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Legenda do vídeo, Restauraçãobingo online betmotionNotre-Dame: teto terá 'florestabingo online betmotioncarvalho'

The story…

The restoration of Notre Dame

reconstruction

Need-to-know language…

dismantling – separating into pieces

mangled – badly damaged

rafters – wooden beams which support the roof

sprouted – grown

contemporary – modern

Answer this…

How many oak trees have been pre-selected for the reconstruction of Notre Dame?

Watch the video online: https://bbc.in/3uoXzdM

Transcript

Beneath its protective cranes, Notre Dame still embodies the horror and heroism that unfolded here two years ago. Since then, workers have been clearing the debris, securing the structure and dismantling the scaffolding that melted in the fire. Forty thousand tubes of it, fused into strange new sculptures. Each mangled piece cut away, one-by-one.

Now for the first time, thoughts are turning to the reconstruction.

A thousand trees have been pre-selected to rebuild the roof, nicknamed ‘the forest’ for its sheer number of rafters. Some of them more than twenty metres tall to span the vast spaces inside the cathedral.

Lucy Williamson, BBC Paris correspondent

This is one of the thousand oak trees that have been specially selected for Notre Dame. Smaller tree trunks will be used to rebuild the medieval rafters. Big ones like this will go to reconstruct the spire.

Each tree is tagged, measured and assigned a place in the reconstruction. This one - its trunk almost a metre across - would have sprouted soon after the French Revolution.

Renaud Trangosi, Forest ranger for the National Forests Office

This is the historic oak of our forests. We're proud to see the work we do is meaningful. The forest is eternal but that's not the case for the trees and if they have a second life in the new Notre Dame forest at the top of the cathedral, so much the better.

A second life too for these statues of the apostles, taken from the cathedral's spire for routine restoration, days before it collapsed in flames. Their survival, says the workshop's director, helped persuade officials to opt for an identical reconstruction, over a new contemporary design.

Richard Boyer, Head of Socra-Ateliersbingo online betmotionFrance

We took the statues down on the 11th of April 2019. They arrived here the next day, a Friday. The following Monday, the fire broke out, and we immediately understood that what we had in our workshop was some kind of relics. Looking back, it's clear we saved them because they would have been smashed to pieces when the spire fell.

There was a time that night when fire crews thought Notre Dame was lost, its survival measured in minutes. Today, it’s measured in tree trunks, manpower, scaffolding. The vast reconstruction of a symbol - whose scale, isn't fully grasped through numbers - any more than through words.

Did you get it?

How many oak trees have been pre-selected for the reconstruction?

One thousand oak trees have been selected.