America's Presidents - Richard Nixon

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Why US College Students Cheat and How to Fight It

  Everyone who has been a student has probably experienced something like this: It is the night before a big test in one of your most difficult classes. You tried your best to study all the information you think will be included in the test. But you are still worried that you have not studied hard enough. If you fail the test, you will likely fail the class. You start to worry so much that you start thinking about doing something you know is wrong. You think about writing some of the information you think will be on the test on a little piece of paper and hiding it in your clothing. You think, “Will my teacher really be able to see what I am doing? And in the end, does doing this harm anyone?” Eric Anderman says he has known many young people who have had these or similar thoughts in his teaching career. It began when he was a high school teacher, where he witnessed many students cheating in his classes. Now Anderman works at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He is a professor of educational psychology and head of the Department of Educational Studies at Ohio State. Anderman says cheating happens just as much at the college level as it does in high school. In fact, the International Center for Academic Integrity found that a majority of American college students cheat. In 2015, over 71,000 university students were asked about cheating. About 68 percent of them admitted to doing so at least once. Anderman has been studying why students cheat and the ways in which they do it for over 20 years. His most recent research, published in September, provides interesting information about when students believe cheating is acceptable. His research involved a little over 400 students at two large research universities in the United States. They were asked about cheating. The study found that the students said it is most acceptable to cheat in classes they disliked. And the classes where students felt cheating was acceptable were often subjects like mathematics and science. Anderman notes that it is difficult to say what makes students like or dislike a class. It could be the subject or the personality of the professor. And in the end, it is always up to the student to make the decision whether or not to cheat. However, Anderman argues that college professors can design their classes in a way that reduces students’ desire to cheat. Students feel cheating is less acceptable in classes that focus on learning how to do something instead of memorizing information, he says. “If you think about it,” he told VOA, “it makes logical sense if a class is set up so that you have to demonstrate mastery … of the content, cheating’s not going to buy you anything. A flipside of that is … a focus on testing. And so when a student goes in a class, and … all they think about or all they hear about is testing … and ‘If you don’t do well on the test, you’ll never move on to the second level’ … they cheat more often.” So, Anderman says, when a math test is given to students, teachers should not test whether or not they have memorized the necessary formulas. Students might be so worried about recalling the formulas that they feel the need to cheat in order to succeed. The more students cheat, the more their understanding of the subject will weaken, Anderman says. Instead, he suggests that the professor could provide the math formulas to the students and test whether or not they know how to use them to solve complex problems. After all, Anderman argues, in the real world, many professionals use computer programs that already possess the formulas. It is up to the professionals to know how to use the formulas and their knowledge of the subject to solve the problems presented to them. Anderman says professors should do their best to explain why they are passionate about a given issue and why students might need such knowledge in the future. That way the students themselves will feel more connected to what they are learning. Yet David Rettinger suggests that even with a connection to the material, there is still more to the fight against cheating. Rettinger is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is also one of the heads of the International Center for Academic Integrity. Rettinger says cheating is so difficult to prevent, in part, because of the examples students see in the world around them. “Cheating is deeply ingrained in our culture,” he told VOA. “And when students look to politics, they look to business, and … they see dishonesty being rewarded, it’s very difficult for those of us in higher education to make an argument that they should do things the right way.” That is why Rettinger believes professors need to clearly explain the rules about cheating. For example, actions such as plagiarism -- copying the work of others -- will likely get a student expelled from any college or university in the U.S. Understanding these rules can often be especially difficult for international students, Rettinger says. The education systems in some countries do not place the same importance on individual work or presenting creative ideas in writing projects, for example. So some international students may be cheating without even knowing they are doing so. But most of all, Rettinger argues, professors should explain that finding cheating acceptable can cause problems for students well after college. “You can, perhaps, get a job by cheating,” he said. “But you’re not going to keep that job. Over time it’s going to become clear to the people you work with that you don’t really know what you’re doing. And so the knowledge that you claim to have isn’t going to present itself, and they’re going to be looking for someone who can actually do the things you say you can do.” I’m Pete Musto. And I’m Dorothy Gundy.   Pete Musto reported this story for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor. We want to hear from you. Have you ever cheated in school? If so, what made you decide to do it? What would you say to others who might consider cheating? Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   focus – v. to cause something, such as attention, to be directed at something specific logical – adj. agreeing with the rules of a proper or reasonable way of thinking about or understanding something content – n. the ideas, facts, or images that are in a book, article, speech, or movie flipside – n. the bad or unpleasant part or result of something formula(s) – n. a general fact or rule expressed in letters and symbols professional(s) – n. someone who does a job that requires special training, education, or skill passionate – adj. having, showing, or expressing strong emotions or beliefs ingrained – adj. existing for a long time and very difficult to change plagiarism – n. the act of using another person's words or ideas without giving credit to that person

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Review of Lessons 6 - 9

Congratulations! You are learning English with VOA Learning English! Try the quiz and enjoy the video of our mistakes. For Fun - 'Bloopers'  Sometimes we do not remember what to say. Or sometimes we are laughing about a funny event. Watch the video above to see these mistakes, or 'bloopers.' New Words from Blooper Video break - n. a period in which you stop activity or for a short time mistake - n. something that is not correct blooper - n. an embarrassing mistake usually made in public some - adj. of an untold amount or number   Listening Quiz Take this quiz to review the lessons from 6 to 9.  Lesson Review Here are the lessons and learning points. Write to us in the Comments section to let us know which you like best.   Lesson 1: Welcome! (Meeting People) Verb BE + name in introductions BE + location Meeting people Personal information Learning the Alphabet Learning the Numbers 1-20 Pronouncing linked sounds   Lesson 2: Hello! I'm Anna! (Introductions) BE + noun; BE + location Subject pronouns: I, you, he, she, we, they Welcoming & Leave-taking Spelling names aloud Contractions with the verb "be" Saying your address   Lesson 3: I'm Here! (Apologizing and Phone Conversation) Numbers in Addresses & Phone numbers Place pronouns: here, there Calling someone on the phone Polite telephone expressions   Lesson 4: What Is It? (Everyday Things) Greeting people To Have + Object To Not Have + Object To Be + Object Saying quickly "and" as "n"   Lesson 5: Where Are You? (Rooms in a House) To Be + Location Asking about locations Listening for information about people’s locations Naming places and activities   Lesson 6: Where Is the Gym? (Places in an Apartment) Places in an apartment Prepositions: next to, behind, across from Greetings between friends Asking questions about locations Naming places   Lesson 7 - What Are You Doing? (Everyday Activities) Asking someone what they are doing Telling someone what you are doing Saying "what are" quickly   Lesson 8: Are You Busy? (Schedules) Times of day: morning, evening, afternoon To Be + Short answers Telling what someone is doing Words to use when you don't know what to say: uh, um How to say "I'm sorry"   Lesson 9: Is it cold? (Talking About Weather) Weather words & adjectives Fahrenheit & Celsius temperatures To Be + Short answers Yes/No question Agreeing and disagreeing   What do you think? How are you using "Let's Learn English?" Is it helping you to learn English? Please write to us in the comments section or send us an email. Take the poll to let us know the most helpful part of each lesson. Thank you for coming to learn English with us!

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Pig or Pork? Cow or Beef?

