Climate change and what we can do
An informative article about climate change impacts and individual actions.
An intermediate-level session of about 3 minutes. A 110-word passage, scored word by word.
The objective on this passage asks for conviction, which is a sound rather than a mood: more weight on the words carrying the argument, and a short silence before the phrase you want remembered. Readings usually fail in the opposite direction, delivering every sentence at one pitch and one volume, so a sentence about consequences lands exactly like a sentence of background. The vocabulary sits at intermediate level but the sentences are informative ones, and informative sentences tend to stack a cause and its effect into a single stretch of speech. Decide before you record which half of each sentence is the point. That decision is audible on playback, and it is most of what separates a flat reading from a convincing one.
Angles worth taking
- Choose one word per sentence to carry the stress before you record; a sentence with even weight throughout has no argument in it.
- Where the passage turns from the problem to what can be done, mark the turn with a pause rather than with more volume.
- If a figure or a measurement appears, separate it slightly from the words around it — numbers spoken at sentence pace vanish.
- Keep the conviction in the breath, not the throat: steady airflow and clear endings read as serious, pushed volume reads as strain.
- Give the lines about individual action a shade more time, because that is the part of the passage a listener has to hold on to.
How the passage opens
Climate change is the defining crisis of our generation. Global temperatures have risen by approximately one point one degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, and the effects are already visible: more frequent and intense heatwaves, rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, and…
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Passage length
110 words
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How a read-aloud session works
Pick a passage
Passages are graded from short and simple to long and dense. The length and the level are on every card.
Read it aloud
The text stays on screen while you record. Read at a normal pace — rushing to finish is itself one of the things being measured.
See it marked up
Every word comes back scored: accurate, unclear, or missed. The problem sounds are highlighted where they occurred.
Re-record the hard line
Go back to the sentence that scored worst and read it again. That single loop is where most of the improvement happens.
What you're scored on
A read-aloud report has four numbers, and knowing which one is low tells you what to practise — they are not interchangeable.
Read with clarity and conviction on an important topic.
Accuracy
How close each word was to the expected pronunciation, scored per word rather than averaged into one verdict.
Fluency
Pace and pausing. Pausing at commas reads as fluent; pausing mid-phrase to decode the next word does not.
Completeness
The words that never arrived — skipped articles, dropped past-tense endings, swallowed plurals.
Prosody
Stress and intonation: whether the sentence lands with emphasis in the right place, or flat from end to end.
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