The Weather – Lesson plan © BBC | British Council 2006

The Weather

Level: Advanced

The aim of this lesson is to give students practice in reading for specific information in an
online article about the weather. Students will also have an opportunity to practise
pronunciation, word stress and collocations connected with the weather.

The plan is based around a text from the British Council LearnEnglish Central website at:
http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-magazine-weather.htm

The webpage also has a variety of online interactive activities.

We have also included the text for students and teachers without Internet access in class.

Procedure

Introduction task
• As a lead-in to the topic, you could show students the BBC weather website at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/world/ and look at the five-day forecast for your area.
Elicit from students what the various symbols and words mean.
Alternatively use a weather map from a magazine or newspaper.

Pre-reading discussion

Worksheet A
• Students should discuss in pairs or groups the difference between the different
weather phenomena.

Tip: photos or drawings of the various weather phenomenon will make comprehension
checking much easier as well as making the vocabulary more memorable for your students.

Pronunciation work

Worksheet B
• Ask students in pairs to match the beginnings to the ends of the phonemically spelt
words.
• Write the phonemic next to the actual spelling and drill pronunciation.

Answers:
a 3 /«blˆzûdz/
b 5 /«hÇrˆkûnz/
c 6 /«saˆklûànz/
d 1 /draàts/
e 4 /hjuö«mˆdˆtˆ/
f 2 /fl√dz/

BBC | British Council Lesson plan. The Weather– Page 1

The Weather – Lesson plan © BBC | British Council 2006

Vocabulary

Worksheet C
• Ask students what adjectives we often use with ‘rain’ and why, for example, we say
‘heavy rain’ and not ‘strong rain’. (Answer: because the words form common
collocations or word partnerships).
• Ask students in pairs or groups to match the adjectives in column A to the nouns in
column B to form strong collocations. (Note: in some cases there is more than one
possibility).

Tip: If available, provide students with good monolingual dictionaries as these will often give
common collocations, sometimes with example sentences so that your students can see how
the words are used in context. Using a bilingual dictionary is not as helpful and often
confusing as collocations tend to differ between languages.

Suggested collocations:
torrential rain
flash floods
severe gales/weather conditions/storms/floods
dense fog
sunny spells/weather conditions
freak gales/weather conditions/storms/floods
violent gales/weather conditions/storms
high humidity

Pre-reading discussion

Worksheet D

• Ask students to discuss the questions in pairs or groups. Monitor the discussions
closely so that you can ask students to bring up any interesting points they raised in
an open-class discussion afterwards.

Reading task

• Show students the text about the weather from the website and give them the reading
comprehension questions (below) in Worksheet E. Ask them to find the answers to
the questions. If you have a computer room, you may prefer them to read the article
online at: http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-magazine-weather.htm

Tip: The online article has a special function that you might like to make students
aware of. If they double-click on any word, a definition will appear in a separate box
on the screen.

• In class, elicit the answers to the questions.

BBC | British Council Lesson plan. The Weather – Page 2

The Weather – Lesson plan © BBC | British Council 2006

Worksheet E

1. According to scientific studies, what effects can the weather have on people?

2. What causes changes in the weather in the British Isles?

3. According to some researchers, what effect has human activity in Europe and North
America had on Africa?

4. How can pine cones and seaweed help us predict the weather?

5. How reliable is technology in predicting the weather?

6. What did a recent study by an Australian psychologist suggest?

7. What’s the connection between weather and disease?

8. What are stormchasers

BBC | British Council Lesson plan. The Weather – Page 3

The Weather – Lesson plan © BBC | British Council 2006

Text
Weather
by Mike Rayner

It's hardly surprising that weather is a favourite topic for so many people around the
world - it affects where we choose to live, what we wear, our moods, and perhaps
even our national characteristics. A sunny day can relieve the deepest depression,
while extreme weather can destroy homes and threaten lives.

The effects of weather

Palm trees bent double in hurricane force winds, cars stranded in snow drifts, people
navigating small boats down flooded city streets – images we are all familiar with
from news reports of severe weather spells. But many of the effects of the weather
are less newsworthy.

‘I’m feeling a bit under the weather’ is a common complaint in Britain, especially on
Monday mornings, and it seems that weather really can be responsible for moods.
Studies have shown that changeable weather can make it hard to concentrate,
cloudy skies slow down reflexes, and high humidity with hot, dry winds makes many
people irritable and snappy.