  Now, Words and Their Stories from VOA Learning English. On this program we often talk about the origins of words and expressions that we use in American English. We also talk about how we use them in everyday conversations. Today we talk about animals--and animals we eat. In English, these two categories often have different names. Pigs turn into pork. Cows turn into beef. Sheep is mutton. Calves are veal. And deer is venison. But why do we call these animals different names when we prepare them for a meal?  Why is it “pig” on the farm but "pork" in a sandwich? The answer is the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066. That is when many French words became part of the English language. Many of those French words related to the battlefield, such as “army” and “royal.” Many related to government and taxation. And many others related to food.  When animals were in the stable or on the farm, they kept their Old English names: pig, cow, sheep and calf. But when they were cooked and brought to the table, an English version of the French word was used: pork (porc), beef (beouf), mutton (mouton) and veal (veau). On several websites, word experts claim that this change shows a class difference between the Anglo-Saxons and the French in Britain at the time of the conquest. Because the lower-class Anglo-Saxons were the hunters, they used the Old English names for animals. But the upper-class French saw these animals only at mealtimes. So, they used the French word to describe the prepared dishes. Today, modern English speakers — regardless of social class — have come to use both. However, the words “deer" and "venison," however, are a bit more complicated. Etymology Online says "venison" comes from an Old French word from the 1300s (venesoun) meaning "'meat of large game,' especially deer or boar." And that Old French word comes from a Latin word (venation) meaning "a hunt, hunting, or the chase." Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, any hunted animal was called venison after it was killed. And probably because deer were killed more than any other animal, “venison” came to mean “deer meat.” However, “chicken” and “fish” remain largely unchanged. However, sometimes we use the word "poultry" when talking about buying a chicken, turkey, or other similar bird to eat. For example, a grocery store may have a place called “the poultry section.” But we don't use "poultry" when we order chicken or turkey at a restaurant, or serve it at a meal. We simply say "chicken" or “turkey.”   For example, if I want to order my favorite dish, which is popular in the southern part of the United States, I will say, "I’ll have the chicken and waffles, please." I would never order "poultry and waffles." Lesser common birds, such as quail and pheasant, simply go by their own names. What about fish? The French word for "fish" is "poisson." Some word experts suspect that "poisson" is too close to the English word "poison" to become a common food word. After all, even the food-rich culture of France cannot overcome the fact that eating poison might kill you or at least make you sick. As a result, anything that even sounds like “poison” will probably be an unpopular choice at mealtimes. And that bring us to the end of another Words and Their Stories. In your language, do the words for animals change when you eat them? Let us know in the Comments Section! Thanks for joining us. I'm Anna Matteo. I’m William the Conqueror Britain’s first Norman king. I found renown and won my crown at the Battle of Hastings.In September of 1066 …”   Anna Matteo wrote this story for VOA Learning English. Kelly Jean Kelly edited the story. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   category – n. a group of people or things that are similar in some way Norman Conquest – This major event in history is when William, duke of Normandy, took control of England. His important victory at the Battle of Hastings (Oct. 14, 1066) resulted in profound political, administrative, and social changes in the British Isles conquest – n. the act of taking control of a country, city, etc., through the use of force royal – adj. of, relating to, or subject to the crown stable – n. a building in which animals are kept, fed, and cared for poultry – n. birds (such as chickens and ducks) that are raised on farms for their eggs or meat quail – n. an Old World migratory game bird : a kind of small wild bird that is often hunted pheasant – n. a large bird that has a long tail and is often hunted for food or sport overcome – v. to defeat (someone or something) : to successfully deal with or gain control of (something difficult)

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Tecumseh: Tribal Leader Who Fought American Expansion

  Tecumseh was a leader of the Shawnee Tribe in the early 1800s. He led the Shawnee and other tribes in fighting American expansion into what is now the Northwestern United States. In the end, however, their efforts failed. Tecumseh was born in western Ohio around 1768. He grew up during a period of endless warfare, as non-native settlers moved inland from the Atlantic Coast. The Shawnee had once lived in woodlands east of the Mississippi River. But by the late 1700s, they had been forced to move to what are today the states of Ohio and Indiana. The Eastern Shawnee Tribe’s website notes that Tecumseh’s father died in a battle with a Virginia militia in 1774. The boy was left to be raised by his older brother, who trained him as a warrior. Tecumseh fought his first battle at the age of 14. The Shawnee say he became frightened and ran from the battlefield. He was so embarrassed that he made up his mind to never be afraid of battle again. In 1790, his forces attacked a group of American soldiers in western Ohio. More than 600 soldiers died and hundreds more were wounded in the attack. It was the biggest defeat of the U.S. army ever. Around 1805, Tecumseh’s younger brother is said to have had a series of visions. That experience led him to take the name Tenskwatawa, which means “Prophet” in English. Tecumseh worked to support Tenskwatawa’s visions, which promised protection against American soldiers and predicted the return of the traditional Shawnee way of life. The two brothers established the village of Tippecanoe in what is now Indiana. It was meant to serve as the headquarters of a new native alliance against the U.S. government. Tecumseh then began to travel, as far north as Canada and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. He wanted to spread his brother’s message in an effort to seek out tribal allies. By the spring of 1810, non-native settlers had grown increasingly nervous. They worried that the tribal alliance was planning to attack and kill them. In 1811, while Tecumseh was away on a trip along the Gulf Coast, the U.S. army prepared to attack “Prophetstown.” A group of Shawnee warriors went out to meet them, and the two sides fought a two-hour battle. Neither side won. The Shawnee withdrew from the area. The next day, the U.S. army burned Tippecanoe to the ground. In 1812, the U.S. Congress declared war on Great Britain. Tecumseh and his allies joined the side of the British. They believed that a British victory would stop the progress of the Americans. Tecumseh is said to have demonstrated himself to be a clever planner who helped the British to victory in Detroit. But in 1813, he was wounded by American forces during the Battle of the Thames in Ontario, Canada. He died a short time later. His death is seen as having opened the way for American expansion into the continental northwest. In the following years, the U.S. government forced tribes west of the Mississippi River to accept more than 200 treaties. The government also set up nearly 100 areas for Native American tribes. They are called reservations.    The Shawnee were once spread across parts of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Today, the U.S. government recognizes the Shawnee in three branches: the Shawnee Tribe, the Absentee Shawnee Tribe and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe. Each one lives in Oklahoma, and all remember Tecumseh as a hero. William Henry Harrison would become the ninth U.S. president. He described Tecumseh as “one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.” I’m Jonathan Evans.   Cecelia Hilleary wrote this story for VOA News. Jonathan Evans adapted her report for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor. _______________________________________________________________ Words in this Story   clever – adj.  showing intelligent thinking embarrassed – adj. feeling confused and foolish in front of other people genius – n. a very smart or talented person; a person who has a level of talent or intelligence that is very rare or remarkable vision – n. something that you see or dream especially as part of a religious or supernatural experience branch – n. a local office of an organization; a major part of something prophet – n. someone with moral or spiritual gifts; one who can predict future events

