ESL WORKSHEET - Einstein

LESSON PLAN FOR ENGLISH TEACHERS

ALBERT EINSTEIN

LinguaHouse
Jan. 15, 2022

Level: Intermediate (B1-B2)
Type of English: General English
Tags: Celebrities and Historical Figures; Science and Technology; War and Peace; The Universe and Space; Vocabulary and Grammar
Publication date: 01/15/2022

This audio-aided lesson tells the life story of the legendary physicist Albert Einstein. The lesson focuses on vocabulary, listening comprehension, and speaking and includes a short look at linking words that show contrast. The optional extension task is a mini marketing activity about how the name Einstein can be used to sell products (by Stephanie Hirschman).

• CLICK HERE to download the student’s worksheet (American English).
• CLICK HERE to download the student’s worksheet (British English).
• CLICK HERE to download the teacher’s lesson plan (American English).
• CLICK HERE to download the teacher’s lesson plan (British English).
• CLICK HERE to listen to/download the American English audio (MP3).
• CLICK HERE to listen to/download the British English audio (MP3).

TRANSCRIPT (American English)

Albert Einstein was born in Germany in 1879 to a Jewish family. The young Albert spoke much later than most children, and his teachers at school thought he wouldn’t achieve much. In contrast, at home, the boy was musical and curious. Tutored informally in science by a family friend, he wrote his first scientific paper in his teens.
Albert completed his high school education in Switzerland before studying mathematics and physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In 1902 he took up a job with the Swiss government. As this work was not very difficult, he had plenty of time to think about physics.
1905 has been described as Einstein’s “miracle year”. In addition to completing his Ph.D., he published four groundbreaking papers. He eventually won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for one of these, which explained the photoelectric effect.
Two other papers laid out his ideas about relativity, or the relationship between energy, space, and time, and one put forward the famous equation E=mc². Although many physicists found these theories controversial, astronomical observations over the next decade confirmed them.
With the support of the famous physicist Max Planck, Einstein lectured widely and then took up a series of important academic jobs in Europe before serving as director of the Institute for Physics in Berlin from 1917 to 1933.
However, after the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s, as a Jewish person, Einstein’s life was in danger. He moved to the United States to teach at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, becoming a US citizen in 1940.
Despite being a lifelong pacifist, when the Second World War began, he worked on Navy weapons systems. Surprisingly, he was not invited to join the government’s atomic weapons research program, even though it was his work that had led to their development. This may have been because the FBI was suspicious of his political beliefs. After the use of atomic bombs against Japan in 1945, he joined a group of physicists working to limit the use of these terrible weapons.
In the following years, Einstein continued his work on relativity and considered time travel, black holes, and the origins of the universe, searching for a unified theory of physics. At this time, many physicists were more focused on quantum physics, which describes the behavior of tiny subatomic particles, so increasingly he felt like he was working alone.
Einstein was married to Serbian physicist Mileva Maric from 1903 to 1919. After their divorce, he was married to a cousin, Elsa Lowenthal, until her death in 1936. He died in 1955 after refusing an operation for a heart problem. Famously, his brain was removed for study, and the area relating to mathematical thinking was found to be 15% wider than most people’s.
Today the name Einstein is a synonym for genius - he will always be remembered for his unique combination of intelligence, curiosity, and imagination.

Adapted from: https://www.linguahouse.com/esl-lesson-plans/general-english/albert-einstein. Accessed on January 18, 2022. LinguaHouse.com © 2008 - 2022. All rights reserved.