Friday 31 October 2014

First woman swims across the Atlantic


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A 56-year-old has become the first woman to swim across the Atlantic Ocean. Jennifer Figge climbed out of the water in Trinidad on February the 5th to write her name in the record books. She left the Cape Verde Islands near Africa’s west coast on January the 12th. Her original plan was to swim in a straight line to the Bahamas. However, bad weather forced her to change direction and she had to swim an extra 1,600 kilometres to Trinidad. She spent almost a month in the water, swimming for up to eight hours at a time. Her day started at 7.00am with a huge breakfast to keep her energy levels high. She burnt up to 8,000 calories a day during her epic adventure. Her team threw her energy drinks as she swam to keep her going.
Figge first decided to swim the Atlantic when she was a teenager. She was on a stormy flight to the USA and decided if the plane crashed, she could swim back to shore. She got inspiration from French swimmer Benoite Lecomte, who became the first man to achieve the feat a decade ago. She trained for her trans-Atlantic marathon in an outdoor swimming pool surrounded by snow. Figge said she was never afraid during her swim, even though she used a shark cage. She said she never saw any sharks, but did see lots of whales, dolphins and turtles. She thought a lot about her family and her pet dog while in the water and told the Associated Press news agency: "My dog doesn't know where I am. It's time for me to get back home to Hank."
SYNONYM MATCH: Match the following synonyms from the article:
1. woman a. drove
2 left b. influence
3. forced c. informed
4. huge d. female
5. epic e. rough
6. stormy f. enormous
7. inspiration g. frightened
8. trained h. departed
9. afraid i. heroic
10. told j. practiced


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