Podcast 137 - The Spaceman (part 1) (by M. A. Bilbrough)

A short story for students studying B1 level English

Story starts at 5:36

B1 short story - spaceship (part 1)

So today I'm going to tell you a story about space. The area above, around the Earth, planet Earth, where the stars and the planets are found. The story is called The Spaceman. I'm going to tell this story in two parts. Today, part one, and this is a B1-level recording with lots of useful B1 language in it. And I will start off with telling you a few words related, connected to the subject of space. Here we go...

Okay, so just a few words then before I start the story, which you can listen out for. For example, the word planet and the planets are those round bodies which go around the sun. In English, starting from the sun and moving outwards, they are called mercury and then Venus and then the planet Earth and then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune - now that's eight. When I was a boy, there was another planet, Pluto, the furthest planet away from the sun. But now they say it's not a planet, and so we say there are eight planets in our solar system, where the planets are that go around the sun.

A spaceship is a vehicle, like a plane, an aeroplane, which flies through space. And in space, of course, we have those little points of light called stars, bright stars. Now in this spaceship, we have a windscreen which is really the front window like you get in a car or a bus. That front window that you look out of if you are the driver or the pilot of a spaceship - that is called the windscreen.

And on this spaceship, well there's the computer of course and on the computer you can download programmes. So to download is to get a file or a programme from somewhere else down to your computer - that is to download. And by the way, the opposite is to upload, if you send something from your computer to a platform, which isn't on your computer.

Talking about computers, you will have a screen which is the little window that you look through to see your information. And that information on the screen is called a display. And often we need a password to access different programmes or platforms on the Internet.

And in the story we have the word social networks, which are companies such as Facebook and Instagram, for example, where we can interact, we can exchange information with friends, family and other people.

And in this spaceship, you have to plan a route and you need to know which direction you're going in - which way you're going: that way, this way, this direction, that direction.

And the last word is fuel. Fuel is what is used to make a spaceship or any vehicle go along. It could be petrol it could be diesel, electricity, nuclear power.

Okay, so that's enough of the vocabulary. I'm going to start the first part of the story then...

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Listen to Part 2 of The Spaceman...