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Turkey's Africa Presence

In Somalia this past September, Turkey opened its first military base on the African continent. Over the past ten years, Turkey has expanded its presence in Africa, establishing 36 embassies and major trade links. Turkey has a long history with North African countries, says David Shinn, a professor at George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs. In 2016, Turkey had more than $10 billion in trade with Egypt, Algeria and Morocco. Now Turkey is expanding into African countries below the Sahara Desert. A Turkish company is building a multi-billion dollar railroad across Ethiopia and Tanzania. The state-owned Turkish Airlines flies to more than 50 African cities. Most of Turkey’s ties to Africa are about business, says Shinn, who believes Turkey wants to invest in private African companies and expand its exports. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made Africa an important part of his foreign policy. In a statement published by Al-Jazeera last year, Erdogan wrote, "Many people in the world associate the African continent with extreme poverty, violent conflict and a general state of hopelessness. The people of Turkey have a different view. “We believe Africa deserves better,” he wrote. Shinn says the new Turkish military base in Somalia is a display of power and helps to strengthen strategic alliances. Turkey’s presence in Somalia goes back to the Ottoman Empire, when Turkey built small communities along the Somali coast. But, its recent interest is linked to politics as well as economics. Somalia is a mostly Muslim nation, like Turkey, and Erdogan thinks a partnership could be helpful to both countries. Turkey can help Somalia as it struggles with food insecurity, drought, and terrorism. On October 14, more than 300 people died from a car bomb explosion in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. It was the country’s worst terrorist attack in 20 years. Turkey helped immediately. It flew wounded people to a Turkish hospital in Ankara. Turkey condemned the attack and offered Somalia support and solidarity. A few days later, Somali Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire went to Ankara to meet the Turkish Prime Minister and visit the victims. “Turkey’s help and support will be written in our history books and we will never forget that,” Khaire said at a news conference. Turkey plans to train as soldiers thousands of Somalis at the new military base just south of Mogadishu. The soldiers will replace AMISOM, the international peacekeeping force now in Somalia. It is to withdraw over the next three years. AMISOM is helping Somalia fight the terrorist group al-Shabab, suspected of the October bomb attack. Al-Shabab calls AMISOM an army of “foreign invaders.” Many of the troops are Christians from other African nations. Serhat Orakci is an Africa expert with the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation. He told VOA that the newly trained Somali soldiers could help fight al-Shabab. The presence of Turks may be more acceptable in Somalia since they are Muslims. Since 2015, Erdogan has visited Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya and Uganda. He also traveled to Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar. In each country, he requested that Gulen schools close. Gulen Schools are Islamic schools named after Fethullah Gulen, a clergy leader with many international followers. Years ago, Gulen chose to leave Turkey and live in the United States. Erdogan says Gulen was the leader of a violent overthrow attempt in Turkey in 2016. Gulen denies the accusation. More than 250 people died during the violence. At least six governments in Africa have agreed to close the schools although they are popular. Shinn thinks it unlikely that Turkey will continue to expand in Africa when Erdogan leaves office. He added that Turkey’s economy will have to remain strong to continue its presence in Africa. I'm Susan Shand   Salem Solomon, Hilmi Hacaloglu wrote this story for VOANews. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   associate – v. to think of one person or thing when you think of another person or thing — usually + with strategic   - adj. of or relating to a general plan that is created to achieve a goal in war, politics, etc solidarity – n. a feeling of unity between people who have the same interests, goals, etc.    

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India’s Currency Ban Under Fire One Year Later

It’s been a year since India’s government banned the use of high-value paper money. That decision is being heavily criticized by some individuals and groups. Prime Minister Narendra Modi – who ordered the action in November 2016 – has repeatedly defended his decision. The move removed India’s 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from use. Modi has said the ban was necessary to fight corruption and target “black money.” Black money is a term used to describe undeclared wealth that is not taxed. He said the move was also intended to get rid of fake currency and reduce terror financing. The ban affected about 86 percent of the country’s currency. It led to huge cash shortages for nearly two months. Millions of people stood in long bank lines to get cash for their daily needs. About 75 percent of India’s workforce depends on the country’s cash economy for employment. Some critics say the ban greatly harmed India’s economy at a time when it was experiencing healthy growth. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the move “reckless.” ​ Singh recently spoke out against the ban again, saying that “nowhere in the world has any democracy undertaken such a coercive move.” He said the measure was hurting small and medium businesses across the country. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy is a Mumbai-based think tank. It estimated that about 1.5 million jobs were lost in the first four months of 2017 following the currency ban. But government officials recently declared the year-old policy a success and celebrated the anniversary as “anti-black money day.” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Facebook the country’s dependence on cash had fallen by nearly 3.89 trillion rupees. He also said the cash to Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, rate dropped from 12 to 9 percent over the past year. The finance ministry said the policy led to about 5.6 million new taxpayers being added. And the Reserve Bank of India said new data showed that digital money transactions tripled.   But the opposition Congress party held demonstrations in major cities to protest what they believe is a failed policy. “It has ruined the lives of millions of hard-working Indians,” the party’s Vice President Rahul Gandhi said on Twitter. The policy also affects people in neighboring Nepal. There, thousands of migrant workers held old currency notes that could not be exchanged before the date to do so passed. Nepalese officials are currently seeking help from India to provide a way to exchange the nearly 55 million in Indian currency notes held by its citizens. I’m Bryan Lynn.   Anjana Pasricha reported this story for VOA News. Bryan Lynn adapted it Learning English, with additional material from Reuters. Hai Do was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   intend – v. to plan or want to do (something): to have (something) in your mind as a purpose or goal​ rid – v. to cause (someone or something) to no longer have or be affected by (someone or something unwanted)​ fake – adj. not true or real currency – n. ​the money that a country uses: a specific kind of money​ cash – n. ready money; paper money and coins data – n. facts or information used usually to calculate, analyze, or plan something digital – adj. using or characterized by computer technology​ reckless – adj. doing something dangerous and not caring about what might happen coercive – adj. using force to persuade people to do things they are unwilling to do transaction – n. a deal involving the buying or selling of something  

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'A White Heron,' by Sarah Orne Jewett

