Reading

1. | GW. Read and fill in the gaps with the words from the box. Pay attention to the degrees of adjectives. There are extra words.

a) coldest e) largest i) driest | b) hottest f) dangerous j) wettest | c) best g) boring | d) dehydrated h) difficult

DO YOU KNOW...?

Welcome to the (1)___, highest and (2)___ places in the world! How do people live in Mali, West Africa, where the temperature is often +500C? John Baxter, a BBC journalist in Mali, says, “People get up very early and they don’t move very much in the afternoon. Surprisingly, they wear a lot of cotton clothes as this helps them not to get (3)___. Houses are very hot and don’t have air conditioning- the (4)___place to sleep is on the roof.”

Victoria Falls

In Southern Africa, the Zambezi River flows across a flat plateau that extends hundreds of kilometres in all directions. It is here that one will find the (5)___ waterfall in the world. It is formed as the full width of the Zambezi river plummets into a 108 metres high cleft*. During the wet season, the spray from the falls can be seen nearly 50 kilometres away, hence the local name Mosi-oa-Tunya (The smoke that Thunders).

One of the (6)____places in the world is Mount Wai’ale’’ale [waı,ɑ:leı'ɑ:leı], in Hawaii. It rains 335 days a year, with an average rainfall of 9,763 mm a year. One of the world’s (7)__places is the Atacama Desert in Chile. It gets less than 0.01 cm of rain a year.

*cleft - a split in rock or the ground