Exercise 4. Answer the questions

1. Why do they claim that the British love of compromise is the result of the country’s physical geography?

2. What are the main features of the British landscape? Is it boring?

3. How does the weather change through the year/ when going from one part of the country to another?

4. Why do people always speak about weather?

5. Why do we still have a belief that it rains all the time in Great Britain.

6. What happens when it becomes extremely cold or hot? Why aren’t they prepared?

7. Where do the British prefer to live?

8. Where would you prefer to live? Think of advantages and disadvantages of living in the country side or in town?

Text 2
The Environment

It was in Britain that the word 'smog' (a mixture of smoke and fog) was first used. As the world's first industrialized country, its cities were the first to suffer this atmospheric condition. In the nineteenth century, London's 'pea-soupers' (thick fogs) became famous through descriptions of them in the works of Charles Dickens and in the Sherlock Holmes stories. The situation in London reached its worst point in 1952. At the end of that year a particularly bad smog, which lasted for several days, was estimated to have caused between 4,000 and 8,000 deaths.

Water pollution was also a problem. In the nineteenth century it was once suggested that the Houses of Parliament should be wrapped in enormous wet sheets to protect those inside from the awful smell of the River Thames. Until the 1960s, the first thing that happened to people who fell into the Thames in London was that they were rushed to hospital to have their stomachs pumped!

Then, during the 1960s and 1970s, laws were passed which forbade the heating of homes with open coal fires and which stopped much of the pollution from factories. At one time, a scene of fog in a Hollywood film was all that was necessary to symbolize London. This image is now out of date, and by the end of the 1970s it was said to be possible to catch fish in the Thames outside Parliament.

However, as in the rest of Europe, the great increase in the use of the motor car in the last quarter of the twentieth century caused an increase in a different kind of air pollution. This problem is serious enough for weather forecasts to have an 'air quality' section and on some occasions for official advice to be given that certain people (such as asthma sufferers) should not even leave their houses, and that nobody should take any vigorous exercise.

Now that the reduction of greenhouse gases has become a pressing global need, how to provide for Britain's energy needs and/ or reduce its energy consumption has become a national issue, especially as the country's oil reserves in the North Sea will not last much longer. There is a possibility that new nuclear power stations will be built because they do not emit greenhouse gases. But they are politically unpopular and there is doubt about their environmental friendliness (they do cause some greenhouse gases to be emitted, both in their construction and in the disposal of the waste they create). Various attempts at using 'green' energy sources are being made. One of these is solar power, but for obvious reasons there is a limit to its possibilities in Britain. Others are tidal power and even wave power. The one which has really developed is wind power. Wind farms are now quite a common feature of the British landscape. But they are not universally popular either, Some local people and nature lovers feel strongly that they ruin the countryside - and so local tourist boards are often opposed to them too. One way around this problem is to construct them offshore in the sea, and this too has been done.

/Britain for Learners of English/