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but they all speak it differently. A Scottish person has to listen carefully if he wants to understand a Londoner or a Welsh person.
Tapescript 10 (p. 138)
Nowadays when people speak of Australia they can mean three things: 1) Australia as a continent; 2) Australia as an island and 3) Australia as an independent country. Australia is the world's largest island and its smallest continent. Asia is the continent nearest to Australia in the north. The icy shores of Antarctica lie to the south. New Zealand is to the east. To the west of Australia stretches the vast Indian Ocean. In the east the continent is washed by the Pacific Ocean.
Australia is a land of striking differences. In the centre of the continent and in the west more than 50 % of the land is desert — dry and uninhabited. There are three deserts there: the Great Sandy Desert, the Great Victoria Desert and the Gibson Desert, situated between them. Naturally, very few people live there. Most of them live on the narrow coasts of the east and southeast. Main cities, where people live among tall office buildings, automobile plants and busy factories, are also situated there.
In the northeast, tropical forests cover the coast. In the mountains of the southeast the snow lies for seven months of the year.
The capital of Australia is Canberra.
Tapescript 11 (p. 155)
Interviewer: Well, professor, what is your opinion about what a person needs to live a long healthy life?
Professor: My advice for a long healthy life is to get yourself an absorbing hobby.
Hobbies teach us all sorts of things and they do it in a rather pleasant way. For example, stamp collecting is more than just the gathering of little labels. It's our entry into the world of culture and history — at least for the last 150 years. Those little slips of paper celebrate national achievements and reveal historical events. The philatelist can
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learn, too, about money, geography, sightseeings and all the rest.
Another hobby with international links is the cultivation of pen friends. There are pen friend agencies which will send your address to potential correspondents in a wide range of countries. And through your letter exchange in the months and years that follow, a whole collection of interesting letters, sent to you by all sorts of interesting people from far and exotic places will come. In the process, if you're a stamp collector, you gain a good choice of specimen to add to your collection. And both of these hobbies will give you at least a good amount of words from a very wide range of foreign languages.
Tapescript 12 (p.169) Summer Camp in the USA
Most school kids in the USA go to camp in summer. There are special camps for different sports, and also for music, languages and computers. There are even camps with slimming programmes for overweight kids! But Camp Potomac, like most camps, has a nice mixture of different things to do. Let's listen to Steve, who is on his holiday there.
— Hi, Steve! What can you tell us about Camp Potomac?
— Well, the camp is on the Potomac river about 25 miles from Washington D.C. There is also a canal called the 'Ohio Canal'. The big thing here is canoeing. We canoe on the river and on the canal. There are beginners, intermediate, and advanced. I was a beginner last year, now I'm intermediate. We have races on the canal. And we usually take food with us in the canoe, and go to eat it on an island.
You can't swim in the river or the canal. They say it's dangerous. There are snakes in the water. That's why we have a big swimming pool at the camp.
The food is pretty good. French toast for breakfast. Sandwiches and fruit for lunch. Pizza or burgers for supper.
The instructors are really young — not like the teachers at school! They are mostly 19 or 20.
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