World News for Students of English

18-03-2015 07:00 

Two pilots hoping to make history have embarked on the first-ever solar-powered round-the-world flight. Shortly after dawn this morning, Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, who are cofounders of the company Solar Impulse, set off from an airport in Abu Dhabi.

The pair’s mission is to fly 35,000 kilometres around the world without using any fuel. They will have stopovers in India, Myanmar and China before crossing the Pacific Ocean and flying across the United States and southern Europe, to arrive back in Abu Dhabi.

The plane, which has the weight of a family car and a wingspan equal to that of the largest passenger airliners, is expected to return by late July. Its journey will span approximately 25 flight days with speeds between 30 and 60 miles per hour.

Difficult words: embark (to start on a trip), cofounder (a person who helped start something with another person), fuel (gasoline that runs a vehicle like a car or a plane), stopover (when a plane lands somewhere for a short time), weight (how heavy something is), wingspan (the distance from one wing to the other wing), span (to take).

Source: www.ondemandnews.com