ACADEMIC LISTENING TEST PRACTICE
SPACEX WANTS TO SEND YOU TO MARS!
SPACEX WANTS TO SEND YOU TO MARS!
For Students Preparing for Academic Tests / IELTS and TOEFL
Listen as you read the script.
Playing Time: 2 minutes 17 seconds
For several years, many people have talked about the possibility of sending humans to Mars. One of the problems with such a trip, however, has been the cost: 10 billion US dollars to send just one person to the red planet. Nevertheless, Elon Musk, a billionaire businessman, announced, in 2016, his plans to change this. He is the CEO of SpaceX, a company that he created, and he hopes to change the world by selling tickets to Mars for only 200,000 US dollars. How can he do this? The answer is simple: with new and better technology. With this technology, he believes, his company will be able to make the long trip to Mars affordable.
He plans to send the first 12 humans to Mars some time before 2030. After that, his company wants to send one million people to Mars during the following 40 to 100 years. To do this, his company needs to build about 1,000 spaceships. Is this a realistic goal? Will he be successful? “I think he will be able to put humans on Mars because he wants to do it,” says Robert Zubrin, the president of the Mars Society. “Right now,” he says, “NASA can’t do it, because they don’t want to.”
Considering the enormous cost and effort to achieve such a goal, it is only natural to ask: why bother to do this? Why not just stay on earth? Well, Elon Musk shares the opinion of a growing number of scientists who say that, for human civilization to survive far into the future, we need to become a multi-planetary species. In other words, humans need to live on at least two planets, just in case something bad happens to our earth, something that makes it uninhabitable. This “bad thing” could be almost anything: it might be a killer virus, an asteroid impact, a nuclear war, or perhaps out-of-control global warming. Or, perhaps, something that we haven't even imagined.
He plans to send the first 12 humans to Mars some time before 2030. After that, his company wants to send one million people to Mars during the following 40 to 100 years. To do this, his company needs to build about 1,000 spaceships. Is this a realistic goal? Will he be successful? “I think he will be able to put humans on Mars because he wants to do it,” says Robert Zubrin, the president of the Mars Society. “Right now,” he says, “NASA can’t do it, because they don’t want to.”
Considering the enormous cost and effort to achieve such a goal, it is only natural to ask: why bother to do this? Why not just stay on earth? Well, Elon Musk shares the opinion of a growing number of scientists who say that, for human civilization to survive far into the future, we need to become a multi-planetary species. In other words, humans need to live on at least two planets, just in case something bad happens to our earth, something that makes it uninhabitable. This “bad thing” could be almost anything: it might be a killer virus, an asteroid impact, a nuclear war, or perhaps out-of-control global warming. Or, perhaps, something that we haven't even imagined.
Note: For more cool ESL resources about space, visit my All Things Topics site.
