英语播客 A Cup of English Road works.

This Spring, we have experienced an unusual amount of rain, so much so that it has caused problems in many areas. I was driving to a local bakery the other day, when I came to some road works. I had to stop my car and wait for the heavy machinery to get out of the way, so I took a few minutes to look around at what had happened. The road followed a hillside that was cut away to look a bit like a cliff, but the mixture of rock and soil looked crumbly. The consistent rain over the course of a week had loosened the rock from the soil and brought some boulders down onto the road. A very dangerous situation! Watch out drivers! The heavy machinery was clearing the road so the traffic could continue. When I got home, I looked up the geology of this area on the internet. It turns out there are two trails that a person can drive along to view an enormous variety of geological activity. Apparently, about 17,000 years ago there were enormous glaciers covering a lot of North America. It just so happens that there was a blockage of ice that stopped a huge lake of melted water from flowing south. When the ice block finally gave way, the gigantic flood affected this area by depositing massive 200 ton boulders in strange places, and tons of gravel in other places. Scientists say that there is evidence of 50 cubic miles of earth and rock being displaced up to a hundred times, and contributing to what is now this area. It's funny what you learn by looking something up on the internet, isn't it? A man who has written a book about the geology of this area, Mr. Charles L. Mason, writes that there has been "a buffet of geological events....that are unparalleled nearly anywhere else on earth." Gosh, and I learned all of that because I had to wait for some road works. Whatever will I learn next?

Grammar notes.

Related vocabulary: glaciers, boulders, gravel, geology.

1. There are small glaciers in the mountains nearby.

2. Some people climb on the large boulders that are a few miles away.

3. Our driveway used to be all gravel, but the little rocks would get everywhere, so now it is asphalt.

4. Geology is the study of rock formations.