Part 3 natural phenomena

 Reading

Read the text and translate the word combinations that follow.

Thunder and lightning

Flaaaaaash! You see a brilliant bolt of lightning. An instant later, you hear the boom of thunder. Why did that happen?

Have you ever felt static electricity? It happens when electricity is released. You can pick up an electric charge by walking across a carpeted floor in leather-soled shoes. As your shoes rub against the carpet fibers, they pick up an electric charge. If you touch a doorknob, there is a small spark - an electric discharge.

Something similar happens inside a rain cloud. Lightning is electricity that comes from rain clouds. The drops of water and ice in the cloud become electrically charged. After a while, the discharge becomes very strong. The drops must get rid of their electric charge. Suddenly there is a spark, or electric discharge, that travels through the air. It may travel through the cloud. Or it may go from one cloud to another cloud. It might even go from the cloud down to the ground. An electric discharge from a cloud is called lightning.

A bolt of lightning contains an incredible amount of energy. It may discharge as much as 100 million volts of electricity. As it travels through the atmosphere, the bolt of lightning very quickly makes the air around very hot. This hot air expands outward from the lightning bolt and slams into cooler air, like a stick beating a drum. When the hot air expands we hear a BOOM! That’s thunder.

When you are close to a bolt of lightning, the boom of thunder follows the flash of lightning almost instantly. When you are farther away from the lightning you have to wait a moment after the flash to hear the crack. That’s because the light waves from the lightning travel much faster than the sound waves from the thunder.

There’s a simple way to find out how far away a lightning bolt is. When you see a flash, count the seconds until you hear the boom of thunder. Divide the number of seconds by five. Your answer tells how many miles you are from the storm. Divide by three for the answer in kilometers.

If you are ever caught outside during a thunderstorm, be careful. If lightning strikes the ground, it usually strikes the highest place or the tallest thing in the area. During a lightning storm, don’t stand under a tree, or a metal tower. Also, stay away from the water. A hardtop car is a safe place to be. The metal frame will carry the charge around you even if lightning hits the car. Even so, do not touch any metal parts of the car’s frame. It’s helpful to know what to do even though many bolts do not strike at all. Of course, the best thing to do in a thunderstorm is to watch the wonder of it from your window!

Вивільнення електричної енергії, блискавка, заряджений, електричне розрядження, спалах блискавки, вразити будинок (блискавкою), триматись подалі від чогось, гуркіт грому, дощова хмара.

Think over the answers to the questions.

 What is static electricity? Give an example.

 What is lightning? How does it appear?

 What is thunder? How does it appear?

 How can you count how far the storm is?

 What place does lightning strike first?

 What is the safe place to wait till the storm is over?

Correct the mistakes where necessary.

Elictricity, lihtning, quicly, dram, thander, flesh, vaves, devide, carefull, cought, wotch, claud, wolts, briliant.

Exercise 1

Insert prepositions where necessary.

WHY IS IT RAINING? SNOWING? HAILING?

 Clouds are made ____ water droplets. But what causes ____ these droplets ____ rain, snow, or hail ____ ____ us? The water droplets that make ____ clouds are extremely tiny - so tiny that even the gentlest air currents will keep them floating ____ the sky. What causes these droplets ____ fall ____ a cloud?

Much rain begins ____ a cloud as bits ____ ice, not drops ____ water. The upper parts ____ a very tall cumulonimbus, or thundercloud, are cold enough ____ water vapor to freeze and form tiny ice crystals. Like seeds, these crystals grow ____ the cloud. As more water vapor condenses ____ the seeds, they grow bigger. When the crystals grow, little pellets ____ ice are formed. When the pellets become too heavy for air currents ____ hold up, they fall. As they fall ____ ____ the tall cloud, the pellets pass ____ warmer air. The warm air melts them and they turn ____ tiny raindrops. As they fall, the tiny raindrops bump ____ each other and form bigger drops. The average raindrop has about a million times as much water as a tiny water droplet ____ a cloud.

