Ingles

The real Baywatch
Baywatch was a successful television series during the 1990s.
It was so popular that it even appeared in the Guinness book of records as “the show with the largest TVaudience”, reaching over a billion viewers worldwide.
Baywatch described the adventures of a group of lifeguards in Los Angeles. It certainly made their jobs seem glamorous, but whatis the life of an LA lifeguard really like? In order to find out, we talked with 26-year-old Alexandra Gudmundsson, who lives in Hermosa Beach and works at Manhattan Beach. She is one ofup to 1,000 lifeguards employed by the Los Angeles county lifeguards service. Their job is to protect the millions of swimmers, surfers and sunbathers who visit LA beaches. They monitor 72miles of coastline in southern California and rescue about 10,000 people every year.
Alexandra abandoned her job as magazine journalist in order to become a lifeguard. We asked herwhether Baywatch accurately described the work of a lifeguard.
Alexandra said: “there are lot of differences between us and TV. Since I became a lifeguard we are trained. One of the big partof our training is we always watch the water; meaning that our faces are always turned towards the water. We have to see what´s going on at all times. We can´t ever turn our backs towardthe ocean and toward people who could potentially be in trouble. And I noticed in the show, obviously for dialogue and acting purposes, they were always facing each other. That´s onehuge difference . And obviously, you know, it´s Hollywood, so their lives were a little more exciting and glamorous than ours. Maybe we are not as glamorous, but we´re definitely very fastswimmers. This job takes a lot of intelligence and a lot of special skills that people don´t always realize. They don´t always realize how hard is to know what´s going on in the ocean”.