We present the short story "A White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett. Dona de Sanctis wrote this version for VOA Learning English. Your narrator is Kay Gallant. The forest was full of shadows as a little girl hurried through it one summer evening in June. It was already 8 o'clock and Sylvie wondered if her grandmother would be angry with her for being so late. Every evening Sylvie left her grandmother's house at 5:30 to bring their cow home. The old animal spent her days out in the open country eating sweet grass. It was Sylvie's job to bring her home to be milked. When the cow heard Sylvie's voice calling her, she would hide among the bushes. This evening it had taken Sylvie longer than usual to find her cow. The child hurried the cow through the dark forest, following a narrow path that led to her grandmother's home. The cow stopped at a small stream to drink. As Sylvie waited, she put her bare feet in the cold, fresh water of the stream. She had never before been alone in the forest as late as this. The air was soft and sweet. Sylvie felt as if she were a part of the gray shadows and the silver leaves that moved in the evening breeze. She began thinking how it was only a year ago that she came to her grandmother's farm. Before that, she had lived with her mother and father in a dirty, crowded factory town. One day, Sylvie's grandmother had visited them and had chosen Sylvie from all her brothers and sisters to be the one to help her on her farm in Vermont. The cow finished drinking, and as the 9-year-old child hurried through the forest to the home she loved, she thought again about the noisy town where her parents still lived. Suddenly the air was cut by a sharp whistle not far away. Sylvie knew it wasn't a friendly bird's whistle. It was the determined whistle of a person. She forgot the cow and hid in some bushes. But she was too late. "Hello, little girl," a young man called out cheerfully. "How far is it to the main road?"  Sylvie was trembling as she whispered "two miles." She came out of the bushes and looked up into the face of a tall young man carrying a gun. The stranger began walking with Sylvie as she followed her cow through the forest. "I've been hunting for birds," he explained, "but I've lost my way. Do you think I can spend the night at your house?" Sylvie didn't answer. She was glad they were almost home. She could see her grandmother standing near the door of the farm house. When they reached her, the stranger put down his gun and explained his problem to Sylvie's smiling grandmother. "Of course you can stay with us," she said. "We don't have much, but you're welcome to share what we have. Now Sylvie, get a plate for the gentleman!" After eating, they all sat outside. The young man explained he was a scientist, who collected birds. "Do you put them in a cage?" Sylvie asked. "No," he answered slowly,  "I shoot them and stuff them with special chemicals to preserve them. I have over 100 different kinds of birds from all over the United States in my study at home." "Sylvie knows a lot about birds, too," her grandmother said proudly. "She knows the forest so well, the wild animals come and eat bread right out of her hands." "So Sylvie knows all about birds. Maybe she can help me then," the young man said. "I saw a white heron not far from here two days ago. I've been looking for it ever since. It's a very rare bird, the little white heron. Have you seen it, too?" he asked Sylvie.  But Sylvie was silent. "You would know it if you saw it," he added. "It's a tall, strange bird with soft white feathers and long thin legs. It probably has its nest at the top of a tall tree." Sylvie's heart began to beat fast. She knew that strange white bird! She had seen it on the other side of the forest. The young man was staring at Sylvie. "I would give $10 to the person who showed me where the white heron is." That night Sylvie's dreams were full of all the wonderful things she and her grandmother could buy for ten dollars. Sylvie spent the next day in the forest with the young man. He told her a lot about the birds they saw. Sylvie would have had a much better time if the young man had left his gun at home. She could not understand why he killed the birds he seemed to like so much. She felt her heart tremble every time he shot an unsuspecting bird as it was singing in the trees. But Sylvie watched the young man with eyes full of admiration. She had never seen anyone so handsome and charming. A strange excitement filled her heart, a new feeling the little girl did not recognize … love. At last evening came. They drove the cow home together. Long after the moon came out and the young man had fallen asleep Sylvie was still awake. She had a plan that would get the $10 for her grandmother and make the young man happy. When it was almost time for the sun to rise, she quietly left her house and hurried through the forest. She finally reached a huge pine tree, so tall it could be seen for many miles around. Her plan was to climb to the top of the pine tree. She could see the whole forest from there. She was sure she would be able to see where the white heron had hidden its nest. Sylvie's bare feet and tiny fingers grabbed the tree's rough trunk. Sharp dry branches scratched at her like cat's claws. The pine tree's sticky sap made her fingers feel stiff and clumsy as she climbed higher and higher. The pine tree seemed to grow taller, the higher that Sylvie climbed. The sky began to brighten in the east. Sylvie's face was like a pale star when, at last, she reached the tree's highest branch. The golden sun's rays hit the green forest. Two hawks flew together in slow-moving circles far below Sylvie. Sylvie felt as if she could go flying among the clouds, too. To the west she could see other farms and forests. Suddenly Sylvie's dark gray eyes caught a flash of white that grew larger and larger. A bird with broad white wings and a long slender neck flew past Sylvie and landed on a pine branch below her. The white heron smoothed its feathers and called to its mate, sitting on their nest in a nearby tree. Then it lifted its wings and flew away. Sylvie gave a long sigh. She knew the wild bird's secret now. Slowly she began her dangerous trip down the ancient pine tree. She did not dare to look down and tried to forget that her fingers hurt and her feet were bleeding. All she wanted to think about was what the stranger would say to her when she told him where to find the heron's nest. As Sylvie climbed slowly down the pine tree, the stranger was waking up back at the farm. He was smiling because he was sure from the way the shy little girl had looked at him that she had seen the white heron. About an hour later Sylvie appeared. Both her grandmother and the young man stood up as she came into the kitchen. The splendid moment to speak about her secret had come. But Sylvie was silent. Her grandmother was angry with her. Where had she been? The young man's kind eyes looked deeply into Sylvie's own dark gray ones. He could give Sylvie and her grandmother $10 dollars. He had promised to do this, and they needed the money. Besides, Sylvie wanted to make him happy. But Sylvie was silent. She remembered how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sun rise together from the top of the world. Sylvie could not speak. She could not tell the heron's secret and give its life away. The young man went away disappointed later that day. Sylvie was sad. She wanted to be his friend. He never returned. But many nights Sylvie heard the sound of his whistle as she came home with her grandmother's cow. Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been? Who can know?   Download activities to help you understand this story here. Now it’s your turn. Imagine you are Sylvie​. Would you do the same thing she did - keep silent about the heron? If not, what could you say to the young man to make him stop killing birds?​ Let us know in the Comments section or on our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ QUIZ   _________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   whistle - n. a high and loud sound made by forcing air through your lips or teeth preserve - v. to keep (something) in its original state or in good condition heron -  n. a large bird that has long legs and a long neck and bill nest - n. the place where a bird lays its eggs and takes care of its young handsome - having a pleasing appearance that causes romantic feelings in someone

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The True Story of Pocahontas

  Pocahontas is one of the most famous figures in American history. Many books and films portray her as a beautiful American Indian “princess” who made sacrifices to serve British colonial interests. These stories also suggest that she saved England’s first Virginia settlers from death and starvation. Most likely none of that is true. Pocahontas was the daughter of Pamunkey Chief Wahunsenaca.  He was leader of an alliance of about thirty Algonquian tribes and bands in Virginia when the British arrived in 1607. This did not make her a “princess” however.  Royalty was a European idea. Her family called her Matoaka, “flower between two streams.” This likely referred to their home between Virginia’s Mattaponi and Pamunkey Rivers. Tradition has said that her father also called her “Pocahontas.” This has several possible meanings, including “wanton” to “mischievous.” The name suggests she had a lively personality. Little is known of Pocahontas’ childhood. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow was a member of the Mattaponi tribe, an ally of Wahunsenaca’s. Dr. Linwood’s book, The True Story of Pocahontas, the Other Side of History reports about Mattaponi oral history. It says Matoakoa married a young Potowomac fighter named Kocoum when she was about 14. They had a child called Little Kocoum, who was raised among the Mattaponi. The book also says that the English murdered the older Kocoum.  ​Pocahontas’s imprisonment In 1613, the English took Pocahontas and imprisoned her because they thought it would help influence negotiations with her father.  They kept her for a year at the settlement of Jamestown. ​At some point during her imprisonment, Pocahontas was declared a Christian and her British captors gave her a new name: Rebecca. The Mattaponi say at one point the English settlers permitted her sister to visit her.  During that visit Pocahontas told her sister that she had been raped. During her time at Jamestown, a British farmer named John Rolfe took an interest in her. The details of their relationship are not clear. In his writings, Rolfe said that he loved Pocahontas but also recognized that a marriage alliance between Britain and Virginia tribes would be helpful. Rolfe married Pocahontas in 1614, and she gave birth to a son, Thomas. The Mattaponi say her father did not attend the wedding.  However he gave her a necklace made of pearls harvested from Virginia's coastal waters as a gift. Pocahontas later traveled to England with Rolfe and Thomas to help bring attention to the new Virginia colony. She was presented to the Queen as Virginia’s first Christian. Historical records say she was well-received. However, Pocahontas became sick, and later died before she and Rolfe could return to Virginia. She was buried at St. George’s Church in the Kent town of Gravesend on March 21, 1617. A memorial statue for Pocahontas stands there today. Famous for an unclear story Pocahontas is most famous for an event that likely never happened: Saving British explorer Captain John Smith from death by Chief Wahunsenaca in 1607. Smith claimed that he had been taken prisoner by a group of fighters, who brought him before Chief Wahunsenaca.  Smith said they were ready to kill him with a club. But, he wrote, Pocahontas threw herself down on top of the prisoner, which saved his life. Today, the Mattaponi say it could not have happened. They say such behavior would not have been consistent with Virginia Native culture or custom. Non-Native researchers also suspect the truth of this story, taking note that even in his own time, people saw Smith as a liar who had an inflated sense of his own importance. I’m Phil Dierking.   This story was originally written by Cecily Hilleary for VOANews. Phil Dierking adapted the story for VOA Learning. Caty Weaver was the editor. Does your country have history stories that might not be true? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   alliance - n. a union between people, groups, countries, etc.​ baptize - v.  to officially make someone a member of a specified Christian church through the ceremony of baptism​ exaggerate - v. to think of or describe something as larger or greater than it really is​ mischievous - adj. causing or tending to cause annoyance or minor harm or damage​ oral - adj. of or relating to the mouth​ pearl - n. a hard, shiny, white ball that is formed inside the shell of an oyster and that is often used as jewelry​ royalty - n. members of a royal family​ wanton - adj. showing no thought or care for the rights, feelings, or safety of others​