Can it rain if a cloud is too warm ____ ice crystals to form? Only if the cloud is ____ the ocean. The droplets that form clouds always condense ____ microscopic particles in the air. Seed crystals must be formed ____ clouds before it rains. When it is warm, ice crystals can’t form, but clouds that are ____ or very ____ the ocean make a different kind ____ seed. This time, the seeds ____ the raindrops are tiny crystals ____ salt ____ the ocean. Water droplets soon condense ____ the salt crystals. The water droplets bump ____ each other and form bigger drops.

Before long the drops are big enough and heavy enough ____ fall as rain.

What happens when the air both high ____ the sky and close ____ the ground is very cold? The tiny ice crystals that form ____ clouds do not melt and turn ____ rain. Instead, they become crystals ____ ice. As they fall ____ the cloud, they gather more ice crystals and grow bigger. By the time they reach the bottom ____ the cloud, they have beautiful, intricate ____ shapes. Can you guess what these are? Snowflakes!

Exercise 2

Translate into English.

- Мені здається, цей дощ ніколи не скінчиться. Ллє як із вiдра. Цей дощ iде вже третій день.

- Так, погода сьогодні справді огидна і мерзотна. Справжній потоп. Ще ніколи в житті не бачив такої зливи. Я потрапив під дощ і промок до нитки.

- Сподіваюсь, погода покращиться до вечора.

- Небо затягнулось важкими сірими хмарами. Якби це був грозовий дощ, то він би був коротким. Правду кажучи, я боюсь грому і блискавки, мені жахливо сидіти одному вдома під час блискавки.

- Годі тобі скаржитись на погоду. Як кажуть, поганої погоди не буває, буває лише поганий одяг.

 Reading

Read the information about the natural phenomena and answer the questions below.

Monsoons are regional, seasonal winds that affect large parts of the globe. During the summer, these winds contain water vapor and can bring heavy rains. They blow across Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan, China, Japan, Australia, parts of Africa, and the southwestern United States. Some of the world’s most heavily populated countries lie in monsoon areas. In parts of Bangladesh, the summer monsoon can dump as much as 1,107 centimeters of rain – more than ten times the average annual rainfall for the United States. Farmers depend on the summer monsoon for rain to water the crops.

The strongest monsoon is in southern and eastern Asia. It’s caused by seasonal temperature differences between the surfaces of the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the land surface of central Asia.

In winter, the land is colder than the ocean. Therefore, the air pressure over central Asia is higher than the air pressure over the ocean. Cool, dry air blows to the southwest from Asia to the Indian Ocean, crossing India and all of southern Asia on its way. This wind is called the winter monsoon.

Tornadoes are powerful storms that move over land in narrow paths. Their winds are so strong they can pick up houses or smash factories. Tornadoes affect relatively small areas, but their fierce winds devastate almost everything in their path. The winds flatten buildings and hurl objects at speeds so great that straw driven by the force of a tornado’s wind can penetrate wood. These winds can also pick up huge objects such as trains. Some of these objects are crushed, and others are simply carried away.

The eye of the tornado is very calm, but it, too, can cause damage. No one had ever been in the eye of a tornado and looked up its funnel until 1928, when a Kansas farmer looked up from the door of his storm cellar just as a tornado passed over. “Everything was as still as death”, he reported. “There was a strong gassy odor, and I felt as if I could not breathe”. He said the eye was about 15-35 meters (about 15-100 feet) in diameter and formed a funnel at least a kilometer (about one-half mile) high.

Little can be done to avoid property damage in a tornado, but taking precautions can save lives. In 1935, the same twister hit the Texas towns of San Anselmo and Waco. More than 560 people were injured and 125 people lost their lives.

Tornado warnings don’t come very far in advance, and they sometimes don’t come at all. The path of a tornado can reduce one house to splinters and leave the one next door untouched. Tornadoes are most likely to form in the presence of thunderstorms with heavy rain or hail. As the warm, humid air is forced upward within a cumulonimbus cloud, more warm air rushes in to replace the air that was forced upward. The air that rushed in is also forced upward, and in some instances it begins to rotate. This rotating air extends beneath the cloud and may touch down toward the surface. Tornadoes can last a few minutes or as long as a few hours. They can move over the surface anywhere from 40 to 96 kilomerters (25 to 60 miles) per hour, and they follow very unpredictable paths.

When a tornado has been spotted, you must take precautions immediately. The following chart tells you what to do.

Tornado Safety Procedures