Grade 8: Unit 5

Marcos spent two weeks assembling the contents according to an instruction manual written in English, which he was able to decipher thanks to his invincible imagination and a small dictionary.

Marcos spent two weeks assembling the contents according to an instruction manual written in English, which he was able to decipher thanks to his invincible imagination and a small dictionary.

The contraption lay with its stomach on terra firma, heavy and sluggish and looking more like a wounded duck than like one of those newfangled airplanes they were starting to produce in the United States.

The contraption lay with its stomach on terra firma, heavy and sluggish and looking more like a wounded duck than like one of those newfangled airplanes they were starting to produce in the United States.

Severo del Valle was obliged to use all his legal ingenuity to bring his brother-in-law back to life and the full rights of citizenship.

She would whisper in her Uncle Marcos's ear, and he in turn would transmit the message to the client, along with any improvisations of his own that he thought pertinent.

I remember as a student in junior high school reading that the famed physicist Lord Kelvin, at the turn of the twentieth century, had argued the impossibility of self-propelled flight by any device that was heavier than air. Clearly this was a myopic prediction.

If something is not forbidden by the laws of physics, then it is, in principle, possible, regardless of the limits of one's technological foresight.

I speak not from a naivete about technology's future but from a platform built upon the laws of physics, which apply on Earth as they do in the heavens.

As late as 1933—six years after Lindbergh's historic solo flight across the Atlantic—H. Gordon Garbedian ignored airplanes in the otherwise prescient introduction to his book Major Mysteries of Science...

Soon, television will enable you to see the world's greatest spectacles as you sit in the comfort of your living room.

Knowing that the V-2 brought orbital technology within reach, some people got impatient. Among them were the editors of the popular, family-oriented magazine Collier's, which sent two journalists to join the engineers, scientists, and visionaries gathered at New York City's Hayden Planetarium on Columbus Day, 1951, for its seminal Space Travel Symposium.

Edison hired Tesla, who began as an electrical engineer.

Tesla told Edison he could improve some of Edison's motors and generators.

Tesla started his own company in 1887, Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing. There he worked on making a system called "alternating current" to produce electricity. Thomas Edison thought his system, called "direct current," was better and safer.

"I don't have wings," I tell the birds who are perched beside me on the ledge. "I don't have magnetite in my head." These deficiencies punish me daily, particularly as I get older and recall Smiljan with increasing frequency.

I gave a jump of triumph and was immediately struck by a vision of the future in which humans would exist in a kingdom of ease, the burden of all our chores and travails would be borne by the world of insects.

Quickly I explained to him how I had just revolutionized the future, how I had developed insect energy, the source that would soon be providing the world with cheap, replenishable power.

It was the kind of mistake, known as a spherical aberration, that an amateur astronomer might make, and it was a handful of astronomers who first recognized the flaw—to the disbelief and then the dismay of the engineers and contractors working for NASA.

These postcards were not without controversy.

Mr. O'Keefe's decision ignited a national outcry. Schoolchildren offered to send their pennies to NASA to help pay for the telescope.

• Elements within the lens create the camera's zoom effect.
• Zooming in on an image emphasizes its importance.

The term "video clip" is used to mean any video shorter than the length of a traditional program.

• A shot that is out of focus can seem mysterious and eerie.
• Some photographers prefer sharply focused images and bright colors.