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7/22/2024 (#12 this year)
This is my last English News before the summer vacation. 3 glorious1 weeks of vacation!
What are you going to do? Are you going to go anywhere? When I was at high school inthe UK, we have about 9 weeks of summer vacation! It was heaven for students, but
not so great for parents. If both parents work, they need to find someone to look after
the children. And if a parent is at home, the children will drive them mad2. My motherwas a teacher, so she was at home when we were and my brother and I drove her upthe wall3. She was so glad when school started again! Haha. I hope you have a greatsummer and come back in August refreshed.
12 differences!

Last week’s answer

Chinese Woman in Inflatable Ring Saved
Last week, a miracle happened. A Chinese lady was swimming in the sea off abeach in Shimoda, Shizuoka with an inflatable ring8. She was there with her
friends and when her friends looked for her, they couldn’t find her. They
couldn’t find her because the Chinese lady had drifted out to sea and nobody
could hear her shout for help. It didn’t stop there. She kept drifting out to sea
and couldn’t get back into shore. She was being pulled out into the Pacific
Ocean and there was nothing between her and Hawaii, 6,500 km away. A lotof ships use the sea, but a woman in an inflatable ring is tiny, and there wasalmost no chance anyone would see her. Well, a miracle happened. Thewoman floated in the sea for 36 hours before someone on a ship saw her! Theship that spotted her was a giant cargo ship and it couldn’t stop. It radioed asmaller ship that went to rescue the woman. Sailors from the ship went into
the water to pull her out. She was dehydrated9, but the sea was warm and she
was ok. She was too weak and couldn’t stand up, so they had to carry her up
the ladder10 onto the ship. Then she was taken by helicopter to hospital. She
was very lucky. Humans can usually survive about three days without water.
Another day, and she would probably have died. Whoever saw her from thedeck of a massive11 cargo ship is an amazing person.

Something you didn’t know about people missing at sea
1. Jose Salvador Alvarenga spent 438 days adrift4 in the Pacific Ocean when the motor
on his fishing boat died. He ate fish, turtles, birds that landed on his boat, and drank
rainwater. In the end, his boat floated near to land and he swam to shore.
2. 438 days sounds like a long time, but it is not actually the longest. A Japanese sailor
called Oguri Jukichi and his crew were stranded5 in their boat off the coast of Japanin 1814. The ship drifted6 out into the Pacific, before reaching Santa Barbara 484
days later. All of the crew but Jukichi and two others had died. They lived on soybeans, which the hold was full of, rainwater, and seawater that they distilled7.

1.glorious すてきな 2.drive someone mad の気を狂わせる 3.drive someone up the wall お
かっかさせる 4.adrift 漂流している 5.stranded 動けなくなった 6.drift 漂流 7.distill 蒸留
する 8.inflatable ring 浮き輪 9.dehydrated 脱水症状 10.ladder はしご 11.massive 超大An Unusual Job

World record
There was a bee in one of the classrooms the other day and the students started
screaming. I switched off the classroom lights and the bee flew back out of the window.
Bees are not scary because they will only sting1 you if they really have to. A bee’s sting isa last resort2 because they die if they use it. Wasps3 and hornets4 are a different matter5.
Those are scary because they can keep on stinging forever. Anyway, the man behind thisweek’s record isn’t scared of bees. Ruan Liangming from China has the world record forthe largest mantle6 of bees. He was covered in 637,000 bees! I’m not sure if it was exactlythat number because it was probably impossible for people to count them, but I’m sureit was close. Still, that is an impressive record. What do you think? Do you feel like trying
to break this record?

Watching Paint Dry
Do you have a lot of patience7? If you do, then this is probably the job foryou. Watching paint dry is not as boring as it sounds. People doing this job
have to find out how long different types of paint take to dry in different
conditions8 and what they look like when they have dried. Companies thatmake paint need to know how it dries in lots of different situations, and they
don’t have time to do all of the tests themselves. If you do this job, you use
small pieces of different materials and paint them with the paint that you
are testing. Then you watch then dry. As they are drying, you have to takenotes on how quickly they are drying and their consistency9. Then you haveto change the temperature, or change the material, and do the experiment
again. You will probably spend most of every day just watching paint dry. It
depends on the paint, but some dry in about 15 minutes and some take overan hour to dry. Once the experiment is finished, you have to write a reportfor the company so thatthey can change thepaint, if they want to.
The salary is surprisingly
high because you need
to be very observant10
and very patient for thisjob. There are not a lotof people that can stareat something like a pieceof painted wood for overan hour without falling
asleep. What aboutyou?

刺す 2.last resort 最後の手段 3.wasp カリバチ 4.hornet スズメ“Trust yourself. You know more than 1.sting
バチ 5.different matter 別問題 6.mantle マント 7.patience 忍耐8.condition 状況 9.consistency 粘度 10.observant 知覚力の鋭い
you think you do.”— Benjamin Spock