地道美语听力练习:Winter Weather(行走在冬季)

I grew up in Minnesota where the summers are hot and humid and winters are bitterly cold. Living in Los Angeles now, it's sometimes hard to describe to people how winter weather can be in chillier climates. In L.A. most of the year, the weather is sunny , clear, and warm. In one of my favorite movies, LA Story, the weathercaster pre-recorded his weather forecasts because the weather was the same everyday!

Well, that's an exaggeration, because even in L.A., it can sometimes be quite cool in the winter and some areas around the beaches can have dense fog and occasionally drizzling. But, that's nothing compared to Minnesota. In winter, they get snow flurries and blizzards, when as much as 3 feet of snow can fall. As I kid, I would build snowmen and make angels on the ground. That part was fun. But I also froze my buns off!

And, of course, one thing that Minnesota has a lot of in the wintertime is snow. Sometimes, we get so many inches of snow, we have to shovel and plow our way out of our houses. The worst is when there is freezing rain and sleet and the roads are slippery . Needless to say, there are a lot of fender benders on the road with this kind of weather. Luckily, Minnesota doesn't get any hurricanes that far north, but other parts of the country are hard hit by those every year.

Well, I have to say that it's nice not to have to scrape ice off my windshield in the mornings, but I do miss the white Christmases.

背景链接：地道美语听力播客English as a Second Language Podcast (ESLPod)，是一家位于美国加州洛杉矶的英语教育研究机构推出的英文听力会话，于2005年7月23日首播， 主播Dr. Jeff McQuillan为南加州大学的语言学博士， 现专注于外国语学生的英语学习研究。该播客在iTunes store播客的教育子分类中，与Grammar Girl Just Vocabulary常居前三甲.