Current Event #4

Date: 1-8-12

Name: Alexander Yan

Current Events Journal #4

Title: Booking a Flight to Space, With Travel Insurance 

Author: Kenneth Chang

Source: __________

The topic of the article is booking flights to space

The main idea of the article is: You can now book flights to space but for a hefty payment like over 15,000 dollars just for a seat. You can also add travel insurance to your trip. Now this increases the people going to space because it is now more affordable.  This is stated.

The author’s purpose for writing this article is to inform the reader that you can now travel to space like you would travel in an airplane.

The author’s perspective in this article is objective because it doesn’t talk about his or her opinions.

The pattern of organization of the article is flashback. It says you can go to space the same why you book a flight and it gives an example from the past.

The reason the author chose this pattern for the article is because it helps make the article clearer. It says you can book a flight to space, and then it gives an example of someone booking a flight to space.

The text features included in the article are: quotes. They help by telling the reader how the costumers feel about this type of “trip”. Another feature are the details, they help by making the article clearer. The last text feature is the title. It tells what the story is going to be about.

This article is about (a summary in your own words) going to space like how you would book an airplane flight. You can also get travel insurance for the flight, too. There are many companies that do this, but the most talked about in the article is Virgin Galactic. The trip is two hours and a half. Once in space or suborbital, you can move around it the cabin and take pictures with the curvature of the Earth in the background.

The significance (importance) of this article is that it now shows that technology has advanced so much, that now even the little more wealthier general public can go into space.

What I learned from this article is that you can book flights into space like you would with an airplane trip.

What I liked about this article is that it is very informative and that it provided details to support the main idea. Also it used superb vocabulary words like jaunt.

What I did not like about it is nothing. It is well written and does not add or leave out any unneeded or important information.

Who should read this article and why people who have dreamed to go to space should read this. I think this because now it informs them that they could.

This article reminds me of (text-to-self) when I wanted to see space when I was little.

(text-to-text) This reminds me of the biography I read for summer reading, Ilan Ramon a Shining Star. It reminds me of this because he was an astronaut.

(text-to-world) This reminds me of the movie Despicable Me because the main character wanted to become an astronaut.

New vocabulary I learned

Word Context Clues Meaning

1. jaunt: rocket ship it has built, featuring five minutes of weightlessness during a two-and-a-half hour jaunt. Meaning: trip

2. grandiosity: “Hopefully by next Christmas, myself, my daughter and my son will be the first people to go up into space” on a commercial craft, Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin Galactic, said in a videotaped interview in November (with a touch of his signature grandiosity). Meaning: kindness

3. albeit: For Ms. Culver, the Virgin flight will fulfill a dream, albeit an expensive one. Meaning: although