Text 6 — The following text is for questions 29 to 31.
A Trip to Snow Mountains
When my family was living in Sydney, we used to go to a place called Snow Mountains because Sydney never has snow in winter. Well, the weather can get very, very cold, and the temperature could go as minus 5 degrees Celcius, but it never snows. That was the reason why we liked going to Snow Mountains.
Our first trip to Snow Mountains was very exciting. We went with a group of foreign students from different parts of the world. We went by bus to Canberra and then we went up to the mountain. And believe me, you need to be an expert driver because the road was rough and wet. We had to go very slowly and cautiously.
Luckily, our driver was a real professional. He did a great job taking us to the mountains, but I saw many good cars sliding off the roads. The police were made busy by those accidents, but the police seemed to have anticipated the situations. They had all kinds of equipment to help the poor cars.
When we reached the resort area, a nice warm meal was waiting in a nice and warm dining room. It was a relief. Then we had to hire the "Snow-Mountain gear" like caps, scarves, thick jackets, and snow boots. We simply had to do that or we would have been freezing to death. I felt really big and fat in that outfit and I had to learn how to walk in snow.
The most exciting part was the toboggan ride. Toboggan is basically a fiberglass board designed to slide down the snowy slopes. So I climbed up the hill and then I sat down on the toboggan. I held on to ropes used to steer and slid down the hill. It turned out that my steering ropes weren't tied on correctly, so I could not control my toboggan properly. I slid down really fast without being able to control where I was going. So I ended up plugging into a freezing cold creek!