Wildlife in Chernobyl Disaster Area

UNIT 10

NUCLEAR POWER: FRIEND OR FOE

Functions practiced: stating and justifying opinion, making suggestions

Vocabulary Area: explosion, debris, release, patch, minuscule, flammable, safety regulations, violation, flaw, side effects, fusion, to fuse, fission, particle, nucleus, irradiation, fast-breeder, IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), appropriate, worrisome, to absorb, to mishandle, to dispose, to expose, to penetrate, to reduce, to repel, to tear smth open.

LISTENING AND SPEAKING

You are going to listen to the program devoted to the wildlife in Chernobyl disaster area. First, learn the words in the box. Use a dictionary if necessary. Then listen and try to write the missing words in the blanks below in the appropriate form. The words in the box will help you. Listen again and check your work.

to thrive destruction a dead zone ghost town agenda preserve lingering radioactivity to mutate species evolution cell researchers to adapt deceptively DNA molecules resilient implication to evolve

1: On the American ____ tonight, it has been 10 years almost to the day since the Cherbobyl explosion in Ukraine. By far the most severe nuclear accident in history. The extent of the ___ and the ___ effects on all kinds of life are still unfolding and will continue to do so. But out agenda reporting that a part of this find is that animals are not only living in the midst of this unimaginable pollution but ___ actually in some cases ___.

2: Never in the history of the Adam had there been an accident quite like this one. Up to two hundred times as much radiation as Hiroshima. Today the land around Chernobyl is considered a ___ ___.

3: We’re walking in the city of Prypyat’, the largest ___ ___ in the world.

2: And yet when Ron Chessner came with his research team he was surprised to find that the dead zone was as rich as any wildlife ____.

3: This area is _____ normal. And till you turn on the Geiger counter and……. you are really struck by the beauty of this area.

2: The real surprise came when the scientists collected field mice of a ____ that had stayed in the area despite the accident. They were apparently thriving, despite mass of ____ found in their bodies in the lab.

3: The first time we showed these results to other people they simply said we’d made a mistake.

2: But they hadn’t. And here’s their theory why the mice appear healthy. Deep in every ___ of the mice the ____ ____ or genetic plethora are constantly being broken down by the radioactivity all around them. Instead of dying, animals ______, their genes ______ massively. The mice don’t look any different but in effect they ______ more than a thousand times as fast as they normally would.

3: What’s surprising is that we see as much ____ in the last nine years as has occurred under natural conditions outside of this zone over last eight million years.

2: A second Chernobyl study published today by another group finds genetic changes in people, in children of families who lived downwind from the accident. Those changes are much less dramatic than the ones in the mice who live within the inside of the reactor itself. I put these studies together and scientists say there’s a surprising _____.

3: It says that life is very _____ and says that animals are adapted and I’m sure that mice living at Chernobyl are adapted to Chernobyl.

2: _______ say they learned that faced with some of the worst pollution on earth life did not stop. It changed on the most basic genetic level and went on.

This is Ned Putt of the American Agenda.

Why are field mice living in the Chernobyl area mutating? Do people in the Chernobyl change on the genetic level? What are the consequences of the Chernobyl accident for wildlife and humans?

READING

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