Grade 7 English Comprehension & Language: Space

Netsport

Description

A short comprehension test about Outer Space.

Sujets

• Littérature Sud-Africaine
• Littérature sud-africaine
• Collège
• Secondary education in France
• collège
• Collège
• Collège
• Post-primaire

Informations

• Publié par: Netsport
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• Langue: English

Extrait

English Lang & Grammar

SectionA:

!1

Comprehension & Grammar Read the following article, then answer the questions which follow

Space Crusaders

Grade 7

If you’re waiting for little green or grey men to invade planet earth, you may have the wrong end of the stick. From one of the bigwigs at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC,Keith Bainlearns about humanity’s imminent conquest of space, and how technology is leading the way forward. 1 Jim Adams is one of those rare people who looks Making the leap from having astronauts aboard 5 forward to going to work each day. He’s not a rock the ISS for a few months at a time to full-blown star of a TV-talk-show host, but much of what he off-planet existence is at the heart of much of does has some kind of spin-off that fundamentally NASA’s current technology development. altersAlthough it’s been publicised as a one-way trip,the course of human history. Jim’s a technology expert, with a background in physics many of us would like to know what the and systems engineering. For almost forty years, consequences of a manned mission to Mars he’s worked for the same US government agency: might be, considering the farthest that we NASA. humans have ever travelled is to the moon. 2 “Am I a rocket scientist?” he asks rhetorically. “We know very little about the effects of being in 6 “Well, I’ve never designed a rocket, but I’ve space on humans,” says Jim. Most of the clues, helped others do that. I’m not an astrophysicist, though, are being collected from astronauts who though I’ve helped others build telescopes to spend time on the ISS. In March last year, understand the cosmos.” NASA wrapped up a study of the ISS’s first one- Like most of his colleagues, Jim considers what year residents, which should shed considerable he does to be one of the coolest jobs on the light on the short-term effects of being in space planet. “Because we make history every day.” forprolongedperiods. Of course, it’ll take some time before the long-term effects on those 3 If he is not a rocket scientist or an astronaut, astronauts can be measured. though, what precisely does Jim do? Over four What is known, though, is that being in space is 7 decades, he’s worked his way up from radiation quite harmful to humans. analyst to systems engineer to project manager. “Firstly,” says Jim, “microgravity in space 8 At one stage, he was deputy director of Planetary causes your body to release the calcium in your Science — “probably the best job I ever had” — bones. To prevent excessive calcium loss, and today he is the deputy chief technologist for astronauts must exercise two hours per day in the entire agency. That means he’s had his fingers order to be able to function when they return to in a lot of diverse projects, all of which, he says, Earth.” have contributed in some way to humanity’s While regular exercise helps todeterbone 9 presence in space. decay, what’s not so easily countered is space 4 “I’ve built communication satellites and science radiation. satellites,” he says. “I have sent satellites around “The Earth’s magnetic field provides a shielding 10 the moon and probes to Mercury, contributed to bubble against radiation. Without it, we’d be the design of the International Space Station (ISS) bombarded with all kinds of radiation that would in its early days, and worked on humanity’s basically cause our DNA to disintegrate.” understanding of climate change. Heck, I even “Currently,” says Jim, “travel time between Earth 11 helped design the toilet for the space shuttle!” and Mars is eight-and-a-half months. Any “Most of us who work here knows that it’s our passengers on such a trip would be spending destiny to move off this planet in a permanent sort an enormous amount of that time within deep of way,” says Jim. “Several years ago, I was space, with no protection against that radiation.” asked to look 50 years into the future and I said I What NASA is interested in though, is not in believe that we will have people who were sending people into the future or back to the conceived and born and raised off this planet. time of the dinosaurs, but the basic question of Right now, we have thistinyfoothold in space, whether or not we understand the mechanics of and that’s the ISS.” the universe as its been laid out in the physics of Newton and Einstein.

Article adapted from Khuluma, Kulula.com, April 2016