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CLIL360 2014 All rights reserved. May be photocopied for use in the classroom.

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unless stated.
Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. Its
summit is 8,848 metres above sea level. Mount Everest is
in the Himalayas, on the border between China and
Nepal.
How did Mount Everest get its
name?
The mountain had many local names. For example, the
Nepalese people called it Sagarmatha and the Tibetans
called it Chomolangma. But in 1865 the British decided
to call it Mount Everest after Sir George Everest.
Between 1823 and 1843, Sir George Everest had made
maps of India.
How was Mount Everest formed?
About 55 million years ago, the Indian and Asian plates
started to collide. This collision pushed up the land,
forming the Himalayas. The Indian Plate is still moving
north so the Himalayas are getting higher. Mount
Everest gets one metre higher every 250 years.
Mountaineering
Mount Everest has two climbing routes, the southeast
route from Nepal and the northeast route from Tibet.
The southeast route is easier and it was used by
Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay in 1953. It can take 2 months to climb the mountain because
mountaineers must spend a long time at the bottom of the mountain to get used to the high altitude. May is
the best time of the year to climb the mountain because the winds are not very strong.

Mountaineers first tried to climb Mount Everest in the 1920s. In 1924, the British mountaineers, George
Mallory and Andrew Irvine, died near the summit of Mount Everest. Mallorys body was found in 1999.
Before 1950, most mountaineers tried to reach the summit from Tibet, but in 1950 the Chinese closed the
border. So mountaineers started to use the southeast route. The first mountaineers to reach the summit
were Edmund Hillary and Tensing Torgay on 29th May 1953. Since then, thousands of mountaineers have
tried to climb to the top.

By June 2011, 5652 people had reached the summit of Mount Everest, most of them since 2000. The
youngest person to reach the summit was Jordan Romero, a 13 year old American, in 2010. The oldest
person was Min Bahadur Sherchan, a 76 year old from Nepal, in 2008. However, over 200 people have
died trying to climb Mount Everest: eight people died during a storm on the mountain on 11th May 1996 and
on 18th May 2014, sixteen Nepalese sherpas died in an avalanche. Most of these bodies have been left on
the mountain because it is too difficult to bring them down. Most of the deaths happen because of the
weather, the wind and the high altitude. The altitude above 8000 metres is called the Death Zone, because
of the lack of oxygen, strong winds, low temperatures and ice.
Plants and Animals
The high altitude and lack of oxygen cannot support plants or animals. No plants live above 5750 metres.
However, a tiny spider has been found at an altitude of 6,700 metres, making it perhaps the highest living
animal in the world. People think it eats insects blown up the mountain by the wind.

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