Paragraph 1
On 14 September 1930, a windstorm kicked up dust out of southwest Kansas and tumbled towards Oklahoma. By the time the storm cut a swath through the Texas Panhandle, it looked unlike anything ever seen before on the High Plains. People called the government to find out what was up with this dirty swirling thing in the sky. The weather bureau people in Lubbock did not know what to make of ut or how to define it. It was not a sandstorm. Sandstorms were beige, off-white, and not thick like this thing. It was not a hailstorm, though it certainly brought with it a dark, threatening sky, the kind of formation you would get just before a roof buster. The strange thing about it, the weather bureau observers siad, was that it rolled, like a mobile hill of crude, and it was black. When it tumbled through, it carried static electricity, enough to short out a car. It hurt, like a swipe of coarse sandpaper on the face. The first black duster was a curiosity, nothing else. The weather bureau observers wrote it up and put it in a drawer.
From PASSAGE A
From Paragraph 1
1. Pick out the word which indicates the windstorm was moving quickly. [1m]
2. Why could the approaching windstorm be mistaken for a hailstorm? [1m]
Paragraph 2
Around noon on 21 January 1932, a cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared just outside Amarillo. The winds had been fierce all day, clocked at sixty miles an hour when the curtain dropped over the Panhandle. The sky lost its customary white, and turned brownish, then grey as the thing lumbered around the edge of Amarillo, a city of 43000 people. Nobody knew waht to call it. It was not a rain cloud. Nor was it a cloud holding ice pellets. It was not a twister. It was thick like coarse animal hair; it was alive. People close to it described a feeling of being in a blizzard - a black blizzard, they called it - with an edge like steel wool. THe weather bureau people in Amarillo were fascinated by the cloud precisely because it defied explanation. They wrote in their logs that it was "most spectacular". After hovering near Amarillo, the cloud moved north, up the Texas Panhandle, towards Oklahoma, Colarado and Kansas.
From Paragraph 2
3. "The curtain dropped over the Panhandle." What does the author mean by this? [1m]
4. What does the word "alive" tell you about the dust cloud? [1m]
Paragraph 3
Barn White sawa htis black monstrosity approaching from the south, and he thought at first he was looking at a range of mountains on the move, nearly two miles hight. But the Llano Estacado was one of the flattest places on Earth, and there was no mountain of ten thousand feet, moving or stationary, anywhere on the horizon. He told his boys to run for protection and hide deep under their little house. The cloud passed over Dalhart quickly, briefly blocking the sun so that it looked like dusk outside. It dumped its load and disappeared, its departure as swift as its arrival. The storm left the streets full of coal-coloured dust and covered the tops of cars and sidewalks on Denrock. Folks had it in their hair, their eyes, down their throat. You blew your nose and there it was - black snot. You hacked up the same thing. It burned in the eyes and made people cough. It was the damnest thing and a mystery.
From Paragraph 3
5. Explain in your own words why the author described the duststorm as "the damnest thing, and a mystery". [2m]
Paragraph 4
What is it? Melt White asked his daddy.
It is the earth itself, Barn said. The earth is on the move.
Why?
Look at what they have done to the grass, he said. Look at the land: wrong side up.
By 1934, the soil was like finely-sifted flour, and the heat made it a danger to go outside in many ways. In Vinita, Oklahoma, the temperature soared above 100 degrees for thirty-five consecutive days. On the thirty-sixth day, it reached 117. It was a time without air-conditioning, of course, a time without even electricity for most farmers in the southern plains.
From Paragraph 4
6. What did the duststorm do to the land? [1m]
Paragraph 5
On the skin, the dust was like a nail file, a grit strong enough to hurt. People rubbed Vaseline in their noses as a filter. The Red Cross handed out respiratory masks to schools. Families put wet towels beneath their doors and covered their windows with bed sheets, fresh-dampened nightly. The sheets turned a muddy brown. At shcool, Jeanne Clark, a New York dancer's daughter, went through dust drills. When the storms hit, they usually came without warning. Weather forecasting, with no pictures from high above, relied on changes in atmospheric pressure, but such measures rarely picked up galloping earth. Dusters went undetected until they rolled into a neighbouring town and a phone link was set in motion.
From Paragraph 5
7. Explain in your own words how people were alerted about impending duststorms in the past. [2m]
Paragraph 6
A Sunday in mid-April 1935 dawned quiet, windless and bright, in the afternoon, the sky went purple - as if it were sick - and the temperature plunged. People looked northwest and saw a ragged-top formation on the move, covering the horizon. The air crackled with electricity. Snap, snap, snap. Waves of sand, like ocean water rising over a ship's prow, swept over roads. Cars went into ditches. A train derailed. That was Black Sunday, 14 April 1935, day o fthe worst duster of them all. The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal. The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon. More than 300000 tons of Great Plains topsoil was airborne that day.
From Paragraph 6
8. Why was the duststorm that happened on 14 April 1935 considered as "the worst duster of them all"? [1m]
Paragraph 7
The narrative of those times is not just buried among fence posts and mummified homesteads. People who lived through the whole thing - the great town-building, farm-fattening, family establishing prosperity of hte 1920s, followed by the back hand of nature in the next decade, when all of life played out as if filmed grainy black-and-white - are with us still, shelters of living memory.
From Paragraph 7
9. Explain fully what the author means when he says that life in the decade after the 1920s "played out as if filmed in grainy black-and-white". [2m]
Passage B
Paragraph 1
We live in precarious times, climate-wise. Judging from past climate swings preserved in ancient ice, the glaciers should soon be creeping southward. Instead, the mercury seems to be chugging upwards, and the ice is still melting. We have already seen how nature's own dusts must push the mercury this way or that. But what are the deeds of humanity's dusts? The Earth's climate system was a baffling and erratic machine before we ever lumbered onto the scene, and now we have emptied Pandora's box into those mysterious gears: a staggering load of sulphur beads and nitrogen-rich bits, boatloads of soot, and a smattering of everything else that we build or burn. We have even added to the desert dust.
From Paragraph 1
10. Why does teh author think we live in precarious times? [1m]
11. In your own words, describe whtat the earth's natural climatic system is like. [2m]
From Paragraph 2
12. Explain fully what it is about desert dust that has gotten climatologists confused. [2m]
From Paragraph 3
13. Why are sulphur particles able to lower the temperature of hte Northern hemisphere? [1m]
From Paragraph 4
14. Why do sulphur beads have a limited cooling effect? [2m]
From Passage A and Passage B
15. For each of the following words, give one word or phrase (of not more than seven words) which has the same meaning that the word has in the passage. [5m]
From Passage A
[a] spectacular
[b] picked up
From Passage B
[c] creeping
[d] cancel out
[e] industriousness
From Passage B
16. Using your own words as far as possible, summarise how dust of various types affect the world's climate and weather patterns.
USE MATERIALS IN PASSAGE B
Your summary, which must be in continuous writing (not note form), must not be more then 150 words (not counting the words to help you begin).
Begin your summary as follows:
Highly reflective sulphur particles found in the atmosphere can cool... [25m]
After 8 September, we work hard to do well at the O.
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