F2F Class Notes (Sonia)

Demo StudentCatherine

Homework

read through the BBC article and try to give a brief summary to your next teacher as a speaking exercise

Vocabulary

spam(n/v): unwanted advertisements on email Wechat etc

e.g I think people don’t like their friends to spam on we chat moments.

e.g My office mailbox always receives many spam emails.

e.g”came out of nowhere/ out of the blue“: You don’t know where it came from, very random

e.g her hurtful comments came out of nowhere

at mercy (be affected by, be controlled by)

our world is at the mercy of man and mother nature

defiant (adj) : strong, fight back

e.g tom gave a defiant debate in a debating contest

northernmost: the furthest point north

wilderness(n): the wild, with no civilisation just nature

e.g some people like to travel to the wilderness

peninsula: half island

brooding (adj): making you feel uncomfortable or worried, as if something bad is going tohappen, very sad/angry/serious all the time

upper hand: the advantage/ the one with a stronger position

Reading

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20171203-the-norwegian-town-the-world-tried-to-erase

For centuries, this arctic Norwegian port has been at the mercy of Mother Nature and man, and yet has risen from the ashes with a deep and defiant response.

Much farther north than the famous fjord inlets, Norway’s northernmost seaboard of Finnmark is a frontier on the edge. Five hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, it is a raw wilderness of abrupt peninsulas and brooding cliffs at the nerve ends of the world, a place where nature has long had the upper hand. In winter, as if by decree of Odin, roads vanish under deep snows that cut off communities for days. And when polar darkness descends, from mid-November to late January, it is near absolute.

It is a raw wilderness at the nerve ends of the world

But as you drive along the deserted, snow-crusted road to Hammerfest, population 10,527, past barely-there fishing hamlets and cod trawlers at standstill, you soon learn that one of the world’s northernmost towns has had far worse problems to deal with than temperatures plummeting below zero.

For Hammerfest’s history is a luckless narrative of natural disasters, fires, plagues and war, spanning a timeline from Napoleon to the Nazis. And despite being one of the most storied settlements in northern Europe, the town’s acutely modern look might strike you as odd. Look around and it feels different to elsewhere this far north.