Open Cloze Week 5

A biography of Kilian Jornet
When you picture mountain climbers scaling Mount Everest, what probably comes to mind are
teams of climbers with Sherpa guides leading them to the summit, equipped with oxygen
masks, supplies and tents. And in most cases you'd be right, as 97 per cent of climbers use
oxygen to 1____________Everest's summit at 8,850 metres above sea level. The thin air at high
altitudes makes most people 2 ___________at 3,500 metres, and the vast majority of climbers
use oxygen past 7,000 metres. A typical climbing group will have 8–15 people in it, with an
almost equal number of guides, and they'll spend weeks to get to the top after reaching Base
Camp.
But 3 ___________and mountain runner Kilian Jornet Burgada ascended the mountain in May
2017 alone, without an oxygen mask or fixed ropes for climbing.
Born in 1987, Kilian has been training for Everest his whole life. And that really does mean his
whole life, as he grew up 2,000 metres above sea level in the Pyrenees in the 4 ______resort of
Lles de Cerdanya in Catalonia, north-eastern Spain. While other children his age were learning
to walk, Kilian was on skis. At one and a half years old he did a five-hour hike with his mother,
entirely under his own 5______. He left his peers even further behind when he climbed his first
mountain and competed in his first 6 __________ski race at age three. By age seven, he had
scaled a 4,000er and, at ten, he did a 42-day crossing of the Pyrenees.
He was 13 when he says he started to take it 'seriously' and trained with the Ski
Mountaineering Technical Centre (CTEMC) in Catalonia, entering competitions and working
with a coach. At 18, he took 7 ______his own ski-mountaineering and trail-running training,
with a schedule that only allows a couple of weeks of rest a year. He does as many as 1,140
hours of endurance training a year, plus strength training and technical workouts as well as
specific training in the week before a 8____. For his 9___________ascent and
10___________of the Matterhorn, he prepared by climbing the mountain ten times until he
knew every detail of it, even including where the sun would be______at every part of the day.
Key:
1 ascend to
2 breathless
3 ultra-distance
4 ski
5 steam
6 cross-country
7 over
8 race
9 record-breaking
10 decent
A threat to bananas
In the 1950s, Central American commercial banana growers were facing the death of their most
1___________product, the Gros Michel banana, known as Big Mike. And now it’s happening
again to Big Mike’s successor – the Cavendish.
With its easily transported, thick-skinned and sweet-tasting fruit, the Gros Michel banana plant
dominated the plantations of Central America. United Fruit, the main grower and exporter in
South America at the time,2_________its bananas in the most efficient way possible: it cloned
shoots from the 3_______of plants instead of growing plants from seeds, and cultivated them
in densely packed 4________.
Unfortunately, these conditions are also perfect for the spread of the fungus Fusarium
oxysporum f. sp. cubense, which attacks the plant’s roots and prevents it from transporting
water to the stem and leaves. The TR-1 strain of the fungus was 5__________to crop sprays
and travelled around on boots or the 6_________of trucks, slowly infecting plantations across
the region. In an attempt to escape the fungus, farmers abandoned infected fields, flooded
them and then _________crops somewhere else, often cutting down rainforest to do so.
Their efforts failed. So, instead, they searched for a variety of banana that the fungus didn’t
affect. They found the Cavendish, as it was called, in the greenhouse of a British duke. It wasn’t
as well suited to shipping as the Gros Michel, but its bananas tasted good enough to keep
consumers happy. Most importantly, TR-1 didn’t seem to 8 ___________it. In a few years,
United Fruit had saved itself from bankruptcy by filling its 9______________with thousands of
the new plants, copying the same 10______________growing conditions Gros Michel had
thrived in.
Key:
1 lucrative
2 mass-produced
3 stems
4 fields
5 resistant
6 tyres
7 replanted
8 affect
9 plantations
10 monoculture

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A biography of Kilian Jornet

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