English Every Day: World Engineering Feats

Your Daily English Programme #22 - Engineering Feats of the Day (Reading B1-C1)

Shall we name today as International Engineering Day? So many achievements, past and present, have taken place on this day that we had a hard time choosing one for today's post on Engramme. Let's take a look at a few:

Think Before You Read

What do you see in the photos below? Do you know where each one is, and when they opened for the first time?

Read and match each caption to the right photo:

[1] On August 2, 1870, Tower Subway, the world's first underground tube railway, opened in London, England. The second oldest tunnel under the Thames River, after Brunel's 'Thames Tunnel', Tower Subway is an often forgotten legacy of Victorian engineering. In this photo, you can see the northern entrance that still exists at Tower Hill, just next to the Tower of London ticket office¹.

[2] On August 2, 1873, at 4:00 a.m., Andrew Smith Hallidie tested the first cable car on Clay Street, in San Francisco. And there began operation of San Francisco's famous cable car system. This photo shows a cable car on California Street in San Francisco in 1901.

Time to Read

Watch This Captioned Video: What important engineering success is it about? What is special about it?

Let's Practice

One of the best ways to learn new vocabulary, in any language, is to see the words in context: for example in a photo, a video or a sentence that helps you recognize the meaning of the words that may be new to you. In this video, too, the pictures and the word combinations help you understand the new words, even if you haven't encountered them before.

Watch the video again and make a note of the missing words below. Can you guess what they mean according to the part of the video/ the sentence they appear in? (right-click to open the table in a new window while watching the video)

Your Turn

Do you know of any record-breaking structures (towers, bridges, dams, etc) or pioneering systems (railroads, subways, etc) in your city or country, in the past or present? What was/is special about them? (write your answers in the comments below)

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Well Done! You've completed another lesson in the Series: English Every Day on Engramme: Your Daily English Programme. We sincerely hope that you enjoyed this lesson and that it helped you improve your English.

Want to practice the vocabulary from this post? Click here.

Teachers can download a pdf copy of this lesson HERE.

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1 Text reproduced from www.historic-uk.com with minor changes; Photo courtesy of www.geograph.org.uk^↩