Stephen Hawking: a Unique Scientist

On the occasion of the death of Professor Stephen Hawking, we've updated this B1-level article, which we published for his 75th birthday in 2017.  Students will learn about Hawking, one of Britain’s most famous scientists, who had a brilliant career in spite of a terrible neurological disease. The film The Theory of Everything , released in 2014, paid tribute to this exceptional man.

This sequence would fit well in an EPI Sciences, technologie et société with physics.

Vocabulary, structures and pronunciation:

• The most+adjective / most+noun
• Expressing purpose
• Simpl resent perfect//simple past.
• Brilliant, famous, respected, rare, incredible, major, unique… // anonymous, ordinary
• Experiment // experience
• The quest for knowledge
• Be diagnosed with a disease
• Derivation: science, scientist, scientific / mathematics, mathematician, mathematical / physics, physicist…

Skills and strategies:

• Understanding significant points in straightforward newspaper articles (B1).
• Writing brief reports and descriptions (B1).
• Sustained monologue : briefly giving reasons and explanations for opinions (B1)