Read the passage below and summarize it using one sentence. Type your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish this task.
Your response will be judge on the quality of your writing and on how well your response presents the key points in the passage.
In 1815, on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, a handsome and long quiescent mountain named Tambora exploded spectacularly, killing a hundred thousand people with its blast and associated tsunamis. No-one living now has ever seen such fury. Tambora was far bigger than anything any living human has experienced. It was the biggest volcanic explosion in ten thousand years—150 times the size of Mount St. Helens, equivalent to sixty thousand Hiroshima-sized atom bombs. News didn’t travel terribly fast in those days. In London, The Times ran a small story—actually a letter from a merchant—seven months after the event. But by this time Tambora’s effects were already being felt. Two hundred and forty cubic kilometres of smoky ash, dust and grit had diffused through the atmosphere, obscuring the Sun’s rays and causing the Earth to cool. Sunsets were unusually but blearily colourful, an effect memorably captured by the artist J.M.W. Turner, who could not have been happier, but mostly the world existed under an oppressive, dusky pall. It was this deathly dimness that inspired Byron to write the lines quoted above. Spring never came and summer never warmed: 1816 became known as the year without summer. Crops everywhere failed to grow. In Ireland a famine and associated typhoid epidemic killed sixty-five thousand people. In New England, the year became popularly known as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death. Morning frosts continued until June and almost no planted seed would grow. Short of fodder, livestock died or had to be prematurely slaughtered. In every way it was a dreadful year—almost certainly the worst for farmers in modern times. Yet globally the temperature fell by less than 1 degree Celsius. The Earth’s natural thermostat, as scientists would learn, is an exceedingly delicate instrument.
