Exam Excellence, Oxford / CD / Текст / Oxford_Exam_Excellence_Recording_10

Unit 4. Home. Recording 10.

Reporter

Welcome to ‘Our Neighbourhood’, the programme that looks at the different places and conditions that people live in. Today we’re visiting the Outback, a distant part of Australia far from the main population centres. Imagine you’re living on a farm and your nearest neighbours are over 100 kilometres away. It certainly is very lonely and isolated. And this is how it feels for many people living on farms in the Outback of Australia, far away from the cities and towns. Some people are lucky enough to have email and the Internet but many do not even have a telephone line. Everyone has a two-way radio. You can listen as well as talk into it, and it is the most important means of contact with other people. When someone needs a doctor urgently, they use their two-way radio to contact The Flying Doctors. That’s a special medical service that covers six million square kilometres of Australia. The doctors fly to an emergency in a small aeroplane or helicopter, and they say they can arrive at any place within ninety minutes. There are thirteen flying doctor bases in Australia with thirty-eight aeroplanes and helicopters. They visit 150,000 people every year. Another problem to solve is education. How do you go to school when you’re living five hundred kilometres from the nearest one? Some kids go to boarding schools, others have their lessons sent by post. But most outback children use their two-way radios twice a day to listen to their teachers and to communicate with them and with other Outback students.