World News for Students of English

13-10-2014 15:00

There she is, the world’s largest playable guitar, and you don’t need the skills of Jimi Hendrix to give it a strum.

The 43-foot-long (13 metres) Gibson is on display at a new exhibition all about guitars on at the moment at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.

Harvey Newquist from the National Guitar Museum is the organiser.

“It was built by a science academy in Houston, Texas about ten years ago as a project to teach construction engineering and physics to students, and it took them almost a year to build it and right after they built it, the Guinness Book of Records certified it as the world’s largest playable guitar. And we do specify that it’s playable. It’s not just a sign. It’s not a picture. It can actually be strummed. It doesn’t sound necessarily the sweetest of all guitars, but it can be played.”

The guitar is 16 feet (almost 5 metres) wide and weighs a massive 2,255 pounds, over a thousand kilos and more than 150 stones. It’s not the only interesting guitar on display at this travelling exhibition.

This one’s partly made up of the ivory from a woolly mammoth.

Difficult words: Jimi Hendrix (a famous guitarist from the 1970s), strum (to play a guitar by sweeping the thumb down across the strings), academy (school devoted to one type of subject), physics (the branch of science about movement), ivory (the bone from a tusk which is a big tooth from a mammal).

Source: www.ondemandnews.com