Writing tasks

A.Plan a 150-word article about Dartmoor to appear in a tourist brochure to inform foreign visitors about the National Park and its attractions.

1. Select what you think are the most interesting and relevant points about Dartmoor National Park from these points (you won’t be able to use them all). Add further information you found out from the programme.

2. Use these points to write your article.

3. Work in pairs. Show your completed article to your partner and ask for his or her comments. Then join another pair and read each other’s articles.

B.If you prefer prepare an article about a national park in your own or another country. Use the notes here, and what you found out from the programme, as guidelines to the points you want to cover.

Dartmoor National Park

– set up in 1951

– employs about 70 permanent staff

– area 945 square kilometers: half moorland, a third farmland

– highest point 621 metres

– one of eleven National Parks in England and Wales

– the whole of Dartmoor is granite, an ancient volcanic rock. The granite has been eroded in many places to form tors, isolated rocky formations at the tops of the hills.

– largest and highest upland in southern Britain

– exposed to strong winds and high rainfall

– relatively undisturbed by intensive agriculture

– especially interesting and good for wildlife

– Dartmoor ponies seem to be wild, but all belong to individual farmers. They are rounded up to be identified and marked by their owners in autumn.

– farming and other activities (forestry, army firing ranges, china clay, quarries and water supply) continue side by side with the recreational use of the park by visitors and the conservation of the landscape and ecology

Prehistoric archaeology

– at the start of the Bronze Age (2500 BC) the climate in Britain was milder than now-Dartmoor was covered in trees

– forests cleared by farmers able to grow cereals even on the highest parts of Dartmoor

– farmers lived in groups of small round hoses-their fields were surrounded with stone walls

– in around 1000 BC the climate became colder – higher fields and settlements abandoned

– since then moorland could only be used for grazing animals

– remains of the houses and walls can be seen today as “hut circles” and “reaves”.

Tin mines

– first tin mines were open gullies dug back into hillsides where a vein of ore came to the surface

– by the 18^th century surface deposits exhausted deep underground mining began

– major industry until the beginning of the 20^th century

– remains of tin miners’ gullies and buildings can be seen all over Dartmoor today – often covered with grass and plants.

Finally …

Watch the whole sequence again. Enjoy watching it. Now you can understand everything much more easily than you could before – you’ll feel that you have made progress.

This relaxed viewing (with no questions to answer or tasks to worry about) is also an excellent way of assimilating vocabulary and useful expressions.

Unit 2