Listen again. Choose the correct option (a-c) to complete these sentences.

The artist Georgia O'Keefe painted the “White Place’:

The San Andreas Fault is in California. It is a place where earthquakes can begin.

Listen to part of a TV programme about the fault and choose the correct option to answer the questions.

Where is the TV presenter talking from?

Wild weather

What is happening to our weather?

What is ‘extreme’ weather? Why are people talking about it these days? ‘Extreme’ weather is an unusual weather event such as rainfall, a drought or a heat wave in the wrong place or at the wrong time. In theory, they are very rare. But these days,

our TV screens are constantly showing such extreme weather events. Take just three news stories from 2010: 28 centimetres of rain fell on Rio de Janeiro in 24 hours, Nashville, USA, had 33 centimetres of rain in two days and there was record rainfall

in Pakistan.

The effects of this kind of rainfall are dramatic and lethal. In Rio de Janeiro, landslides followed, killing hundreds of people. In Pakistan, the floods affected 20 million people. Meanwhile, other parts of the world suffer devastating droughts.

Australia, Russia and East Africa have been hit in the last ten years. And then there are unexpected heat waves, such as in 2003 in Europe. That summer, 35,000 deaths were said to be heat-related.

So, what is happening to our weather? Are these extreme events part of a natural cycle? Or are they caused by human activity and its effects on the Earth’s climate? Peter Miller says it’s probably a mixture of both of these things. On the one hand,

the most important influences on weather events are natural cycles in the climate. Two of the most famous weather cycles, El Niño and La Niña, originate in the Pacific Ocean. The heat from the warm ocean rises high into the atmosphere and affects

weather all around the world. On the other hand, the temperature of the Earth’s oceans is slowly but steadily going up. And this is a result of human activity. We are producing greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. This heat

warms up the atmosphere, land and oceans. Warmer oceans produce more water vapour – think of heating a pan of water in your kitchen. Turn up the heat, it produces steam more quickly. Satellite data tells us that the water vapour in the atmosphere

has gone up by four percent in 25 years. This warm, wet air turns into the rain, storms, hurricanes and typhoons that we are increasingly experiencing.

Climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer says that we need to face the reality of climate change. And we also need to act now to save lives and money in the future.

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The article says extreme weather is ...

If statues could talk

How did the

Easter Island statues move? Archaeologists are still trying to work out how –

and what their story really means.

On a winter night last June, José

Antonio Tuki, a 30-year-old artist on Easter Island, sat on Anakena beach and

stared at the enormous human statues there – the moai. The statues are from

four feet tall to 33 feet tall. Some weigh more than 80 tons. They were carved

a long time ago, with stone tools, and then they were moved up to 11 miles to

the beach. Tuki stares at their faces and he feels a connection. ‘This is

something that was produced by my ancestors,’ he says. ‘How did they do it?’

The first

Polynesians arrived at Rapa Nui (Easter Island), probably by canoe, hundreds of

years ago. The island is 2,150 miles west of South America and 1,300 miles east

of its nearest inhabited neighbour, Pitcairn. Nowadays 12 flights arrive every

week from Chile, Peru and Tahiti. In 2011, 50,000 tourists – ten times the

island’s population – flew to Easter Island. Almost all of the jobs on Easter

Island depend on tourism. And the tourists go there for only one thing: the

People around

the world became curious about the statues after the Norwegian adventurer Thor

Heyerdahl made Easter Island famous, and there are different theories about how

the statues were moved to the beach. Many researchers think the statues were

pulled along the ground using ropes and wood.

Pulitzer Prize

winner Jared Diamond has suggested that many people were needed to build and

move the

On the other

hand, archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of

California State University Long Beach have a more positive view of the

island’s history. They suggest that the inhabitants actually pioneered a type

of sustainable farming – they built thousands of circular stone walls, called

As José Tuki

contemplates these enormous statues, he doesn’t mind that there are no definite

answers about the history of his island. ‘I want to know the truth,’ he says,

‘but maybe knowing everything would take its power away’.

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article and choose the correct option.

Jim has:

The second speaker:

The person is asking about the other person’s:

The father:

The friend: