AMAZING WOMEN

AMAZING WOMEN

Read the following pieces of news about amazing women and Match each piece of news with the heading which best summarizes it. The first one is an example (0). There are TWO headings that you DO NOT NEED to use.  You will get 1 point per correct answer. Notice that the words or expressions in bold* will appear in a glossary at the end of the text.

AMAZING WOMEN

[0] Best speller in the country.
Last Thursday night, 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde won the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee*. Her winning word – only one of the many difficult words she had to spell – was “murraya”, a kind of tree. Amazingly, Zaila only started taking part in spelling bees two years ago.
Zaila’s win makes her the first Black American to win the bee. She says, “I’m hoping that in a few years, I’ll see a whole lot more African American females, and males too, doing well in the Scripps Spelling Bee.”
[1]
Another kind of musical record was set this weekend when Taylor Swift’s song “All Too Well” hit #1 on the charts. Ms. Swift has had many number one songs, but this one was a little unusual, since it’s over 10 minutes long.
Before this, the longest song to make #1 was “American Pie” by the songwriter Don Maclean. American Pie was eight minutes and 42 seconds long.
[2]
Vanderbilt University senior Sarah Fuller has made history again, this time by becoming the first female to score in a Power 5 college football game. “Power 5” stands for the five strongest and best college football conferences.
Fuller is normally a soccer goalkeeper. In November, Fuller and her team won the Southeastern Conference women’s soccer championships.
[3]
Zara Rutherford is flying around the world by herself in a small plane. When she finishes her trip, which will take over two months, she’ll become the youngest woman to fly all the way around the globe by herself. She’s just 19 years old.
Ms. Rutherford, who’s British-Belgian, began her trip in Belgium on August 18. She plans to fly across five continents, through 52 countries before returning to Belgium in November.
[4]
Last Saturday morning, Jasmine Harrison became the youngest woman to row alone across an ocean. It took the 21-year-old swimming teacher just over 70 days to row across the Atlantic Ocean.
Ms. Harrison, who’s from North Yorkshire, England, didn’t have loads of experience in rowing long distances. She’d only got the idea three years earlier when she happened to be in Antigua and saw the end of the 2017 Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge.

[5]
In February, Maya Gabeira of Brazil set a new surfing record for women when she tackled a 73.5-foot (22.4-meter) wave off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal.
But Gabeira’s wave, and that of Justine Dupont, who came in second, had to be measured specially before the World Surf League would say publicly that she had also beaten the male winner, Kai Lenny.
It turned out that both women beat Lenny’s 70-foot (21.3-meter) wave. And Gabeira’s wave was the biggest wave anyone – male or female – has surfed so far in 2020.
[6]
Wednesday was a historic day in Sweden, as 54-year-old Magdalena Andersson was named prime minister. Ms. Andersson became the leader of Sweden’s Social Democrats party earlier this month. But Ms. Andersson’s term in office came to a quick end. Political differences in a deeply divided Parliament broke up the coalition that Ms. Andersson had put together.
Adapted from: NFK Editors GLOSSARY:
* Spelling Bee: A spelling competition won by the person or team spelling the greatest number of words correctly.

Enable JavaScript

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 4.0