Assignment C - Part 2.i
Authentic Text
✓ Check the Class Description and Notes on Part 2 on the assignment platform before you begin.
✓ The text should be 500 - 700 words long. (4-5 minutes for listening texts).
✓ In this document, provide a copy of the reading text or a transcript of the listening text you
have chosen.
✓ Ensure the text is referenced, and if you have selected a listening text or video, provide a link.
✓ If you choose a reading text, you can shorten and/or adapt it slightly.
✓ Please supply a copy of the original and your adapted version.
✓ If you have adapted the text, briefly explain the decisions you've made about changing the text
in section b) of the essay.
✓ Highlight 12 vocabulary items (words or phrases) which would be useful to pre-teach.
Shortened Text
Why global warming threatens east African coffee
Jeremiah letting learned about coffee from his father. As a child in the late 1980s, he worked on his
family’s one-acre (0.4 hectare) coffee farm in the hills of Nandi county, western Kenya. The cycle ran
like clockwork: cultivate, plant, ripen, harvest and sell. “Every year was the same,” he says. “It was
timely.”
No longer. As the chairman of a co-operative, he now represents 303 smallholder coffee farmers who
are suffering from droughts, unpredictable rains and rising temperatures that bring pests and disease.
Warming weather in east Africa, the birthplace of coffee, is already beginning to harm one of the
region’s most important export crops, which is worth some $2bn a year (see chart). Overheating
coffee shrubs also foreshadow the harm that may befall other vital crops such as tea, Kenya’s biggest
export. And if coffee becomes more expensive or less tasty, it is not just farmers who will suffer, but
the big chunk of humanity who together glug down some 3bn cups of the stuff a day, at a cost of
about $200bn a year.
Some of the world’s best Coffea arabica is grown on the fertile slopes of Mount Kenya. This variety
of the plant, which originated in the highlands of Ethiopia and Sudan, produces beans that are tastier
(and more valuable) than those from its poor cousin, Coffea canephora (known as robusta), which
often ends up in instant coffee granules. Arabica is also more finicky.
Global warming may shrink the total area that is most suited to growing arabica beans by about half
by 2050, according to a recent peer-reviewed paper. Rising temperatures may make some new places
suitable for cultivating coffee, because they will raise the maximum altitude at which the crop can be
grown, but such spots are relatively small and generally given over to other crops already. Overall
“trends are mainly negative,” says Roman Grüter, one of the authors of the paper.
© 2020 The TEFL Academy. All rights reserved. 1
, Arabica plants, which account for roughly 60% of worldwide coffee production and more than 98%
of Kenya’s, thrive at altitudes of 1,000-2,000 metres in equatorial regions and at temperatures between
18°C and 21°C. Over the past 60 years average temperatures in some of Kenya’s coffee regions have
already risen by 1.1°C, reaching daytime highs of 25°C, says Patricia Nying’uro, a climate scientist
at Kenya’s Meteorological Department.
Rosabella Langat, who owns a six-hectare estate with 15,000 coffee bushes in Nandi, woke one
morning last year to find that the entire harvest of her most sought-after variety had turned from ripe
red to deathly black from a fungus that festers in high humidity and warm temperatures. “It eats into
our profitability,” she says. “We don’t get money to put back into that crop.”
Although coffee is only Kenya’s fourth-largest export, it provides a lifeline in the countryside. The
industry directly or indirectly provides an income for about 6m people, according to data from the
Kenyan government. That is more than a tenth of the population of 54m. Smallholder farmers grow
65% of Kenya’s coffee on tiny plots averaging just 0.16 hectares.
(Word Count 508)
This is a shortened extract of an online article. I have not adapted the text, please see below for the
full article.
(Please see bibliography for source)
© 2020 The TEFL Academy. All rights reserved. 2
Authentic Text
✓ Check the Class Description and Notes on Part 2 on the assignment platform before you begin.
✓ The text should be 500 - 700 words long. (4-5 minutes for listening texts).
✓ In this document, provide a copy of the reading text or a transcript of the listening text you
have chosen.
✓ Ensure the text is referenced, and if you have selected a listening text or video, provide a link.
✓ If you choose a reading text, you can shorten and/or adapt it slightly.
✓ Please supply a copy of the original and your adapted version.
✓ If you have adapted the text, briefly explain the decisions you've made about changing the text
in section b) of the essay.
✓ Highlight 12 vocabulary items (words or phrases) which would be useful to pre-teach.
Shortened Text
Why global warming threatens east African coffee
Jeremiah letting learned about coffee from his father. As a child in the late 1980s, he worked on his
family’s one-acre (0.4 hectare) coffee farm in the hills of Nandi county, western Kenya. The cycle ran
like clockwork: cultivate, plant, ripen, harvest and sell. “Every year was the same,” he says. “It was
timely.”
No longer. As the chairman of a co-operative, he now represents 303 smallholder coffee farmers who
are suffering from droughts, unpredictable rains and rising temperatures that bring pests and disease.
Warming weather in east Africa, the birthplace of coffee, is already beginning to harm one of the
region’s most important export crops, which is worth some $2bn a year (see chart). Overheating
coffee shrubs also foreshadow the harm that may befall other vital crops such as tea, Kenya’s biggest
export. And if coffee becomes more expensive or less tasty, it is not just farmers who will suffer, but
the big chunk of humanity who together glug down some 3bn cups of the stuff a day, at a cost of
about $200bn a year.
Some of the world’s best Coffea arabica is grown on the fertile slopes of Mount Kenya. This variety
of the plant, which originated in the highlands of Ethiopia and Sudan, produces beans that are tastier
(and more valuable) than those from its poor cousin, Coffea canephora (known as robusta), which
often ends up in instant coffee granules. Arabica is also more finicky.
Global warming may shrink the total area that is most suited to growing arabica beans by about half
by 2050, according to a recent peer-reviewed paper. Rising temperatures may make some new places
suitable for cultivating coffee, because they will raise the maximum altitude at which the crop can be
grown, but such spots are relatively small and generally given over to other crops already. Overall
“trends are mainly negative,” says Roman Grüter, one of the authors of the paper.
© 2020 The TEFL Academy. All rights reserved. 1
, Arabica plants, which account for roughly 60% of worldwide coffee production and more than 98%
of Kenya’s, thrive at altitudes of 1,000-2,000 metres in equatorial regions and at temperatures between
18°C and 21°C. Over the past 60 years average temperatures in some of Kenya’s coffee regions have
already risen by 1.1°C, reaching daytime highs of 25°C, says Patricia Nying’uro, a climate scientist
at Kenya’s Meteorological Department.
Rosabella Langat, who owns a six-hectare estate with 15,000 coffee bushes in Nandi, woke one
morning last year to find that the entire harvest of her most sought-after variety had turned from ripe
red to deathly black from a fungus that festers in high humidity and warm temperatures. “It eats into
our profitability,” she says. “We don’t get money to put back into that crop.”
Although coffee is only Kenya’s fourth-largest export, it provides a lifeline in the countryside. The
industry directly or indirectly provides an income for about 6m people, according to data from the
Kenyan government. That is more than a tenth of the population of 54m. Smallholder farmers grow
65% of Kenya’s coffee on tiny plots averaging just 0.16 hectares.
(Word Count 508)
This is a shortened extract of an online article. I have not adapted the text, please see below for the
full article.
(Please see bibliography for source)
© 2020 The TEFL Academy. All rights reserved. 2
