Colegio El Roble

English
Miss Ximena Arriagada B.

WORKSHEET N°3: DISCOVERIES AND RECENT CREATIONS

Name:_________________________________________________ Grade:4ºM Date:04/06/2020

Objetivos de aprendizaje: To understand main ideas and details from a text and recognize vocabulary
from the topic. To relate the text in English with things you know in Spanish and to be able to summarize
each paragraph.

Read the following text and discuss your ideas at the end of the Reading:

10 Discoveries and Inventions That Are More

Recent Than You Think
Some science discoveries and inventions feel like they’ve been part of our lives forever. Sometimes,

these "old" discoveries are actually so recent they can be measured by the age of celebrities. Here are

a few.

1. SLICED BREAD // 1928

For perspective, Betty White, Dick Van Dyke, Mel Brooks, and Sidney Poitier are all  older than sliced

bread (Mr. Rogers is the same age). Invented in 1928 by Otto F. Rohwedder, sliced bread was

advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” (The

invention would have hit shelves sooner, but a prototype bread-slicing machine that Rohwedder built in

1917 was destroyed by a fire.)

2. OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE EARTH’S AGE // 1956

By the late 1940s, new radiometric dating methods suggested that Earth’s age was 3.3 billion years—

but scientists were not confident in the number. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s, when  Clair

Patterson perfected a new method of calculating the age of extremely old rocks, that the Earth’s true

age of 4.5 billion years was revealed [PDF]. (Patterson’s methods, which involved building an “ultra-

clean” laboratory to remove all traces of foreign contaminants, also led to a second important

discovery: It revealed just how badly leaded gasoline was polluting the environment.) Incredibly, both

of these concepts are only as old as Tom Hanks.

3. THE DISCOVERY OF PLUTO // 1930

Everybody’s favorite dwarf planet, Pluto, was first spotted in 1930 by a telescope enthusiast who

hadn't been to college. Working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona,  Clyde

Tombaugh found “Planet X” using an astrograph—essentially a grainy space camera—and making a

discovery that's as old as Clint Eastwood. (Meanwhile, the first exoplanet wouldn’t be confirmed

until 1992, or about one Selena Gomez ago.)

4. THE SCIENTIFIC ACCEPTANCE OF PLATE TECTONICS // 1961

In 1926, German scientist Alfred Wegener attended a conference where he discussed his theory that

all of Earth’s continents had once been connected. The director of the Geological Survey of France

called Wegener's idea “the dream of a great poet.” For the next three decades, continental drift was

the sort of wacky theory that could get a scientist ostracized from the Establishment. But when

geologist Marie Tharp discovered the 10,000-mile Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the Atlantic Ocean—part of the

longest mountain range on the planet, and evidence that Earth’s plates were indeed moving—

scientists started taking the idea seriously. The theory didn’t reach widespread acceptance until 1961,

the year of Barack Obama's birth.

5. THE MODERN CAN OPENER // 1870

The modern can opener (with the spinning wheel) was invented in 1870, the same year Vladimir Lenin

was born, which seems remarkably late when you consider that metal food cans had already been

around for decades. (Before then, people had to pry open food tins by literally "taking a stab at it." In

fact, one container advised consumers to “cut round the top near the outer edge with a chisel and

hammer.”) Earlier can-opening prototypes existed but weren't very popular: Ezra Warner’s can opener,

invented in 1858, resembled a bayonet and was so dangerous that it was usually only used by grocery

store owners.

6. ACCEPTANCE OF THE BIG BANG THEORY // 1965

In 1929, Edwin Hubble confirmed a theory posited by Georges Lemaître—a Belgian Catholic priest and

scientist—that the universe was expanding. Two years later, Lemaître attempted to describe the

phenomenon with his “hypothesis of the primeval atom,” what would later be called the “Big Bang.” For

the next three decades, many scientists debated whether to accept the “Big Bang” model (where the

universe has a beginning) or the “Steady State” model (where the universe has no beginning). The

former wasn’t widely accepted until 1965, the same year JK Rowling was born.
7. HIB VACCINES // 1985

Hib disease is caused by a bacterium (Haemophilus influenzae type b) and can lead to meningitis,

pneumonia, and a slew of nasty infections. It once infected 20,000 young children every year in the

United States, killing up to 5 percent of them and leaving up to a third with permanent neurological

damage. In 1975, a trial of the drug failed to convince pharmaceutical companies to produce the

vaccine, prompting its developer, David H. Smith, to start his own company to make it. First appearing

in 1985, the same year as Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot, the vaccine has since reduced Hib disease

rates by 99 percent.

8. DOUBLE HELIX STRUCTURE OF DNA // 1953

DNA was first identified by a Swiss chemist in 1869. The nucleobases—adenine, cytosine, guanine,

thymine, and uracil—were first isolated soon after. But scientists would remain clueless as to DNA’s

physical structure until Rosalind Franklin, an expert in X-ray crystallography, and graduate student

Raymond Gosling took photographs of it and found two, twisting strands. Using Franklin’s images

(without her express permission), James Watson and Francis Crick first described the DNA double

helix in 1953, the same year as Pierce Brosnan's birth.

9. CLASSIFICATION OF LUCY // 1978

In November 1974, scientists digging in Ethiopia spotted a hunk of a human-like elbow bone in the dirt.

With it came a remarkably complete skeleton that was 3.2 million years old. Named Lucy,

the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton was an early human ancestor. Lucy was classified as a new

species—which upturned ideas about the timeline of human evolution—in 1978, the same year Rachel

McAdams was welcomed into the world.

10. DISCOVERY OF THE SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE AT THE CENTER OF THE GALAXY // 2002

A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it.

The colorful term wasn’t coined until the 1960s, and hard evidence of black holes wasn’t found until

1971. The discovery of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is even more recent: In 2002, the

birth year of Stranger Things actor Gaten Matarazzo, astronomers analyzed stars orbiting a region of

the galaxy called Sagittarius A*—and discovered a black hole with a mass  4 million times that of our

Sun.
ACTIVITY:
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Summarize every paragraph in a máximum of 3 lines per topic, send it to my email in a Word
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