180 UNIT 15
1
Look at the photos. What do you know about
Loch Ness and the Loch Ness Monster?
2
Read the article quickly and match the
pictures A–C to the paragraphs 1–3.
READING
3
Read the article again and answer the questions.
1
When do people think they see things on
the loch?
2
What does ‘loch’ mean?
3
How big is Loch Ness?
4
Which has more water: the lakes of Wales
and England or Loch Ness?
5
When did people first see a monster?
TALKING POINTS
Do you think there is a monster
living in Loch Ness?
If not,
why do so many people
think they see something?
B
Loch is the Scottish Gaelic word for ‘lake’. Loch Ness is in
the north of Scotland not far from Inverness. The loch is
230 m deep – it’s the second deepest loch in Scotland –
36 km long and nearly 3 km wide. There’s
more water in
Loch Ness than all the water in all the lakes in England and
Wales. That’s a lot of water for something to hide in!
The weather around the loch changes quickly.
One minute it’s sunny, the next it’s cloudy, the next
there’s
a bit of rain, and then it’s sunny again. It can
be
a windy place, too. Clouds move quickly through
the sky and on sunny days
the clouds make shadows
on the water. It’s easy to think you see something in
the water. When it’s foggy,
the fog sits on the loch
and it’s possible to think you see things then too.
The story of the Loch Ness Monster, or ‘Nessie’,
started about 1,500 years ago.
Then people called it
a giant water animal. In the 1930s, a new road beside
the loch brought more
people to the area and more
people started to see more strange things. In fact,
over 1,000 people think they saw a strange animal in
the loch.
There are several photos of some of the strange
animals. Could any of them be Nessie?
