Reading. Home sweet home (Int)

Home sweet home

The small town of Coober Pedy, in South Australia, is a difficult place to live. It was founded over a hundred years ¹_____ when large amounts of the valuable mineral opal were discovered in the region. Miners headed to the town from ²_____ over the country to seek their fortune, but what they hadn’t realised was howhot the desert climate was there. Temperatures in Coober Pedy are often as high as 40 degrees, and the ³_____ of plants and trees means there is little shade to be had. Being miners, however, the town’s early inhabitants found a solution to the problem of living in such a hot, dry place. They dug out deep caves in the rock and built their homes underground. They even built subterranean churches and shops. Today, their descendants still live in the town, and ⁴_____ 80% of them have an underground house. When it’s a boiling hot 45 degrees on the surface, down beneath the earth the town’s inhabitants live in the comfort of a mild 20 degrees or so, the cool rock providing a form of natural air conditioning.

The inhabitants of Coober Pedy built their homes underground because of the climate, but increasingly, urban planners are beginning to look at the possibility of following their example for ⁵_____ different reasons. Two thirds of the world’s population are expected to live in cities by 2050, and this means that the demand for more places to live and work can ⁶_____ increase. As it becomes more and more difficult to build upwards or outwards, architects are looking to find living space beneath the ground. This is especially true in mega-cities such as Singapore, a city state which is extremely short of land to build on. Urban planners there have recently come up with a plan to build a huge science centre below ground. In Mexico City, meanwhile, planners are faced with the problem that many people wish to live in the centre where it is almost impossible to build because there are so many historical buildings that need protecting. Their solution is to build beneath the historical centre. One plan hopes to build a huge inverted pyramid with a glass roof beneath the level of the city’s famous main square. It would house 5,000 people right in the heart of the city. In the future, it seems, living life underground, ⁷_____ they do in Coober Pedy, will not be all that strange.