Life in a cold climate – Key and notes
1 Cold causes blood vessels …….. close to the skin surface to contract, reducing blood flow to the extremities and trapping heat in the body’s essential core.
2 Cold makes nerve cells, …….. which transmit information from the brain to the rest of the body, slow down, making it harder for someone to perform simple manual tasks such as tying a shoelace.
3 Low temperatures also impair pain receptors, ……making people less able to notice and react to injuries.
4 ……………. Goose pimples occur when tiny muscles connected to the hairs on the skin tense up, trapping an insulating … layer of air beneath them.
5 In extreme cold the body ………. tries to generate its own heat by making muscles contract and expand rapidly – shivering.
6 This can ………… raise body heat production fivefold.
Key and Notes
close – note the different pronunciation of ‘close’ as an adjective or adverb – the ‘s’ sound – from how ‘close’ is pronounced as a verb, where it has a ‘z’ sound
contract – is a verb – note how the stress is on the second syllable when ‘contract’ is used as a verb. The noun contract has its stress on the first syllable.
You probably guessed how to spell ‘the extremities‘, meaning ‘the hands and feet’.
Did you remember the apostrophe in ‘body’s’, meaning ‘of the body’? You could also have written ‘the bodies’ essential core’ but this is not correct when talking about a generality, as we use the singular. eg The heart is an important organ.
transmit – did you just write one ‘t‘? Verbs of more than one syllable ending in a single consonant double the consonant when the stress is on the final syllable – eg begin / beginning. You may have seen transmit with two ts – eg transmitting / transmitted. Verbs such as ‘permit‘ or ‘occur‘ behave the same way because the stress is on the second syllable.
slow down – did you notice the ‘down’ was stressed more than the ‘slow’?
tying – the verb is to tie. This verb behaves like the ‘y’ verbs ‘cry‘ ‘try‘ or ‘defy‘ – it inflects to ‘ties / tries / cries / studies; tied / tried / cried / studied; but tying / trying / crying / studying.
Notice the structures:
The music makes me relax (verb).
The music makes me sad (adjective) .
The noisy music makes it hard to understand what is happening.
The noisy music makes it hard for me (for us / for them etc) to understand what is happening.
impair – verb – to weaken or damage
pain receptors – specialist medical terms
muscles – did you remember the ‘c‘ in the spelling?
goose pimples – when you are cold or frightened the hairs on your skin go erect, making your skin ‘pimply’ because you have ‘goose pimples‘ or ‘gooseflesh‘. Something frightening may give you goose pimples.
Hair is an uncountable noun, used in the singular – eg she has long hair. He’s had his hair cut. The film made my hair stand on end. It can have an ‘s’ on the very limited occasions when you need to single hair out to describe something unusual – here the individual hairs are acting untypically.
The phrase ‘to split hairs‘ means to make excessively trivial (unnecessary) distinctions.
raise – a transitive verb. The intransitive of this is ‘rise‘.
The suffix -fold can be added to cardinal numbers to create an adjective or adverb & indicating an amount multiplied by – eg twofold, fivefold, sixteenfold