4. London Millennium Footbridge

Now, you will have a chance to see another report. What was tested this time was the London Millennium Footbridge built over the River Thames in London. You can see this bridge in the picture on p. 77 in your book. This pedestrian bridge was opened to the public in June 2000. When people first walked across it, something happened. Read the bullet points next to the picture to find out what it was. Then go to p. 117 in your book and scan the text in the bottom right-hand corner to find answers to the questions in this task as quickly as possible. In order to meet the time limit set on the task, you will have to ignore any irrelevant information occurring in the text.

After practising your rapid reading/scanning and finding out key facts about the bridge, look at the graph on p. 77 in the coursebook. It shows the results of one of the tests carried out on the bridge. Study the graph carefully and try to answer the related questions in this forum.

Now, in this task, you will have an opportunity to get more information on the test carried out on the bridge, not just the result. A student attended a lecture given by an engineer who carried out the test. In this task on the left, you can see this student´s notes from the lecture. On the right, you can see an official report on the test. Your task is to complete the report with the help of the notes. Notice that when taking notes during lectures, using abbreviations and symbols saves time and is usually helpful. Some abbreviations are universal and understood by most people, for example, e.g., i.e., approx., while some others are created individually by writing the first few letters and adding a full stop. Here, you can see a list of abbreviations and symbols used in the student´s notes:

millennium (= Mill.) bridge (= br.), lateral (= lat.), movement (= mov’t), pedestrians (= peds), minimum (= min.), number (= #), cameras (= cams), different (= diff.), about (= c.), from (= fr.), increase (= incr.), significant/insignificant (= signif./insignif.)*

 

If you have problems understanding the notes, you can also listen to Recording 27, which comes with your coursebook.

Now, maybe you wonder how civil engineers modified the bridge and made it ready for reopening in 2002. To discover this, read the text in Task 5 on p. 81 in the coursebook and complete this reading comprehension task and this follow-up task, which will give you an opportunity to revise both technical vocabulary and some grammar forms of verbs.

*From: Bingham, C., Wright, L. (2013). Technical English Level 4 Teacher´s Book. Pearson Longman, p. 101.