Lesson 8. Should we trust weather forecasts?
Forecasts are more accurate than many people think
Vocabulary to the text
get sth wrong — to make a mistake about something moan — стонать, жаловаться reliable — заслуживающий доверия; достоверный evidence – данные sterling -- sterling work or a sterling character is good, strong, and reliable The Met Office — the British government department that prepares reports that say what the weather is going to be like. This type of report is called a weather forecast. accuracy — точность, правильность tricky – обманчивый nonetheless — тем не менее, всё же suggest — высказывать мнение, говорить decade – десяток similarly — подобным образом, так же performance figures – показатели производительности disappoint — разочаровать |
How much do you trust the weather forecast? It is easy to say weather forecasters get it wrong all the time, and moaning about the weather forecast is almost a national sport in the UK. But how reliable are our forecasts? The evidence indicates they do a pretty sterling job. The Met Office checks the accuracy of its forecasts and publishes its performance figures online. When it comes to maximum temperature more than 90% of the predictions are accurate to within two degrees for a 24-hour forecast. Predicting rainfall is trickier, because showers can be so localised, but nonetheless three-hourly predictions of sunshine or rain are accurate more than 70% of the time.
Statistics show that today’s three-day weather forecasts for the UK are more accurate that a one-day forecast was in 1980. Similarly, a recent study of Australian weather forecasts, published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, showed that the accuracy of five to seven day forecasts was similar to a one-day forecast 50 years ago. In his blog, US weather forecaster Dan Satterfield suggests that people who moan that weather forecasts are always wrong may be basing their opinion on what forecasts were like decades ago – when they did get it wrong a lot of the time. Or possibly they are checking poor forecasts: computer generated forecasts that use icons to illustrate the weather hour by hour are almost always going to disappoint. But choose your forecast with care and you can be confident which days are “umbrella days”. Источник: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jul/27/weather-forecasts-met-office |
Reading Test
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Listen, read the story (p.142) and formulate its main idea in one sentence.
Define the genre of the story.
Define the genre of the story.