BR 2-25: California

Oxford Bookworms Factfiles is a sub-series in the Oxford Bookworms series. It is devoted to nonfiction, and most of the books are about countries or famous cities or environmental problems.


The book I read today is California. Generally, the book is quite easy to read. There are few embedded clauses, and sentences are simple in structure length as about 10 words. There are some much longer sentences, but most of those are lists or have easy-to-understand clauses such as "because" clauses. The vocabulary is quite simple, with few unknown words that learners will need to look up in the dictionary. But the books do have quite a lot of information and the number of words is fairly large. Thus, these books are recommended for learners who are aiming to progress beyond very short and simple books such Usborne First Reading or Oxford Reading Tree.

The book consists of nine chapters: The golden state, The gold rush, San francisco, Parks, Highway 1, Los angeles, The desert, San diego, and California.
Chapter 6, Los Angeles, describes the city of California. Los Angeles in one of the world's largest cities. There are nearly nine million people living in the city, and it is more than 10.000 square kilomertes in size. The only way to move around easily is by car. You can stay a month and still not have time to see and do everything. (p.1)
Overall, the book was very interesting and useful for me. My knowledge of Ireland was very limited, and the book gave me of useful information and made me want to visit California myself. As mentioned above, this book and other books in the Factfiles sub-series may be a useful next step for learners who have read mainly very simple books. (291 / 7,220 words)