ACADEMIC LISTENING TEST PRACTICE
WEATHER - RAINING FROGS?
WEATHER - RAINING FROGS?
For Students Preparing for Academic Tests / IELTS and TOEFL
Listen as you read the script.
Playing Time: 1 minute 53 seconds
Our planet's weather is a topic that is becoming more and more popular nowadays. This is because many places in our world are becoming hotter and, in fact, many scientists say that 2020 may be the hottest year on record that our earth has ever seen. More and more ice is melting at the north and south poles of our planet, and with less ice there are fewer and fewer polar bears. Unfortunately, we may not be able to stop these changes before our world becomes a much more difficult place to live in.
Let's face it, the weather on our world is just very difficult to understand . . . and even more difficult to control.
Here is a very interesting example of our world's strange weather. One Roman man called Pliny the Elder wrote about frogs raining from the skies almost two thousand years ago. Can this possibly be true? Yes, it can. Furthermore, not only can frogs rain, but also fish and other small animals. This can sometimes happen when a storm brings strong winds which blow over the tops of oceans or lakes. Small frogs and fish are not very heavy, so they can be picked up by the wind into clouds and carried over land where they fall down. Just a few frogs may fall down or maybe many more. In 2005, people in the European country of Serbia walked outside their homes after a storm and they discovered thousands of frogs trying to hop back to water.
The Huffington Post, an online news service, tells of many more places in the world where this has happened. If you are interested to see what raining frogs looks like, you can do a quick YouTube search for the 1999 movie Magnolia, starring Tom Cruise. It shows thousands of frogs falling down on a small town in the United States
Let's face it, the weather on our world is just very difficult to understand . . . and even more difficult to control.
Here is a very interesting example of our world's strange weather. One Roman man called Pliny the Elder wrote about frogs raining from the skies almost two thousand years ago. Can this possibly be true? Yes, it can. Furthermore, not only can frogs rain, but also fish and other small animals. This can sometimes happen when a storm brings strong winds which blow over the tops of oceans or lakes. Small frogs and fish are not very heavy, so they can be picked up by the wind into clouds and carried over land where they fall down. Just a few frogs may fall down or maybe many more. In 2005, people in the European country of Serbia walked outside their homes after a storm and they discovered thousands of frogs trying to hop back to water.
The Huffington Post, an online news service, tells of many more places in the world where this has happened. If you are interested to see what raining frogs looks like, you can do a quick YouTube search for the 1999 movie Magnolia, starring Tom Cruise. It shows thousands of frogs falling down on a small town in the United States
Note: For more cool ESL resources about weather, visit my All Things Topics site.
