World News for Students of English

21-07-2014 15:00

A giant salamander slowly and casually walking down a footpath.

A student in Japan found the metre-long amphibious creature on his morning commute to school.

“I was just walking without really paying any attention to it but once I got close to it, it started to move. That’s when I realised it was this giant salamander and that’s how I discovered it.”

After finding the huge Japanese giant salamander and taking a quick video of it, Yu informed the police who watched on, as the creature made its own way back to the river by itself.

It wasn’t measured for length, so its exact dimensions remain a mystery. The Japanese salamander is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, as a near-threatened species.

They can grow up to 150 centimetres. Most found in the wild are between 60-70 centimetres, according to Japanese environment agency data. The video of the salamander that Yu uploaded to YouTube has already received over 1.8 million hits and a flurry of comments comparing it to everything from Godzilla to Pokemon.

Difficult words: casually (relaxed and not worried), amphibious (able to live on both land and water), creature (animal), commute (the everyday journey to work or school), huge (very big), dimension (measurements), flurry (lots of).

Source: www.itn.co.uk