The stretching of line elements, surface elements and wave vectors by a random, isotropic, solenoidal velocity field in D dimensions is studied. The rates of growth of line elements and (D – 1)-dimensional surface elements are found to be equal if the statistics are invariant to velocity reversal. The analysis is applied to convection of a sparse distribution of sheets of passive scalar in a random straining field whose correlation scale is large compared with the sheet size. This is Batchelor's (1959) κ−1 spectral regime. Some exact analytical solutions are found when the velocity field varies rapidly in time. These include the dissipation spectrum and a joint probability distribution that describes the simultaneous effect of Stretching and molecular diffusivity κ on the amplitude profile of a sheet. The latter leads to probability distributions of the scalar field and its space derivatives. For a growing κ−1 range at zero κ, these derivatives have essentially lognormal statistics. In the steady-state κ−1 regime at κ > 0, intermittencies measured by moment ratios are much smaller than for lognormal statistics, and they increase less rapidly with the order of the derivative than in the κ = 0 case. The κ > 0 distributions have singularities a t zero amplitude, due to a background of highly diffused sheets. The results do not depend strongly on D. But as D → ∞, temporal fluctuations in the stretching rates become negligible and Batchelor's (1959) constant-strain dissipation spectrum is recovered.