José Hernández is the first Mexican-American astronaut. He was born in August, 1962. His parents were migrant farmworkers, so Hernandez grew up working in the fields picking fruits and vegetables produced in season. When he was young his family used to move back and forth between California and Mexico.
As a 10-year-old kid he had out-of-this-world ambitions. He decided he wanted to be an astronaut. His father encouraged him to work hard in the pursuit of his dream and gave him these pieces of advice: “Decide what you want to be, realise how far you need to go, draw yourself a roadmap, get a good education and always do more than what people expect”.
Education was important for Jose's parents. They believed that school was the key to get better opportunities in life, so that is why he embraced his parent's expectations and values and decided that school was what he had to do.
When he was 22 years old he got a degree in electrical engineering and two years later, in 1986 he earned a masters from the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was not that easy because he studied and worked at the same time. He worked at restaurants and factories to get money to pay their tuition fees.
In 1992 he applied to become a NASA astronaut, but he was rejected. In fact, he was rejected 11 times. Hernández remembers being disappointed after the sixth time he got a rejection letter, but he decided not to give in. Instead of giving up, he began to prepare himself to get better qualifications. Finally, in 2004, at the age of 41 he was accepted and became part of the 19th class of NASA astronauts.
You have learned that the words "first", "second", "third", etcetera help you to order events in a chronological order, but another option to do that is using a timeline. A timeline is a diagram that helps us to present a number of events in chronological order. Let's have some practice.
Now that you have read José Hernández's biography, order some of his life events by dragging the sentences into the following timeline. Correct answers will be in green and the wrong ones in red.
Year
Event
Read the following biographies. Then choose the name that matches the descriptions below. Correct answers will be in green and the wrong ones in red.
Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall is a primatologist and animal rights activist who was born in 1934 in England. Ever since she was a child, she loved animals and she read stories about them. She actually dreamed of travelling to Africa to work with the animals pictured in her favorite books. At age 18, she left school because she couldn't afford a college education and she worked as a secretary and as a film production assistant. One day, she decided to visit a friend in Africa. Once there, Goodall became the assistant of the paleontologist and anthropologist Louis Leakey, who was interested in studying the behavior of primates, particularly chimpanzees and together they studied these animals in Tanzania. Some of her contributions to the field of primatology were the discovery of tool making, their complicated social structure, and the fact that they are omnivores. She also received many awards for her activism on creating a better society for animals. She wrote several books to encourage people to treat animals with kindness and love. She spends about 300 days a year traveling, lecturing, and raising funds for her institute in order to preserve wildlife.
Nick Vujicic
Nick is a motivational speaker who encourages people around the World to overcome their problems and transform them into opportunities. His life has not always been as happy as it is now. He was born in 1982 with tetra-amelia syndrome, a rare disorder that is characterised by the absence of all four limbs. As a child he was bullied and suffered from depression and at the age of 10 he tried to commit suicide. After failing in his attempt to finish with his life, he decided not to do it again. When he was 17 years old he started his own non-profit charity - Life Without Limbs.In 2009, Vujicic took part in a short film 'The Butterfly Circus', and a year later, he won the 'Best Actor in Short Film' award at the 'Method Fest Independent Film Festival'. Three years later, he wrote a book 'Life Without Limits: Inspiration for a Ridiculously Good Life'. In another book, “Stand Strong: You Can Overcome Bullying”, Vujicic wrote about how to turn bullies into motivators and how to use them as personal motivators.
Greta Thunberg
Greta Thunberg, who was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2003, is an environmental activist. She has Asperger syndrome, which makes it hard for her to socialise, but she considers this a “superpower”. When she was eight, she became interested in climate change so by the time she was 15, Greta wrote a climate change essay and won a competition. Three months later, Greta decided not to go to school and sat down outside the Swedish parliament asking politicians to stop global warming. Thanks to social media, her protests went viral and thousands of students from around the world joined her. In September 2019, she travelled to New York to address a UN climate conference. As time went by, her fame grew and gave speeches to politicians, to the EU parliament, the UK parliament, and to protesters. She's even been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize! She wants banks, firms and governments to invest in existing sustainable technologies, research and in restoring nature, and to stop investing in fossil fuels, like oil, coal and gas.
Now, choose the name.
Interesting lives, right? So, remember to never give up when facing difficult times in your life.
Practice makes perfect! So it would be a great idea to make a timeline of a person that inspires your life.