The Night the Martians Landed
The evening of October 30th, 1938, was just like any other quiet Sunday night to most of the people of America. Many families were at home reading the papers or contentedly listening to the radio. There were two programs that night which attracted large audiences. One was a comedy and the other a play produced by the actor-writer Orson Welles. He was presenting a dramatization of H. G. Wells’s classic science-fiction novel ‘The War of the Worlds’.
The listeners prepared themselves for an hour of comfortable excitement but, after the opening announcement, the play did not start. Instead there was dance music. Then, just as people were beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong, an announcer broke in with a dramatic ‘news-flash’. In an excited voice, he said that a professor in an observatory had just noticed ‘some gas explosions on the planet of Mars’. This news was followed by a stream of rapid on-the-spot broadcasts. These told the now uneasy listeners that ‘a metal space-ship containing Martians armed with death-rays’ had landed near Princeton, New Jersey, ‘killing about 1,500 persons’. The Martians had come to make war on the world.
1.How long ago did this story happen?
2.What were the people doing?
3.What programs were on the radio that evening?
4.Who was Orson Welles?
5.What is a dramatization?
6.Who was H. G. Wells?
7.What was the ‘news-flash’ about?
8.What weapons did the Martians have?
9.According to the ‘news-flash’ where did the Martians land?
10.How many people were killed by the Martians?