Days of Abnormal Weather

The following 3 texts deal with abnormal weather conditions. Read them and then do the exercises below.

Ex. 1. Consider the 3 texts.

	Text 1	Text 2	Text 3
1. What sort of weather conditions are being described?
2. What time of year is it?
3. Is the scene described in the city or in the country?
4. Are the weather conditions unusual for the season and place?

Now look at each passage in turn and answer these questions.

Text 1	Text 2	Text 3
How far is the bad weather natural and how far is it man-made? Why was the rain black? How do we know that the streets of the city are not paved?	What sort of weather had they had before the monsoon arrived? Why is Ghote no longer able to take long walks? Why is it unpleasant to stay indoors? How long does it take some workers to get to work, and why?	Why didn’t the carol singers notice the cold? Why was the road to the last house the most difficult? Why was the house itself more attractive?

Vocabulary

The following are words from the three texts. The definitions of these words are grouped together in the box below. Match the definition to the correct word and write in the space provided. One has been done for you.

Text 1		Text 2			Text 3
drizzle soot mire jostling losing their foothold aits meadows defiled dense	______________________________ _____islands_ _________		stifling swirling mould damp commuters	___________________________________	blizzard puttees soaked dripped huddled tramped	__________________________________________

Days of Abnormal Weather Text 1

Implacable November weather. Smoke lowering down from chimney-port, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes. Dogs, indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, and losing their footholds at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollution of a great (and dirty) city.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his Court of Chancery.

Text 2

With the arrival of the monsoon Ghote was no longer able to get out of the house by taking long walks about the city. The roads he had slowly moved along in the days if stifling heat were often deep under flood water now, and where they were not blocked by a foot or more of muddy brown water, pavements and roadways were frequently swirling with the fast-flowing excess of the walls and walls of warm rain.

Indoors, everything smelt day and night of damp cotton and every surface that could hold mould was covered in greeny fungus. Out of doors, cars by the hundred were either brought to a halt in the floods or made immobile by damp in the engines. The trains were frequently unable to run where water covered the rails, and the city’s hundreds of thousands of commuters had to struggle in to their offices on foot, a moving mass of black umbrellas. Gallantly, they would manage to reach their destinations often as late as two in the afternoon, by which time it was only sensible to turn round and start off home again.

Text 3

The week before Christmas, when snow seemed to lie thickest, was the moment for carol singing.

Eight of us set out that night. A blizzard was blowing, but we were well wrapped up, with army puttees on our legs, woolen hats on our heads, and several scarves around our ears.

Steadily we worked through the length of the valley, going from house to house. It was freezing hard, yet not for a moment did we feel the cold. The snow blew into our faces, into our eyes and mouths, soaked through our puttees, got into our boots, and dripped from our woolen caps. But we did not care. The collecting box grew heavier.

We approached our last house high up on the hill, the place of Joseph the farmer. The last stretch of country to reach his farm was perhaps the most difficult of all. In these rough bare lanes, open to all winds, sheep were buried and wagons lost. Huddled together, we tramped in one another’s footsteps, powdered snow blew into our screwed-up eyes, candles burnt low, some blew out altogether, and we talked loudly above the gale.

Crossing, at last, the frozen mill-stream, we climbed up to Joseph’s farm. Sheltered by trees, warm on its bed of snow, it seemed always to be like this. Everything was quiet; everywhere there was the silence of the winter night. We started singing, and we were moved by the words and the trueness of our voices. We were given roast apples, and hot mince-pies, and in our wooden box, as we headed back for the village, there were gifts for all.