Comprehension - Weird towns around the world - PowerPoint & Worksheet

This lesson is a fun look at four very interesting places people have made their home around the world.

-Centralia, Pennsylvania
Once a bustling little mining town, it is now home to only four people.
An oversight during the burning of a landfill in the 1960s started a fire under the town that will burn for hundreds of years.

-Coober Pedy, Australia
The discovery of Opal brought people to settle in a place so inhospitable the heat can down birds mid flight. The way they combat this? Living underground, where extending your home could land you an accidental fortune.

-Whittier, Alaska
A vast bomb-proof high rise constructed during the Cold War is now home to 250 people who spend most of the winter months inside their “city under one roof”

-Naypyidaw, Myanmar
While capital cities have been built from scratch successfully in places like Brazil, they are usually not done in secret. Learn how the paranoid dictatorship spent billions building a city six times the size of New York where hardly anyone actually lives.

The text is graded for A2/B1 CEFR level students, but with careful guidance should be suitable for those of a lower level. The printed text is presented on screen in short, manageable sections and accompanied by photos.

New vocabulary words are highlighted and accompanied by pop-up definitions throughout the presentation.

At the end there are multiple choice and retrieval comprehension questions about the topic.