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Costumes from New York Theaters Find New Life in Other Plays

  In a huge, underground space in New York City, below the largest sound stage east of Hollywood, 80,000 costumes wait for actors to claim them. This is the TDF Costume Collection, run by the not-for-profit Theater Development Fund. The clothing, jewelry, hair pieces and other wearables come from Broadway, Off Broadway, opera, film, and regional productions. People can pay to use the costumes. But not all people, says collection director Steven Cabral. "We're not renting for Halloween, and we're not renting for parties with food or liquids where something could happen to the costume. But if you're doing something that seems of an artistic nature in some way, we're going to be able to rent to you." Cabral notes that the collection has a little of everything - from medieval warrior wear created in the 1920s to modern ball gowns, and some stranger things. "That is...yeah, that is an elephant head." Cabral says TDF got into the costume business in the mid-1960s, when the Metropolitan Opera was about to move into a new home in Lincoln Center. The opera house, also known as the Met, had costumes for 22 full operas that officials were not planning on keeping. But they did not want to throw them away either. So, Cabral says, TDF took on all these old production elements and began to rent them for a very low cost. High school, college and community theater groups, movie production companies and TV shows have all used costumes in the collection. Opera companies can find almost anything they need at TDF. Cabral says he got a call after one gown from a Met production of Lucia di Lammermoor arrived for an opera in the Midwest. It was the opera company director on the phone. "'You had one of my singers in tears last night.' The person being fitted for this costume was a young opera singer, and when she saw the costume, and saw that it had the Metropolitan Opera label, and it said Lucia, and it said wedding scene, and it said Beverly Sills. "The young woman broke down because she couldn't believe that she was so fortunate to not only wear Metropolitan Opera, but to wear something owned by Beverly Sills."  Costumes from the Met are built to last, so when they arrive, they go into a small room of "special stock." After these costumes have seen their share of use, they move to another room. And once they start looking pretty worn, they move again. Some even go on sale. Cabral says those twice-yearly sales have a set price for everything a shopper can fit into one bag. "And the rule is, we just don't ever want to see the costume again." There is always a new crop of donations waiting for space at TDF. I’m Caty Weaver.   The Associated Press reported this story. Caty Weaver adapted it for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   sound stage - n. an area of a movie or television studio for the recording of sound, typically used to record dialogue​ rent - v.  to pay money in return for being able to use​ costume - n. the clothes that are worn by someone (such as an actor) who is trying to look like a different person or thing​ medieval - adj. of or relating to the period of European history from about A.D. 500 to about 1500​ fortunate - adj. coming or happening because of good luck​   We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section.

