World News for Students of English

09-12-2020 15:00

The Arecibo Telescope was a telescope in Puerto Rico. People built it in 1963 into a natural hole.

The telescope’s dish was 305 meters wide and its receiver weighed 900 tons. The telescope was very old and damaged, so officials decided to remove it. More than 200 people still used it and they tried to change the official decision.

Last week, the telescope collapsed itself. A cable snapped and the receiver fell 100 meters onto the dish below.

In the past, the telescope was very important and many scientists from all over the world used it. Besides other things, they used it to search intelligent life outside the earth. It was a part of scenes in many films and games, for example, in the 1995 James Bond film ‘Golden Eye’.

Difficult words: telescope (a machine or device that people use to watch things that are far away), receiver (a part of a machine or device that gets signals and changes them into sounds), collapse itself (to fall in on something), snap (to break suddenly, usually with a sharp sound).

You can watch the original video in the Level 3 section.