02-04-2015 07:00

Earth Hour is a climate change awareness campaign. It began in Sydney in 2007 and it encourages people to turn off lights between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. on the last Saturday of March.

This year, around 7,000 cities took part in Earth Hour. The lights went out in parts of Japan, the Philippines and Hong Kong, where around 4,000 businesses, buildings and schools turned off their lights.

By taking part in last year’s event, Hong Kong’s energy consumption went down by 4%. Thanks to this, 153 tons of CO2 did not enter the atmosphere.

Difficult words: awareness (knowledge or understanding of something), encourage (to tell), consumption (the act of consuming something – using it).

You can read the original story and watch the video in the Level 3 section.