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What It Takes - Lee Berger

00:00:02     OPRAH WINFREY: "Hattie Mae, this child is gifted," and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.   00:00:08     ROGER BANNISTER: If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity, and you don't take it, you may never have another chance.   00:00:14     LAURYN HILL: It all was so clear. It was just, like, the picture started to form itself.   00:00:19     DESMOND TUTU: There was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth, darkness over light, death over life.   00:00:27     CAROL BURNETT (quoting CARRIE HAMILTON): “Every day I wake up and decide, today I'm going to love my life. Decide.”   00:00:35     JOHNNY CASH: My advice is, if they're going to break your leg once when you go in that place, stay out of there.   00:00:40     JAMES MICHENER: And then along come these differential experiences that you don't look for, you don't plan for, but boy, you’d better not miss them.   00:00:52     LEE BERGER: These bones that we’re finding are of individuals that lay somewhere in our deep family tree.   00:01:03     ALICE WINKLER: This is What It Takes, a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy of Achievement. I’m Alice Winkler, and this is Lee Berger. He hunts for human ancestors, and is transforming our understanding of evolution.   00:01:23     LEE BERGER: Every single person is interested to know who their parents are, who your grandparents are, who your great-grandparents are. Genealogy websites and that work are hugely popular. Why? The reason is because every human being on this planet at some point realizes that the people who they descend from in the past carry traits and behaviors that are now part of them.   00:01:54     And as we try to understand ourselves as humans, something only humans can do, we explore our inner selves. We are looking for causality, reason. We want to know not only why we look physically like this, but often, the more important, why we behave like this. Well, people like me just do that in the deep depths of time.   00:02:19     ALICE WINKLER: People like Lee Berger are called paleoanthropologists, but it would be hard to argue that there are many paleoanthropologists like Lee Berger. In 2008, he found a new species, an ancient relative of humans called Australopithecus sediba, or just sediba for short, and in September of 2015, Lee Berger made headlines again when he announced he’d found a cave filled with skeletons of another human relative no one had seen before, a species he named Homo naledi.   00:03:00     These two discoveries are forcing a rewrite of the story of evolution. Lee Berger sat down with the Academy of Achievement twice to talk about his pioneering work, once in 2012, and again soon after the Homo naledi news broke. Both times he was wearing the kind of leather jacket you might expect to see on an intrepid explorer, à la Indiana Jones. You can occasionally hear the creak of the leather as he talks.   00:03:32     And Berger’s stories are often jaw-dropping, filled with enough suspense and drama to warrant a Hollywood movie. But Berger has also known years of fruitless searching, epic dead ends, and academic acrimony. We will cover all of that and more in this episode, but it seemed more fun to start with the tales of action and adventure.   00:04:03     In the autumn of 2013, Berger was hoping to find new bones — well, new very old bones, in what’s known as the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, in South Africa. It’s where he’d found sediba several years before. This time he sent a team of cave explorers underground.   00:04:26     LEE BERGER: And on September 13, they went into one of the best-known cave systems in the entire region, if not all of South Africa, the Rising Star system. They went off the map, though, and they found a place at the top of a collapse we call Dragon's Back, and there they looked down a seven-and-a-half-inch slot. Now imagine, they're already a hundred feet underground. They're looking into this slot and, of course, what do they do?   00:04:51     They go into it, and they go down it about 50 feet and drop into a chamber, and in that chamber are bones scattered across the floor. They're bones that they thought were the kind that I was looking for, and their camera didn't function, so they had to come back out. It was about a four-and-a-half-hour trip at that time. They told me that they thought they'd found something, but I said, you know, "Bring me pictures, and I'm not going to believe you unless I see pictures of this," because I get that kind of thing all the time.   00:05:22     You know, people call you up and say they found a skull, and it's a plastic baby doll head or something that they got out of their backyard.   00:05:28     ALICE WINKLER: A few weeks went by. Nothing. Berger says he forgot about the whole thing, and then one night at about nine p.m., someone showed up at his door.   00:05:39     LEE BERGER: I answered the intercom, and Pedro, who was a student that I had enlisted as sort of the team leader, was on the other end. He said, "You're going to want to let us in," and I almost didn't because it was kind of a creepy voice like that. In they came, lifted up a laptop, and there I saw a picture that I thought I'd never see. There, sitting on this photograph, was a jawbone that I could see was a primitive hominid, but it was just lying there on the floor. Next picture was a skull.   00:06:07     Next picture, a series of bones of a body, it looked like. I'd never seen anything like that in all of my career, just lying there on the floor, and so we celebrated a little. I couldn't sleep that night. Picked up the phone at two a.m., called National Geographic.   00:06:25     ALICE WINKLER: National Geographic agreed to fund an expedition to bring up the bones, but because of the extremely tight and treacherous space the scientists were going to need to get through — remember, seven-and-a-half inches wide — Berger had to advertise for skinny little risk-taking scientists. He ended up with six volunteers who fit the bill, all women. He calls them underground astronauts.   00:06:54     LEE BERGER: Within a week, we had the richest hominid site ever discovered in the history of South Africa, and by the end of a 21-day expedition, we’d found more fossils of primitive hominids than had been discovered in the entire history of the search for human origins, and we left thousands in the chamber. It's probably the richest site ever discovered in the world. It's like our version of Tutankhamun's tomb.   00:07:23     ALICE WINKLER: Before the expedition began, Lee Berger explains, he thought that they were onto one skeleton, which would have been miracle enough.   00:07:32     LEE BERGER: You know, this is a field of fragments. We don’t find these things, and I'd already had my lottery ticket punched with sediba, you know. I had my skeletons from that discovery. I went after this second one with all the expectation of a fragmented skeleton that we would get out of some species. I never in the world expected that chamber to have that richness, and I really didn't expect to find another new species.   00:08:01     ALICE WINKLER: Berger and his team were able to put together enough complete skeletons - male, female, young and old, to confidently form a picture of what this creature looked like.   00:08:12     LEE BERGER: So the easiest way to sort of describe Homo naledi is, it's not a human, first. You've got to get that out of your mind, but it is standing on two legs. Imagine something standing on two legs. It's probably about five feet tall but ultrathin. If you were looking at it across a room, you'd immediately know you're not looking at a human, or if you are, there's something wrong with him because perched atop that five-foot body is going to be a pinhead, a head literally with a brain the size of an orange.   00:08:45     The shoulders would be high and almost a brought-up sort of — held like an ape would hold its shoulders, but then you'd notice that the arms would be more human proportioned. The hands would look like a human hand, except they'd be held and curved out at the end so that they wouldn't be flat. They would just be sort of more like an ape at the end but human proportioned.   00:09:11     When you got down to the hips, they'd be sort of flared, but again, a very slender body, and then long, skinny legs, which, at the very end of that, a humanlike foot.   00:09:23     ALICE WINKLER: Homo naledi may have just been discovered, but because of the huge number of bone fragments involved — over 1,500 pieces from 15 individuals — scientists probably already know more about it than almost any other species of human relative ever discovered. Berger says they don’t yet know its age because the tools now available aren’t well suited for the condition these bones were found in.   00:09:51     Homo naledi may have lived a hundred thousand years ago or as much as three million years ago. Either way, naledi’s physique and its behavior are providing scientists with crucial new insights.   00:10:06     LEE BERGER: And so, we can say that Homo naledi was a climber, but we don’t know what it was climbing. It has these very different hands than any kind of hominid we've ever seen before, with those long, curved fingers.   00:10:20     We know it's a long distance walker. It's got these long legs, and it's walking in much the way a human is. We can even see that in the way the foot and ankle are constructed, but it's doing it somehow a little bit differently because the pelvis is constructed differently. So you've got a climbing, long distance walker, but perhaps what's most amazing about it is that we've also had a glimpse into its behavior.   08:45:55     We've hypothesized, after eliminating pretty much everything else, that Homo naledi was deliberately disposing of its dead, which means it's got a mind that has the capacity that we previously thought was not only unique to humans, but perhaps identified humans — the concept, perhaps, of the recognition of self-mortality.   00:11:07     ALICE WINKLER: That bears repeating, repeating and elaborating. Lee Berger and his colleagues are quite certain that these creatures were intentionally disposing of their dead. Baruch Shemtov, who spoke to Dr. Berger for the Academy of Achievement in 2015, asked how he could be so sure.   00:11:28     LEE BERGER: We were faced with a dilemma. About day four, we realized that there was nothing in this chamber but hominids. All of us have degrees in archeology, forensic anthropology, and we kind of knew what it meant to see a truly monospecific assemblage. It's rare to the point of unique in the paleontological record. Well, except for one species, Homo sapiens. This wasn't Homo sapiens. We knew that very early on.   00:11:57     We knew it was primitive, and so we began trying to eliminate things. We could easily eliminate, eventually, that it wasn't a predator. There were no marks of that. There was no scavenging. We knew that it wasn't a mass death assemblage because they had come in one after the other. We could tell that from studies of how the bones had — were laid out, and also how they were weathering. We knew that they hadn't died in some collapse. We knew they weren't washed in there. We could see that from the sediments.   