Check Your English Level

Welcome! — read the text, then answer the questions.

Welcome!

Pete: Hi! Are you Anna?

Anna: Yes! Hi there! Are you Pete?

Pete: I am Pete.

Anna: Nice to meet you.

Anna: Let’s try that again. I’m Anna.

Pete: I’m Pete. “Anna” Is that A-N-A?

Anna: No. A-N-N-A.

Pete: Well, Anna with two “n’s” … Welcome to … 1400 Irving Street!

Anna: My new apartment! Yes!

VOA Learning English.

Choose one answer for each question.

1 Who says “Nice to meet you”?

• Anna.
• Pete.
• Irving.

2 How does Anna spell her name?

• A-N-A.
• A-N-N.
• A-N-N-A.

3 What is at 1400 Irving Street?

• Anna’s new apartment.
• Anna’s new office.
• Pete’s new school.

Maria Caballero — read the text, then answer the questions.

Maria Caballero

If Maria Caballero could have one superpower, it would be to fly.

When she was young, Maria would lay in her yard, stare up at the sky and dream about making airplanes. She did not know how to make that dream come true. She only knew she loved airplanes.

Maria and her family lived in California. When the first space shuttle was going to land on a runway in California, Maria went to be near the runway and saw the big spaceship appear in the sky and make a perfect landing. She knew right then that she wanted to work for NASA when she grew up.

NASA educational profile excerpt; account as originally published.

Choose one answer for each question.

1 What did Maria dream about when she was young?

• Moving away from California.
• Teaching children to fly.
• Making airplanes.

2 What did Maria know about her dream as a child?

• Her family could build the planes for her.
• She already had a clear plan to achieve it.
• She loved airplanes but did not know how to achieve her dream.

3 What made Maria decide she wanted to work for NASA?

• Meeting a NASA engineer at school.
• Flying an airplane herself.
• Watching a space shuttle land.

Danielle Koch — read the text, then answer the questions.

Danielle Koch

NASA’s Danielle Koch is wired for sound – and finding ways to make things quieter.

No matter where she is, Danielle listens for the sounds that surround her. She might hear a gentle breeze at the top of a mountain. She might hear the roar of an airliner’s jet engines during takeoff from an airport. Sounds intrigue her.

What do you hear right now? Is the room quiet, or noisy? Are you surprised by any of the sounds you hear? Whether you live in the city, suburbs, or out in the country, sounds of all kinds surround you too.

People react differently to different sounds. If you love airplanes you may think the sound of a jumbo jet flying overhead or racing down a runway is music to your ears. Others consider jet engine noise to be a nuisance. They want it to go away, or at least be quieter.

As a researcher who works for NASA, that is what Danielle does. She leads a team of engineers who study ways to reduce engine noise by designing, building, and testing new parts that can be installed in an airplane’s engine to do the job.

She calls her work “an engineering journey.” She has gone from the top of a mountain range in rural Oregon, to sitting on soggy wet soil surrounded by tall grass reeds, to a dome-shaped NASA sound laboratory in Ohio that looks like a futuristic igloo with a big door.

Inside, 17,000 custom-designed fiberglass wedges are mounted on the dome’s walls and floor. These wedges keep sounds from echoing in the dome, making it easier for sound researchers to do their work.

NASA educational profile excerpt; account as originally published.

Choose one answer for each question.

1 Why does the writer compare people’s reactions to aircraft noise?

• To show why reducing it matters to some people.
• To explain why aircraft can no longer use runways.
• To show that everyone eventually learns to enjoy it.

2 How does Danielle’s team try to reduce engine noise?

• By developing and testing parts for engines.
• By moving airports away from cities.
• By teaching passengers to ignore it.

3 How do the fiberglass wedges help the researchers?

• They make the laboratory easier to move.
• They stop sounds from echoing inside the laboratory.
• They produce the same sound as a jet engine.

Red Jensen — read the text, then answer the questions.

Red Jensen

Robert “Red” Jensen is one of those NASA aeronautical innovators that does a little bit of everything.

Officially, Red is the Master UAS Technician for NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, which is located at the famous Edwards Air Force Base in California. UAS is short for Unmanned Aerial Systems, which is a fancy name for unpiloted aircraft most people these days just call drones. And that’s exactly what Red spends a lot of his time building, flying and otherwise tinkering with to help NASA learn all it can about operating drones in the increasingly crowded skies.

Red also is an Operations Engineer and Chief Pilot of subscale UAS aircraft, and he’s responsible for drone pilot training and certification for researchers at Armstrong and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Red’s base of operations, his home away from home, is the Armstrong Model Lab, just a short walk from the edge of Rogers Dry Lakebed, the historic desert sheet of clay where some of the most iconic aircraft in aviation history took off and/or landed – including Chuck Yeager’s X-1 (the first plane to fly faster than the speed of sound), the X-15 rocket plane (an airplane capable of reaching the edge of space), and the Space Shuttle.

Step inside Red’s domain and you will hear 3D printers buzzing in one corner, and see shelves full of small drones from past and current projects packing the walls. On those same shelves, you might find assortments of wings, rolls of high-tech composite materials on a towering stand (much like what teachers use to hold butcher paper), and a variety of aeronautical research projects at every stage of development.

Also filling the lab are other members of Red’s team – technicians and university interns – who are most likely hunched over projects, or discussing among them what’s next for a particular aircraft test.

NASA educational profile excerpt; account as originally published.

Choose one answer for each question.

1 Which statement best captures the range of Red’s responsibilities?

• He combines hands-on aircraft work with preparing people to operate them.
• He focuses on repairing historical aircraft for display.
• He mainly supplies teaching materials to local schools.

2 Why does the writer mention the X-1, the X-15 and the Space Shuttle?

• To suggest that Red designed all three vehicles.
• To identify the aircraft currently stored in Red’s lab.
• To place the lab beside a site with a significant aviation history.

3 What impression of the lab is created by the final two paragraphs?

• It is an active workshop with several projects at different stages.
• It is a training room where everyone follows one fixed exercise.
• It is mainly an archive that visitors explore without staff.