English Olympiad Tasks: 10 Form

English Olympiad Tasks: 10th form
For TEACHERS
10th FORM OLYMPIAD 2016
Round I ~ Listening Comprehension
Directions for Teachers: Read this story 1 time to the students then after 5 minutes read it
again.
Text: “The Birdmen” from A History of the US – An Age of Extremes by Joy Hakim
Suppose, tomorrow, you open your front door and there before you is a flying saucer. A
spaceman steps out and smiles.
The next day you go to school and tell your friends what you saw. Do you think they will
believe you?
Today, it is hard for us to understand what people thought when they first heard that men had
flown. Mostly, if they hadn't seen it themselves, they didn't believe it. Why, if people were
foolish enough to say men could fly, the next thing they might say was that someday men would
walk on the moon!
But on December 17, 1903, two men flew. They were brothers from Dayton, Ohio, and they
owned a bicycle shop. They had attended school, but neither had graduated from high school.
Their names were Wilbur and Orville Wright. It was not luck that made them the first people in
all of history to build and fly an airplane that lifted off the ground with its own power. It was
hard work and determination. Before they built the plane they studied all that was known about
flying. They thought, argued, and experimented. They built a wind tunnel and tested 200
differently shaped wings. Then they drew plans and built carefully.
On that windy December day, Orville won the toss of a coin. He got to fly first, lying flat on
his stomach on the wing of the kite-like biplane. Wilbur ran beside him; the plane lifted a few
feet above the sand and stayed in the air for 17 seconds. The brothers took turns and flew four
flights that day. The longest lasted 59 seconds. It was enough. They had flown. The men from
the lifeboat station had seen them and taken a picture.
The headlines in the morning newspaper in nearby Norfolk, Virginia – the Virginian Pilot –
told of the flight, although most of the details in the story were wrong. The brothers were upset
about the poor reporting, but it didn't much matter: no one paid attention, and other newspapers
didn't carry the story. No one understood that birds now had competition: people would soon be
flying.
Orville and Wilbur went home to Dayton and set to work. They knew they could fly, but they
also knew their plane needed improving. They flew around a big pasture in Ohio. Neighbours
saw them and talked about the flights. In 1904 a group of newspaper reporters came to see for
themselves.
Now, the Wright brothers were not daredevils. They were very methodical and precise. They
did everything as well as they could. They checked and tested and checked and tested again,
each time they flew. That made sense.
When the reporters arrived, the brothers were having mechanical problems with the plane.
The reporters stayed two days. The Wright brothers wouldn't fly on those days; the plane wasn't
ready. The reporters left. Some wrote that the Wright brothers were fakes.
One writer did stay and saw them fly. He was the editor of a special journal. A hive is a place
where bees are raised for their honey. Yes, you heard that right: the first long article about the
Wright brothers' flight was in a beekeepers' magazine!
In September of 1908, in Virginia, Orville showed Americans that people could fly. He lifted
his plane into the air and swung around an army field one and a half times before he landed. The
crowd of watchers rushed forward "screaming as loudly as they could, overwhelmed by the
miracle that had taken place before their eyes".
Try to imagine that scene in 1908. For thousands and thousands of years, men and women
looked at birds and dreamed that they too could lift themselves into the air. Some tried. Mythical
Icarus, back in ancient days, took birds' feathers and a frame and made something like a hang
English Olympiad Tasks: 10th form
glider. But when he soared into the air the sun melted the wax that held the feathers and Icarus
fell into the sea. Others, who we know were real, had built gliders, or hot-air balloons that
floated on the wind. What the Wrights did was different. They didn't depend on the wind. They
used their intelligence to build a machine that conquered the skies. They solved the problem of
flight. Now everyone believed it – people could fly!

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