Look at the picture.
Read the questions.
Think about the topic.
What types of natural disasters do you have in your home country?
What can you do to prepare yourself for them?
What would you do if you heard a warning that a tornado was coming?
Read the following vocabulary words for practice and pronunciation.
demolish
film
funnel
imaginary
remarkable
rotate
storm
tornado
track
version
Read and Pronounce
Read the text below out loud. Your tutor will listen and correct pronunciation errors.
Kansas is known for many things — wheat, sunflowers … and tornadoes! What famous story set in Kansas features a tornado?
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, tells the story of Dorothy, who gets caught in a Kansas tornado and lands in the imaginary land of Oz. This story has been dramatized on stage and film. You might have seen the movie version, which stars Judy Garland as Dorothy.
Tornadoes are storms with rapidly rotating winds that form a funnel cloud. Also known as “twisters,” they extend downward from the huge clouds of a severe thunderstorm. The winds that rotate within a tornado usually reach a speed of almost 300 miles per hour! A tornado often sweeps through an area quickly, but it can cause considerable destruction. There have been a number of remarkable reports of tornadoes. In one instance, a schoolhouse was demolished while the 85 students originally inside it were carried more than 400 feet with none killed. There was also a case of five railway coaches, each weighing 70 tons, lifted from their tracks.
Talk with your tutor about this topic.
Use the expressions and vocabulary you learned.
Use the related resources below to learn more.
Take a quiz to check you comprehension of the reading passage.
1. What is Kansas known for?
2. How fast do the winds rotate within a tornado?
(Go back to the passage and look for the answers.)
3. Tornadoes are also known as
4. Which of the following statements is true?
