B) Now read the text to check your answers. Correct any wrong statements.

THE WINTER’S TALE

Yet winter weather can also be very severe, and can be dangerous because of this. Human beings are totally unsuited to life in the cold. We evolved for life in Africa and unlike most animals and plants we cannot adapt to winter at all. We don't grow extra body hair then. We can't hibernate and if our body temperature drops just three and a half degrees below normal, we begin to die.

Every winter, mountain rescue teams across the world are called out to find people who have got lost in the snow. The climbers may have set out in fine weather but the weather in the mountains is unpredictable and can change from one moment to the next.

Sergeant Graham Gibb of the mountain rescue team in Braemar, in the Scottish Cairngorm mountains, recalls how people lost in the snow act in extraordinary ways when their body temperature falls below normal. "People start to have hallucinations and behave in totally irrational ways. Maybe they've got a big rucksack on their back. They think, “This is far too heavy. If I can just get rid of it, I'll be able to walk better." So they dump the rucksack. We come along looking for the person who's lost. First we find a rucksack, then we find a cagoule, and a bit further on we find a pair of boots. Eventually we come across the body."

However, Braemar has also been the scene of many extraordinary stories of winter survival. In 1994, Jackie Greaves slipped on ice and fell down a mountainside. Amazingly unhurt, she wandered alone in a whiteout for two days before she was found by rescuers. In 1995 cross-country skier Andy Wilson broke records for survival ­ after he spent three nights on the Cairngorms in a February blizzard. A helicopter spotted him stumbling through the snow on the morning of the fourth day.

What enabled both Jackie and Andy to survive was knowledge of the life-saving properties of snow. Out in the wind on the mountain top the night temperature had dropped to minus 39 degrees. In such temperatures the human body will only last about half an hour before it loses consciousness. But inside a snow-hole, protected from the wind and insulated by the air in the snow, the temperature is much higher - it can be only slightly below freezing.

Snow is the most remarkable material. As ecologist Peter Marchand explains: “In the West we tend to regard snow as either a nuisance or something to play with. But we didn't always have the technological advances that we have today. In the past, snow was one of the most useful materials for surviving the winter. And even today, you will find some people who go to great lengths to keep snow on their roof in winter because they know about its excellent insulating properties."

Traditional cultures such as the North American Indians and the Inuit in northern Canada and Greenland have always used snow to make winter houses. Snow can be cut into blocks to make an igloo or hollowed out to make a quinzee, the traditional home of the Athabaskan Indians. With no heating but the warmth of the people inside it, a snow house can be a nice snug place to spend the night in winter.

Snow, then, has its dangers but also its uses. We should keep this in mind and use it to our advantage.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1070