have to take different elements into consideration: not only the words, but the drawing, the expressions of the people, the juxtaposition of certain items and the context.

You will analyse a cartoon about climate change in the activity below.

Activity 1.2 - Analysing a cartoon (group)

Pre-reading:

 Look closely at all aspects of the cartoon.

[From: Sunday Times May 4 2008 p. 6]

 With your partner describe what you see.

Questions:

1. Do you think the two men in the cartoon have taken climate change seriously up until now? Give reasons for your answer.

2. What effect does the word ‘that’ have (instead of ‘this climate change’ or just ‘climate change’)?

3. Why are the eyes of the man on the right so big?

4. Where does the humour in the cartoon lie?

5. What do you think the cartoonist’s purpose was in creating this cartoon?

A listening text

Knowing how to listen – whether it be to an educator, the news or an employer – is a vitally important life skill. One can learn the skill of listening by practising, which is what you will do in the activity below.

Activity 1.3 - Listening to understand (individual and pair)

Pre-listening:

 Read the questions below to give you some idea of what the text will be about.

During listening:

 Sometimes when there are a lot of names, it is difficult to keep track of who did or said what. In the table below are a number of names in the first column. Rewrite the table in your workbook. As you listen to the passage try to fill in the second column.

Name	Description
a. Detlef Quafasel
b. Lamont-Doherty
c. Michael D. Limonick
d. National Oceanography Centre
e. Nature
f. Stuart Cunningham
g. Wallace Broecker

[A research ship used by the British National Oceanography Centre [http://www.nerc.ac.uk] ]

Post-listening:

Questions:

1. The article you have just listened to is about a scientific study that was conducted. This might make you think that everything in the article is factual because it is scientific. This is not the case. A good reader distinguishes between fact and opinion so that they can question and make decisions for themselves. Look at the sentences below and see if you can identify ways of distinguishing the facts from the opinions:

 The sun rises in the East. (fact)

 Red is an attractive colour. (opinion)

 Bob and Gary play golf every Saturday. (fact)

 Golf is an enjoyable game. (opinion)

2. Below is a list of statements from the text. With a partner, decide which ones are fact and which are opinion. Explain to each other why you say so.

a. Even in the dead of winter, long stretches of freezing temperatures are pretty rare for London.

b. The relatively balmy climate of much of Western Europe suggests that many countries in the region should lie well south of where they actually are…

c. a component of the ocean’s current system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed by 30% since 1992.

d. ‘The result’, writes University of Hamburg climatologist Detlef Quadfasel in a commentary on the study that also appears in Nature, ‘is alarming.’

e. His theory: fresh water, perhaps from melting glaciers, might have diluted the ocean’s salinity, making it harder for cooling water to sink and return southward to pick up more heat.

f. … today global warming is causing more melting water to stream into the North Atlantic from glaciers and older sea ice, which is lower in salt.

g. It’s something, in other words, to keep an eye on.

 Your teacher will go through the answers with you.

3.Here is another listening exercise for you to practise with. Listen carefully while your teacher reads the extract about the extinction of life forms on earth. Read through the questions below first and then write out answers to them on your own:

a. What is the purpose of the text? What is its tone? Do you remember one word that supports your answer?

b. What do scientists call what is happening now?

c. When was the last mass extinction and what became extinct then?

d. What is the problem at the moment?

e. What is causing it?

Features of texts

You know the word ‘genre’, don’t you? The genres of literary texts that you will study this year are novel, drama and poetry. You will also read short stories in this book. How do you know which is which? You can determine this by the layout of the text. Literary texts do not usually have contents pages, but other texts do. In the activity below you will look at some of these texts.

Activity 1.4 - What are the key features of books? (pair)

Pre-reading:

 Look at examples of textbooks for your other subjects. With your partner, list the main features that you find.

 Now discuss how literary texts differ from each other.

Questions:

1. If you have a Geography book in front of you and want to look up something about global warming, how would you go about finding it?

 Your teacher will call for answers from the class, and give general feedback.

Novel

You will read one of three prescribed novels this year: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, or Animal Farm by George Orwell. You will read extracts from all three in this book. The idea is to give you practice at reading a novel. You can transfer the knowledge you gain to the reading of whichever of the three novels your school and teacher have chosen.

First we will look at the beginning of Animal Farm and then we will give you a few extracts to study. Orwell wrote this novel in 1945 after Stalin had come to power in Russia. It is an allegory:

Information box

An allegory is a text, written or spoken, that that uses symbolic figures and actions to tell truths about human behaviour or experience. An allegory can be found in forms such as fables and parables. Characters in an allegory often personify abstract types and the action of the story represents something not explicitly stated. Symbolic allegories, where characters have an identity apart from the story itself, are used to represent political and historical situations and figures and are vehicles for satire.

Activity 1.5 - Reading the beginning of a novel (individual and pair)

Pre-reading:

 When we start a book, we want to know who the characters are, details regarding historical context and setting, and what the book will be about. The first chapter of Animal Farm gives us much information about these aspects.

During reading:

 Read the chapter here to yourselves, even if you have already read it before now. Look for the aspects that we have mentioned.