WEEK 6 READING-TRAVEL WRITING

TRAVEL WRITING

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/reading-comprehension-on-travel-writing-6098821

Bill Bryson- A walk in the woods 

Bill Bryson

   

Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town. A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath, but the celebrated Appalachian Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along America’s eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes. The Virginia portion alone is twice the length of the Pennine Way. From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states, through plump, comely hills whose very names – Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Catskills, Green Mountains, White Mountains – seem an invitation to amble. Who could say the words ‘Great Smoky Mountains’ or ‘Shenandoah Valley’ and not feel an urge, as the naturalist John Muir once put it, to ‘throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence’? And here it was, quite unexpectedly, meandering in a dangerously beguiling fashion through the pleasant New England community in which I had just settled. It seemed such an extraordinary notion – the idea that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: ‘Sounds neat! Let’s do it!’

VOCABULARY : 

To beckon (ed) - to signal someone with your arm or hand 

comely -attractive

to amble (ed)-to stroll, to walk slowly 

beguiling-interesting and attractive but not to be trusted 

to clamber over -to climb using hands and feet

prow-the front section of a ship

1. Find two adjectives to describe the Appalachian trail.

2. Why do you think it is described as “the granddaddy of long hikes”?

3. Why are the names an “invitation to amble”?

4. What persuasive technique can you see at the end of the second paragraph?

CONCLUSION

Can you spot the features of the travel type of writing ? 

Now check if they are the same as here :http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/standard/english/close_reading_texts/autobiographies_travel_writing/revision/3/