Some suggest that the weather also leaves its mark on character, giving people from
the same region similar temperaments, although it seems that economic, political and
social factors are likely to have a much stronger effect than the weather.

What causes changes in the weather?

If you live in a place like Britain, where the weather seems to change daily if not
hourly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the weather is random. In fact the
weather is controlled by systems which move around areas of the globe. In the UK
the weather depends on depressions, often called ‘lows’, and anticyclones, also
known as ‘highs’. These systems start in the Atlantic Ocean, and make their way
across the British Isles from the west to the east. Highs bring sunny weather, while
lows bring rain and wind.

The weather systems in tropical climates are very different from those in mid and
high latitudes. Tropical storms develop from depressions, and often build into
cyclones, violent storms featuring hurricanes and torrential rain.

In modern times, human activity seems to be altering weather patterns. Gases

produced by heavy industry change the temperature of the Earth’s surface, and
affect cloud formation. Some researchers say that factories in Europe and North
America may have been one of the causes of the droughts in Africa in the 1980s.

Can we predict the weather?

The human race has always tried to guess the weather, especially in areas of the
world where there are frequent changes. Traditional rhymes point to early attempts to
identify weather patterns, popular poems include:

Red sky at night, shepherds’ delight; Red sky in the morning, shepherds’ warning

Ash leaf before the oak, then we will have a summer soak;
Oak leaf before the ash, the summer comes without a splash

BBC | British Council Lesson plan. The Weather – Page 4

The Weather – Lesson plan © BBC | British Council 2006

Flies will swarm before a storm.

Rain before 7, clear by 11.

Two other popular traditional ways of forecasting the weather used pine cones and
seaweed. When the air has a high level of humidity there is a higher chance of rain,
when the humidity is low, there is more chance of fine weather. Pine cones and
seaweed react to changes in humidity - pines cones open, and seaweed feels dry
when the humidity is low, while high humidity has the opposite effect.

While folk wisdom can still provide a guide to help forecast weather, today’s methods
of prediction increasingly rely on technology. Satellites, balloons, ships, aircraft and
weather centres with sensitive monitoring equipment, send data to computers. The
data is then processed, and the weather predicted. However, even this system
cannot predict weather for longer than about week.

A recent study by an Australian psychologist suggests that certain people may have
a special gift for predicting the weather. However it is possible that these people
would use their talent in another way, since the same group had considerable
success in forecasting changes in another chaotic system – the stock market.

It appears that a study of weather patterns may also enable scientists to predict the
outbreak of disease. An Ebola epidemic in Uganda in the year 2000 came after the
same rare weather conditions that had been present before an outbreak 6 years
earlier. Efforts to limit the spread of airborne diseases such as foot and mouth, are
also strongly dependent on favourable wind conditions.

Extreme weather

Although people in Britain often moan about the weather, we should spare a thought
for the inhabitants of parts of the world where extreme weather regularly wreaks
havoc on the environment and population. Sandstorms, tornadoes, blizzards and
flash floods regularly kill thousands of people and leave many others homeless.

While most of us try to avoid extreme weather, some adventurous souls actively seek
out places where extreme weather conditions exist. Sports such as surfing,
kiteboarding, ice-climbing and white-water rafting are becoming increasingly popular
with people seeking relief from the monotony of daily routine. Extreme sports are
about exhilaration, skill and danger, and often harness the weather to provide
adrenaline addicts with their kicks.

Even more extraordinary are storm-chasers – weather enthusiasts who risk their lives
following tornadoes and thunderstorms at high speed to witness the damage they
cause at close hand.

BBC | British Council Lesson plan. The Weather – Page 5

The Weather – Lesson plan © BBC | British Council 2006

Discussion task

• In pairs, ask students to discuss the following questions:

• Had you heard of any of the ideas in the article before?

• Are there any parts of the article that you agree or disagree with? Why?

• Have you ever experienced any extreme weather conditions? Where were
you and what was it like?

Follow-up

• If your students have Internet access, ask them to search the net for any
stories about extreme weather conditions and report back to the class.

BBC | British Council Lesson plan. The Weather – Page 6