00:12:26     We went through everything, and we were eventually left with this one hypothesis, that this non-human species of animal was doing something that we previously thought only humans did, deliberately disposing of its dead.   00:12:44     BARUCH SHEMTOV: And why would that be so significant?   00:12:47     LEE BERGER: Well, up until September 10, when we announced that we have a species of non-human animal that deliberately disposes of its dead in a ritualized fashion — at least that's the best hypothesis — it was thought that that was not only unique to humans, but perhaps identified us. Now we have to rethink what it means to be a human.   00:13:12     ALICE WINKLER: Lee Berger emphasized several times during this interview that no one knows where this species, Homo naledi, fits into the human family tree. And more than that, he said, it’s probably the wrong question to be asking. If anything, Homo naledi and Berger’s previous discovery, sediba, seem to indicate that there is no one family tree. More likely, there are branches that split off, developed, and came back together at times.   00:13:42     That’s why Berger calls these two species human relatives rather than human ancestors. On the path to humankind, he says, there were lots of different experiments. I want to switch gears here and take you on Lee Berger’s personal path, the path that brought him to sediba and Homo naledi eventually, but that began in the mid-1960s on the farm where he grew up outside the tiny town of Sylvania, Georgia. It's far, far away in every way from where he now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.   00:14:19     LEE BERGER: I was always collecting things. I would spend my time in the woods whenever I could. Some unfortunate animals ended up in terrariums or aquariums in my house, or I would be out in the plowed fields looking for arrowheads or Native American artifacts or rocks. I came from a sort of long line of these sorts of explorers, if you will. My grandfather was an oil wildcatter. I have deep history in sodbusters, the first pioneers going out, and all types of sort of people who were always never happy to be right where they were but always looking for something.   00:14:55     And I found a real thrill in seeing things other people missed, you know, seeing the anomaly, if you will.   00:15:04     ALICE WINKLER: His dad sold insurance. His mom was a math teacher, but all he wanted to do was stay outdoors. He was an Eagle Scout, head of the Georgia 4H Club. You get the picture.   00:15:17     LEE BERGER: I began to become interested in wildlife conservation and biology. I found out there was an endangered species in my region called the gopher tortoise, and that took me to national competitions, and it also introduced me to the first scientists I’d ever met, and they were hugely formative. And I ended up starting the first gopher tortoise preserve in the state of Georgia.   00:15:41     It's now the state reptile, and it was a big part of teaching me not just about passion when you find something, but about the process of what you do to study something or to actually make something happen. It also taught me a little bit about politics, which, you know, getting some other people to become interested in something and assist you in accomplishing something.   00:16:05     ALICE WINKLER: But Lee Berger decided he ought to study law. Why is not such a big mystery, he explained in this interview with journalist Gail Eichenthal. Anyone who’s ever had parents can figure it out. “When you’re young,” he said, “what other people want you to be is often the easiest way out.” Berger got into Vanderbilt University on a Navy ROTC scholarship, but after his first few pre-law courses, he says, he was ready to die.   00:16:36     But he had gotten a scholarship to do what he was doing and didn’t see an escape.   00:16:41     LEE BERGER: My transcript looked sort of like F, D, D, F in my core subjects of what I was supposed to be, and then A, A, A in everything I was taking as an elective. And I reached a critical point where it was literally one of those situations where I was going to fail out of college, or I had to do something radical in my life.   00:17:05     And I had one of those incredible moments when I met a person who didn’t realize how influential he would be in my life, in the young lieutenant who was my advisor in the Naval ROTC, because I went in on the verge of failing out. Now I was lucky enough at that time that we had the two-year process, so I'd gone a year-and-a-bit into it, so I wouldn’t have to go enlisted, but I was in trouble.     00:17:33     And I went to him, and I said, "Gosh, you know, it's not working, and I think I'm maybe going to drop out for a while, maybe enlist in the Navy, and find myself, because this isn't working." And this young lieutenant, who had my life in his hands, he could have told me — and it would have been in his interests, because they're recruiting officers in some ways, to say, "Absolutely." Or, you know — he leaned across the table, and he said, "What is this, when you look at it?" And he had my transcript, and he shoved it across, and, you know, I was like, "Failure?"   00:18:09     You know, that was — and he said, "No, look at it again. Don't look at the D’s and F’s. Look at that again." And I said, "I don't see it." And he said, "I see your passion there. I see what you love. You just don't realize it." He said, "You’re not enlisted material. You need to find your love." And he said, "I will let you out of here right now as long as you promise me to go do what you love."   00:18:38     And he signed my release papers. I put my stay at Vanderbilt in abeyance, and I walked out the door into a very interesting period, but where I then found that thing and never looked back.   00:18:55     ALICE WINKLER: It wasn’t a straight shot to paleoanthropology. His journey included a stint as a news cameraman and the dramatic rescue of a drowning woman, but eventually Berger did get back to school, this time at East Georgia College.   00:19:10     LEE BERGER: And there I met a geologist who just exploded the world of fossils that were all around me. I had no idea, in the place that I lived, this low country, of what was around me. I met this — these passionate English professors and mathematicians. My grades, of course, rocked, because it wasn't work anymore. I stayed there for a brief period, got my grades back, went down to Georgia Southern University because it was the only place I could afford.   00:19:38     You know, I was on my own on this one. I’d had my scholarship chance. And I walked into another place with — that was just full of these rare, passionate academics and scientists. I had, by that time, read a book that fundamentally changed my life, and it was Lucy, and I actually took this book from the library. I did eventually pay the fine and put it back, but I couldn’t put it down.   00:20:06     ALICE WINKLER: “Lucy,” discovered in 1974 by Don Johanson and Tom Gray, was the first skeleton found of an early hominid, which is to say an animal that walks upright on two legs. Until Lucy, the field of paleoanthropology was based mostly on scraps and conjecture, which the book Lee Berger was reading made clear.   00:20:30     LEE BERGER: And there was one line in there that struck me, when Don, who would eventually become a great friend and mentor of mine, said that these early hominid fossils are effectively the rarest sought-after objects on Earth, and there's something like a one-in-ten-million chance of finding one. And I had just before then been thinking of becoming a dinosaur paleontologist or something, and I — that line so intrigued me because the first thought that came into my mind was not, "Gee, who would want to go into a field of science where you have no chance of finding something?"   00:21:11     But, "There's a field that you can make a difference with even the smallest discovery," and I wanted to make a difference.   00:21:21     ALICE WINKLER: Not too much later, Lee Berger met his hero, Don Johanson. Johanson liked him and invited him to join in on a project in Tanzania. When the project didn’t come through, though, Johanson arranged for Lee Berger to join a different research expedition in Kenya with the other most-famous paleontologist of that era, Richard Leakey.   00:21:44     LEE BERGER: My first morning there, I couldn’t sleep. Here I was. You know, these are the fossil fields of Africa. I woke up early. All the rest of the students stayed asleep, and I walked in. I saw the light on in this small encampment in the middle — right on the edge of Lake Turkana, middle of Africa, and there I met a man, John Kimengich, one of Richard Leakey’s fossil hunters, and he chatted to me for a moment. He was having tea.   00:22:12     It was probably 4:30, and then when he said, "You know, you want to go look for fossils with me? I'm going out now." I said, "Of course." Over the next several hours, he taught me how to find these anomalies, how to see these things, and as we were walking back to the Land Rover, 11:00 in the morning — it gets too hot to work — a hundred meters from the Land Rover, I look down, and there was a piece of a femur, this leg bone, of an early hominid. I found my first hominid — one-in-ten-million chance — my first day. It was completely — I was hooked.   00:22:46     ALICE WINKLER: Fast forward not too many years, Lee Berger, now just in his early 30s, had rocketed to a position as chair of a very prestigious research unit at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.   00:23:01     LEE BERGER: I'd taken over from a very powerful and famous paleoanthropologist named Phillip Vallentine Tobias, and I had made some discoveries. And when I first got to South Africa to do my Ph.D., I discovered two little hominid teeth, but those two teeth were the first new early hominid site discovered in Southern Africa in 48 years. They appeared in National Geographic, two teeth. That's how rare this stuff was at the time.     00:23:32     I had done other work looking at what killed the Taung Child. I had looked at body proportions, but I had not made major hominid discoveries because they are just that rare. And I had gotten into the type of ups and downs and wars — I'd had the most ferocious fights with colleagues, and I was always pushing boundary. I also took a stance in the late 1990s about open access to fossils.   00:24:03     You’ve got to remember — it's very important to remember — that I'm almost the first generation of scientists, people my age and just maybe a year older, that were never without a computer. It makes us think differently, and, in the late 1990s, there were some behavioral abnormalities within paleoanthropology that bothered me a lot. And I was in a very powerful position, a young man made director in seemingly one of the most powerful chairs in the science of paleoanthropology. And I had fossils that had been found by other people, albeit in the very distant past, under my control.   