Academic English

Listen to the recording and read along with the conversation. Review the key vocabulary and the sample sentences.

This is SkyCam from Channel 11 News, reporting to you live over the valley. For those of you heading south on I-15 on your commute home from work, expect some delays around the 215 Interchange. Road crews are making repairs on the left lane, so commuters should be prepared to shift over to the right around 7200 South. This bottleneck appears to clear up at around 9600 south. You should expect such delays at least until the end of the week.

Northbound I-15 looks good until you reach around 3300 south. A minor fender-bender, perhaps resulting from the poor visibility out there, has traffic backed up a mile or so. Also, some reports have come in on patches of black ice on roads in that area. Forecasters predict sporadic freezing rain later into the night and early morning hours. And one more note, the frigid temperatures and heavy snow in the mountains have forced a herd of elk down into Riverside Park, so extreme caution should be taken if you are travelling around that area.

And that’s all from SkyCam 11, providing you with traffic updates on the hour.

• heading (verb): going or traveling toward 
  – Let’s head east to avoid the traffic.
• commute (noun): the trip back and forth between work and home 
  – The commute to work this morning was really slow due to bad weather.
• interchange (noun): a crossing of highways allowing traffic to move from one to another 
  – The downtown interchange is closed due to construction.
• shift (verb): to move in another direction 
  – We ought to shift to the center lane to pass these slow-moving cars.
• bottleneck (noun): a slowdown in traffic caused by some form of obstruction like an accident 
  – There is a huge bottleneck in traffic at the intersection of Center and State Street.
• fender-bender (noun): a small accident causing little damage 
  – I got in a small fender-bender with a truck on my way home from work.
• black ice (noun): thin transparent ice often found on streets 
  – I hit a patch of black ice and slid off the road into a ditch.
• sporadic (adjective): occurring periodically with no regular, predictable pattern
  – Buses usually are on time, but they are quite sporadic today because of the bad weather.
• frigid (adjective): extremely cold 
  – Waiting for the bus in the frigid weather is very unpleasant.
• herd (noun): a group of animals 
  – A herd of cattle crossed in front of my car.