Insight Intermediate Unit 2 Reading

The teenage explorerIn December 2011, when sixteen-year-old Amelia Hempleman-Adams arrived at Heathrow Airport in London, journalists from all the major newspapers were waiting for her. She had just spent the last seventeen nights in the Antarctic, enduring snowstorms and temperatures as low as −50°C, and she had become the youngest person in the world to ski to the South Pole.Amelia’s remarkable long-distance trek to the pole had been planned by her father, David, an experienced explorer who was famous in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s for his record-breaking expeditions. In his career, he had walked to the North Pole by himself, with no support from any other people, and he had climbed to the top of the highest mountain on every continent in the world. However, skiing across the Antarctic to the South Pole with his teenage daughter and a small team of other skiers was the most challenging journey of his life, mostly because, as a parent, he was very worried about Amelia.Amelia’s preparation for the expedition was very thorough. She spent a lot of time trekking across the English countryside to get fit, and she camped in a large supermarket freezer warehouse to get used to the low temperatures. She also asked for advice from her two older sisters, both of whom had already been to the North Pole with their dad. In fact, famously, her sister Alicia had flown to the North Pole at the age of eight to be with her father at the end of one of his expeditions. As a result, she was the youngest person ever to visit the most northerly place on Earth.During the expedition, Amelia carried two very special gifts in her bag. Before starting her adventure, she had met Alexandra Shackleton, the granddaughter of the polar explorer, Ernest Shackleton. Alexandra’s grandfather had tried and failed to lead a team of brave adventurers to the South Pole in 1909, and she gave Amelia two gifts to remind the young girl of the amazing history of polar exploration. The first was a coin which had belonged to Ernest Shackleton. The second was a photograph of the famous explorer. Like so many early polar explorers, Ernest Shackleton, who never reached the South Pole in his career, had lost his life in the Antarctic. He had a heart attack during a scientific expedition in the 1920s.When she returned from the expedition, Amelia said that she had enjoyed taking time out from school, and getting to know her father, but she had missed her friends and had found it difficult to deal with the freezing cold and the boring food. She also complained about her father’s snoring. It hadn’t been easy to sleep in a tent every night with her noisy dad.