00:24:40     And in this science, those are resources, and I decided to open them up, let everyone look at them. It now is called “open access.” We didn’t have a name for it at that time, really, but I took a relatively public stance on that, that I was going to let people see these fossils. It was not the way it was done.   00:25:00     ALICE WINKLER: Keep in mind, the idea of an online database was still pretty novel at the time, so that's not what Lee Berger’s talking about here.   00:25:09     LEE BERGER: That was yet to be. No, I meant physically look at them. I meant — and it may sound strange to people, but let scientific colleagues see material, published or unpublished. And that was not the norm. The norm at that time was — and I'm not criticizing it, I'm just explaining how the science worked. You would gather a small team of people around you when you had important fossils, and you would study them over years and years and years and years, and then, at times, you would pronounce on the analyses that you had carefully conducted.   00:25:46     While that's not wrong in any way, shape, or form, it was different than the way my generation thinks about the value. We grew up in the age of where you have a Google or a Facebook or the Internet, where we didn't know what anything was worth until you put it out there and began to establish its worth as a community, as you tested the robusticity of it as you went along.   00:26:13     And so, I was looking at the fossils the same way, and I said, "I'm going to open the safe door." Well, it was probably a decade too early to say that, and it caused wars. It coincided with also a discovery of a very major fossil by a person older than me that worked for me. That caused tension and conflicts.   00:26:34     ALICE WINKLER: All in all, it was one of the lowest periods in his career. Berger says some of the academic infighting caused him to dissolve his own unit, which he’d spent six or seven years building. Eventually, he rebuilt it, but the problems persisted, and then technology shifted with the advent of 3D imaging and reliable large data.   00:26:58     LEE BERGER: Because my exploration efforts looking for fossils in various sites and stuff had not produced any really big hits, the push by things like the universities and colleagues was to move away from exploration. There was very much a real feel that we’d probably pretty much discovered every major fossil field in Africa, and, in fact, some scientists even wrote that down at the turn of the millennia.   00:27:27     ALICE WINKLER: It was becoming clear to Lee Berger that the future of paleoanthropology was going to be in the lab, looking at the fossils already discovered decades before with new tools. Berger began thinking about a career shift.   00:27:43     LEE BERGER: It was going to be very hard to continue to get the kind of resources to fund risk-taking exploration. People were clearly not believing that there were other sites out there. There were talks of not even allowing digging at new sites because they clearly had failed, and I'd almost been a demonstration of that over 17 years. It was at that moment that I became the last human being on Earth to discover Google Earth.   00:28:09     ALICE WINKLER: Berger had spent the previous three years using a handheld GPS and satellite maps he bought from NASA for thousands - sometimes tens of thousands - of dollars, to try and plot the coordinates of known fossil sites. It’s complicated and pretty technical, but he was looking for clues on the terrain that might help him discover where to search next. This technology was a big leap forward, he thought. Then, as he said, came Google Earth.   00:28:42     LEE BERGER: Well, you know, after looking at my house, like everyone does the first time they do it, I saw that little window over to the left that you could put GPS coordinates in. And I had some of the most expensively obtained GPS coordinates on the planet to put in that window, and I typed them in, and I saw what everyone sees, that amazing Google Earth phenomena of flying from the sky and popping right down onto the point that that coordinate is.   00:29:09     And my coordinate, the first one, which I'd put in because I knew it better than any place on Earth, landed on nothing. It landed hundreds and hundreds of meters away. Second point I put in, the same thing. Third — they were all useless. They were all wrong. I had wasted three years of my life. I had wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of research grant.   00:29:34     Did not take me long to Google why the U.S. government had put deliberate error into those GPSs in the late 1990s, for military purposes, and that, with my — the errors that were inherent in those handheld GPSs had created a compounding error. Well, that was like adding low to low on my life at that moment, and so I spent the rest of December and January moving those points physically on Google from where they landed to where I knew they should be, because I could see these sites.   00:30:10     It was one of the most important moments in the entire story of my scientific career because it was in correcting that error that I began to see patterns, that I began to see that they fell in linear structures, that I began to see the fossil sites clustered together. Caves might be in more random situations.   00:30:37     And I also began to see and learn what a site would look like, all the different varieties, and I began to think that if that’s a site, that looks like a site, and this looks like a site.   00:30:52     ALICE WINKLER: First thing he did was make a list of targets, gathered a team, and started out. Within the year, he’d found 40 new fossil sites in an area world-famous for having 20. Then one morning he went out with a student; his dog, Tao; and his nine-year-old son, Matthew, to look at a potential site where some miners, looking for lime 100 years ago, had blasted a few holes with dynamite. For some reason, though, the miners had left the site otherwise untouched.   00:31:26     LEE BERGER: Matthew shouts, "Dad, I found a fossil!" He was 15 meters off the site in high grass. I could see he was holding a small rock, and just for a moment I almost didn't go look because I knew what he would have found. He would have found an antelope fossil because for every one of these early hominins we find, these human ancestor pieces, we find about 250,000 pieces of antelopes. We just don't find these things.   00:31:55     My nine-year-old son and — encouraging fossil-hunting — I started walking towards him, and five meters away I knew that his and my life were going to change forever. Because he was holding a small rock — you have to visualize and crouch down, and there on the outside of it was an S-shaped bone. And that S-shaped bone was a hominin clavicle, and the reason I knew that is very few mammals, first, in Africa have hominin clavicles.   00:32:24     Bats have them because they fly. Moles have them because they dig, and primates have them. We're primates, and only amongst primates do humans and our ancestors have this very characteristic S-shape, and at that time I was probably one of the world's only experts on hominin clavicles. I did my Ph.D. on them. All six or seven pieces, never a complete one, had been found.   00:32:49     I did my thesis on the clavicle, the proximal humerus, and the scapula, and one of the reasons I did is there were no complete bones in the entire record of those, and it was about the only thing left to study, and it was all scraps. And I was looking at one.   00:33:04     ALICE WINKLER: Berger turned over the rock, and on the other side was a jaw and a tooth. It turned out he and nine-year-old Matthew had found the partial skeleton of a child, a tween actually. Up until that day, there were only something like seven partial early hominid skeletons ever found, and two of those were discovered by Berger’s role models and mentors, Don Johanson and Richard Leakey. Overnight, Lee Berger had joined their ultra-elite club.   00:33:39     And all three, I can't help mentioning here, are members of the Academy of Achievement. But anyway, when Berger went back to the fossil site to hunt for the rest of his skeleton, he discovered another, and another, and another — six skeletons in all, belonging to that species he named Australopithecus sediba. At the time he talked to the Academy of Achievement about sediba, four years later, he was still in the glow of it.   00:34:10     After all, it was the discovery of a lifetime, as he told journalist Gail Eichenthal.   00:34:16     LEE BERGER: That started this adventure I’ve been on. It has — the site of Malapa, which I would eventually call it, which means “my home,” has turned into perhaps the richest early hominid site ever discovered in the history of this planet.   00:34:29     ALICE WINKLER: But remember, this conversation about sediba with the Academy of Achievement took place in 2012. The very next year, lightning struck again when Lee Berger discovered another new species, Homo naledi, and a way bigger collection of skeletons deep inside a cave, intentionally buried, it seems. Just weeks after news of that discovery went very, very viral, Lee Berger spoke with the Academy for the second time.   00:35:03     LEE BERGER: Homo naledi has done something that I thought would never happen to me as a paleoanthropologist. I went into a field to study and interpret bones. Suddenly, not only are there bones, but you've got a discovery that's giving you insight into behavior in a way that I never anticipated. The idea that we're getting a window into another species' mind from this chamber — that's amazing, you know?   00:35:33     That's something that I think the whole world is going to have to think about. You know, you've got something here, a discovery that's making us question our own humanity. I guess I don’t know how I feel about that. I haven't had enough time to digest the effect of that in something that I wasn't really prepared for. I'd spent my life as a biologist, a paleontologist, and now I have to also think like a philosopher. That's kind of neat though.   00:36:09     ALICE WINKLER: Lee Berger doesn’t know what he’s looking for next. At any moment, he says, his phone could ring and one of his explorers could be on the other end saying, "Hey, you’ve got to see this," and that, Berger says, is the thrill of it. This is What It Takes from the Academy of Achievement. If you want to learn more about Lee Berger’s life and work, go to achievement.org, and because you are a particularly curious form of hominid, make sure to follow us on Twitter to find out about upcoming episodes. Our handle is @WhatItTakesNow. I’m Alice Winkler.   00:36:49     And thanks, as always, to the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation for funding What It Takes.  

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