Warm-up Activity:
Match the following key words with some of these pictures:
Earthquake | Oil spill | Floods | Volcano | Fires | Tsunami |
- The pollution of the surrounding waters killed birds and marine animals and cost the local fishing and tourism industries billions of dollars.
- Heavy rain resulted in devastating floods in Pakistan that covered up to a fifth of the country.
- Nature was tremendously destructive this year.
- While Pakistan was underwater, Russia was burning.
- An in autumn, disaster struck Indonesia with both a tsunami and a volcanic eruption.
- A volcano in Iceland caused the biggest disruption to air travel since the Second World War.
- The year began with a huge earthquake in Haiti, in the Caribbean, in January.
Reading Activity:
Read the following article from the magazine Spoton. Some paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from paragraphs 1-7 (see warm-up activity) the one which fits each one.
Earthquakes, volcanoes, fires and floods killed millions of people, destroyed cities and cost the world’s economy billions.
It happened about 25 kilometres from the capital city, Port-au-Prince, and was followed by more than 50 major aftershocks in the next 12 days. The earthquake killed 230,000 people, injured 300,000 others and destroyed more than 250,000 homes. Sadly things haven’t got better - a recent cholera outbreak has killed even more people.
Disaster struck in the US in April when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in the biggest oil spill ever in the US. The explosion on 20 April killed 11 workers and injured 17 others. It also broke the pipe between the rig and the oil well 1,500 metres below. For weeks, about four million litres of oil a day pilled into the ocean. Workers finally stopped the oil spill in July. This was not a “natural disaster” as such, but it certainly was disastrous for nature.
On 14 April, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano threw an enormous ash cloud about nine kilometers into the air, making it too dangerous to fly over much of northern and western Europe. Airlines cancelled about 80,000 flights in the following week, causing disruptions to hundreds of thousands of travellers.
On 14 April, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano threw an enormous ash cloud about nine kilometers into the air, making it too dangerous to fly over much of northern and western Europe. Airlines cancelled about 80,000 flights in the following week, causing disruptions to hundreds of thousands of travellers.
Weather in July caused two major disasters in two different countries. The water destroyed millions of homes and millions of dollars worth of crops. About 2,000 people died and up to 20 million others were injured, left homeless or lost their jobs. Experts estimate the cost of the disaster at more than $40 billion.
The hottest summer in Russian history caused hundreds of wildfires – satellite pictures showed a 3,000-kilometre smoke cloud over the west of the country. The heat and the smog killed thousands of people in the capital, Moscow, while the fires themselves did about $15 billion worth of damage. The media criticized the Russian government for not giving people enough information about the disaster.
The hottest summer in Russian history caused hundreds of wildfires – satellite pictures showed a 3,000-kilometre smoke cloud over the west of the country. The heat and the smog killed thousands of people in the capital, Moscow, while the fires themselves did about $15 billion worth of damage. The media criticized the Russian government for not giving people enough information about the disaster.
The tsunami killed about 450 people, and tens of thousands had to flee their homes to escape the eruption.
Source: Spoton Magazine (December 2010)
Follow-up Activity:
Look at the mind-up of this unit (below the title of this blog). Now read the text again and underline all words related to Natural Disasters. Make your own mind-up with all those words.
