A Compilation of Interesting and Funny Reading Text

The man who discovered Britain

He described frozen seas – but no one believed him.

On his return from a sea journey north to the Atlantic, the Greek explorer said of Britain: 'The island is thickly populated … has extremely chilly climate …' Of its people, he wrote: 'They are unusually hospitable and gentle in manner … their diet is inexpensive and quite different from the luxury that is born of wealth … It (Britain) has many kings and potentates who live for the most part in the state of mutual peace …'

Yet no one believed him. It was the year 304 BC, and the explorer was Pytheas of Marseilles.

For 2000 years historians labeled him a charlatan, although they enjoyed his accounts of his travels as masterpieces of fabrication. Yet Pytheas was the first Greek to visit the describe Britain and its people and, possibly, to sail within sight of the Norwegian coast. He wrote: 'The people of Britannia are simple in their habits and far removed from the cunning and knavishness of modern man … they do not drink wine, but a fermented liquor made from barley, which they call curmi.'

At the time of his epic journey, the northern waters of the Atlantic were unknown to Pytheas's contemporaries. How could they – familiar only with the warm waters of the Mediterranean – believe that he had seen chunks of floating ice larger than his ship? Or that further north the sea was entirely frozen and the sun never set?

Pytheas was discredited, and although later Greek historians included references to his travels in their books, their attitude was typified by Strabo (born about 63 BC). He wrote: 'Pytheas tells us that Thule [believed then to be an undiscovered northernmost land] is one day's sail from the congealed see … and this Pytheas saw with his own eyes – or so he would have us believe.


The Reader's Digest Book of Strange Stories Amazing Facts (AmE)

THE BARASANA

Between Colombia and Brazil there is an area called The Vaupes Region'. About 15.000 people live in this area. They are the Amazonian Indians. These Amazonian Indians live in small groups. These groups have got different names like: Tukano, Desana, Cubeo and Barasana.
The Barasana have a very different life-style. They do not live in villages. Many families live together in one house. It's a very big house and they share everything in this house. These houses are very far away from each other. A person has to walk for one hour to get from one house to another. There are gardens for special plants behind the houses. The Barasana pick bananas from the banana trees and use the leaves of these trees to serve food.
The Barasana men and the Barasana women do different things. The women spend most of their time doing housework. They look after children, work in the gardens and prepare the food. The men go fishing and hunt animals for their meat.
The Barasana are marvellous language-learners. This is because a Barasana man has to marry a woman from a different house. The people in different houses speak different languages, so they must learn the other language to understand each other. The wife has to learn her husband's language and the husband has to learn his wife's language.
The children first learn their father1s language and use it every day, but they also understand their mother's language. The children do not go to school. They play with other children, watch their parents and in this way they learn about life. Young girls have to help their mothers, but the boys don't. They usually swim in the rivers, go fishing and practise hunting animals.

THE POSTAGE STAMP

Before the postage stamp, it was difficult to send a letter to another country. The sender paid for the letter to travel in his or her own country. Then the person in the other country paid for the other part of the trip. If a letter crossed several countries, the problem was bigger.

Rowland Hill, a British teacher, had the idea of a postage stamp with gum on the back. The British Post Office made the first stamps in 1840. They were the Penny Black and the Twopence Blue. A person bought a stamp and put it on a letter. The post office delivered the letter or took the letter to the person. When the person got the letter it was That is, the sender paid for it earlier.
Postage stamps became popular in Great Britain immediately other countries started making their own postage stamps very quickly
However, there were still problems with international mail. Some countries did not want to accept letters with the stamps of other countries. Finally, in 1874 a German organized the Universal Postal System (the UPS). Each country in the UPS agreed to accept letters with prepaid postage from the other members. Today the offices of the UPS are only in Switzerland. Almost every country in the world j5 a member of this organization. It takes care of any international mail problems.
Today post offices in every country sell beautiful stamps. Collecting stamps is one of the most popular hobbies in the world, and every stamp collector knows about the Penny Black and the Twopence Blue.

TORNADOES

The great power of tornadoes is almost unbelievable. The speed of this whirling funnel-shaped wind may be more than 800 kilometres per hour. Like a giant vacuum cleaner, it sucks up anything in its path.
There are many interesting stories about the strange things that tornadoes have done in the United States. Common wheat straw has been driven several centimetres onto posts and trees. Buildings have been turned completely around on their foundations and have remained intact. People and animals have been carried hundreds of metres, often suffering no physical harm. Feathers have been removed from chickens. Cars, trucks, and even whole freight trains have been carried away.
Fonunately, a tornado does not last long, about 20 to 30 minutes on the avenge. Usually, it destroys an area about 26 kilometres long, and the great damage that it does in one place lasts only about 30 seconds. Tornadoes normally occur on hot, humid days but not necessarily in the summer. The biggest and most destrutive tornado in the United States struck on March 18, 1925. Roaring along at a speed of 96 kilometres per hour, it swept clean a path 2 kilometres wide across the states of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. In its 354-kilometre long journey across these three states, the tornado killed 689 people.
More than 200 tornadoes strike in the United States every year. It is not possible to predict when a tornado will strike although the U.S. Weather Bureau gives storm warnings when conditions are right to cause a tornado. The safest place to be if a tornado seems likely is in some underground area such as a cellar or a basement.

Dinosaurs on a tidal wave?

In a river valley not far from Houston, Texas, a team of American scientists have found geological evidence that a vast tidal wave swept the whole Caribbean region 65 million years ago, just as the Cretaceous period – the age of the dinosaurs – was ending. Writing in the latest issue of the US journal Science, the geologists claim that a tidal wave on this scale could only have been caused by the impact of an asteroid, probably five to ten kilometers in diameter, plunging through the Earth's atmosphere and into the sea. That spectacular picture fits well with the view of the 'catastrophists', geologists who think that the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs, along with a diverse range of other living things, was caused by a series of asteroid impacts.

Each impact would have thrown up a world-embracing dust cloud, blotting out the Sun and lowering temperatures to the point where many plants and animals could not survive. Evidence for that view already comes in clays from the end of the Cretaceous period. They are enriched in iridium, an element which is very rare in the Earth's crust but much more abundant in asteroids.

Of course, the clinching evidence for the catastrophic view would be the discovery of the remains of the craters where the asteroids struck. Unfortunately, no crater of the right age has been definitely identified, although if they are all at the bottom of the sea that is not so surprising. But the new work published in Science does provide the next best thing – if not the crater itself, evidence of the wave the asteroid created when it struck the sea. The evidence comes in a puzzling layer of rippled sandstone found in the Brazos River valley, Texas. The sandstone is curious because, at first, there seems no good reason why it should be there. It is a sudden, thin, interruption in a thick deposit of mudstone. That, as its name suggests, is compacted mud that quietly accumulated over the millions of years that the region lay at the bottom of a shallow, undisturbed sea.

The Times (BrE)