– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

Welcome to Learning English,

a daily 30 minute program from the Voice of America.

I'm Caty. Weaver.

And I'm Mario Ritter Jr.

This program is designed for English learners.

So we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases,

especially written for people learning

English.

On today's program, John Russell reports

on unmanned aircraft for agriculture.

Jill Robbins has a story about an ancient, bird like animal.

Bryan Lynn tells about the Voyager spacecraft on the science report,

then wishing on lesson of the day.

But first.

American companies are developing

unmanned aircraft systems that are larger than drones.

The goal is for the aircraft to help agricultural producers

and reduce risks to human safety.

When Hector Xue was learning

to pilot a helicopter in college,

he remembered having a few bad experiences while flying at night.

The experiences led him

to research unmanned aircraft systems

while getting his doctorate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Then, Xu formed Rotor Technologies in 2021

to develop unmanned helicopters.

Roder has built two autonomous helicopters

that the company calls Spray Hawks.

Roder aims to have as many as 20

spray hawks ready for market next year.

The company also is developing

helicopters that would fly shipments into disaster areas

and to oil rigs in oceans.

The helicopters could also be used to fight wildfires.

For now, Roder is paying attention to agriculture.

The industry has accepted automation

with drones, but sees unmanned helicopters

as a better way to spray larger areas

with pesticides and fertilizers.

A major appeal of automation

in agriculture flights is safety,

because special airplanes, called crop

dusters, fly at around 240km/h

and only about three meters off the ground.

There are tens of accidents each year.

The small planes hit power lines,

cell towers and other planes.

Older planes in disrepair and pilot

tiredness play a part in accidents.

2014 report from the

National Transportation Safety Board found

there were more than 800 agriculture flight accidents

between 2001 and 2010,

including 81 that were deadly.

A separate report from the National Agriculture Aviation Association

found nearly 640 accidents from 2014

until this month, with 109 deaths.

It is a very, very dangerous profession,

said Dan Martin, a research engineer with the US Department

of Agriculture's Agriculture Research Service.

Martin said about the pilots,

they make all their money in those short few months.

So sometimes it may mean that they fly

10 to 12 hours a day or more.

Job risks also include possible contact

with farming, chemicals in recent years.

Safety and cost concerns have led to a number of drones

flying above farmers fields, Martin said.

He added that some 10,000 drones

will likely be sold this year alone.

It's growing exponentially as a market

super fast, Martin said.

But the size of the drones means they only can cover

a small amount of the area that a plane or helicopter can.

The limitation is

providing an opening for companies building bigger unmanned aircraft

like Rotor and another company, Pica.

California based Pica announced in August

that it had sold its first autonomous electric aircraft

for crop protection, and to a buyer in the United States.

Pikas.

Pelican spray, a fixed wing aircraft, received

official approval last year to fly for crop protection.

The company also sold its Pelican

spray to Dole for use in Honduras

and to the Brazilian company SLC Agricola.

Lucas Coke is chief technology officer

at Hainan Brothers Agro Services.

The company which but the Pelicans prey in August.

Coke has called unmanned aircraft

part of a coming revolution

that will save farmers money and increase safety.

The Kansas based company operates out of airports

from Texas to Illinois.

Coke does not see the unmanned aircraft

replacing all the company's pilots,

but rather taking over the riskiest jobs.

The biggest draw

is taking the pilot out of the aircraft inside

of those most dangerous situations, cook said.

But Coke also says that autonomous aviation systems

could bring new dangers to an already busy airspace.

Still, the risk is

less of a concern in rural areas,

with plenty of open space and fewer people.

Companies like rotor have developed

their systems to work if bad events come up.

Rotors helicopter, for example,

has a half dozen communications systems

and for now, a remote pilot in control.

If the ground team loses contact with the helicopter,

rotor has a system to deal with the problem.

The system makes sure the engine can be turned off,

and the helicopter can perform a controlled landing.

The safety measures will go a long way to helping the company receive

what it expects will be official government

approval to fly its helicopters for business purposes

once the company has approval.

The difficulty, as Xu sees it, will be building more devices

to meet the demand in the United States and Brazil.

I'm John Russell.

The brains

of today's birds show a level of intelligence

and behavioral complexity

rivaled only by mammals.

But scientists do not fully understand how bird brains have changed

over millions of years from the form they had as dinosaurs.

That understanding is now growing

thanks to a fossil discovery in Brazil.

Researchers unearthed the remains, or fossil, of a head, bone

or skull of a bird species not known before

it has been named.

Another witness, Hestia.

The fossil was in such good condition that scientists were able

to create a computer image of its brain

and inner ear structures, as

it lived in a dry area about 80 million years ago,

during the Cretaceous period, near the end of the age of dinosaurs.

This finding is one of a kind, said University of Cambridge

fossil expert Guillermo Avalon, a lead researcher of the study.

It appeared this month

in the publication Nature.

Birds developed from small feathered dinosaurs

during the Jurassic period.

The novel Ana's Discovery

filled in a 70 million year gap in the understanding of the development

of the bird dating back to the earliest known bird,

Archaeopteryx.

It lived about 150 million years ago

in what is now Europe.

The researchers said

the novel Ana's Skull has a bill

and is shaped like modern birds.

Its brain shows both modern and ancient elements,

and some that are in between.

Luis Chiapas

is a fossil scientist at the Natural History Museum of Los

Angeles County in California, and a co-writer of the study.

He said scientists

rarely find such skulls of early birds,

and this one is the best preserved ever.

Daniel Field is a fossil scientist

at the University of Cambridge and the study's lead writer.

He said scientists have long struggled to understand how

and when the brains and intelligence of birds developed.

The field has been awaiting

the discovery of a fossil exactly like this one.

He said

the novel Ana's brain, measuring about ten millimeters

across, is smaller relative to skull size

than that of modern birds,

but the skull is larger

and more complex than that of Archaeopteryx.

Its cerebellum, a brain structure

that in living birds helps with motor control during flight,

was smaller than in today's bird species

and more like Archaeopteryx is,

but its brain was connected to the spinal cord

in a way similar to modern birds as well as humans.

It was unlike Archaeopteryx

and the dinosaurs from which birds evolved.

Nervousness also had something special its inner ear organ for

balance is larger than in any other known bird.

The fossil included 80%

of the birds bone structure or skeleton.

The scientists say they believe the bird could fly well

based on their examination of the remains.

Field said, if you gave it a quick look,

you might think it was like a living bird.

But a closer look would show you some important differences,

like claws coming out of its wings.

I'm Jill Robins.

NASA has once again reconnected

with its Voyager spacecraft, marking a continuous portion

of the American space agency's longest mission in history.

The two spacecraft, Voyager one and Voyager two,

launched within weeks of each other in 1977,

so they have been operating for more than 47 years.

NASA officials have reported several difficulties

with the spacecraft in recent years,

mainly communication issues.

The most recent problems involved

the Voyager one spacecraft,

NASA said in a statement in April.

It had remained out of touch with the spacecraft

for the previous five months.

Agency officials said they later learned

the problem was linked to a chip inside

one of Voyager One's onboard computers.

The issue may data being sent

by the spacecraft unreadable.

NASA said its engineers were able to fix that problem

by making changes to how the spacecraft stores and reads data.

Then in October,

NASA reported another communication issue

that resulted in a brief delay

in receiving data from Voyager one.

That problem turned out to be linked to the spacecraft's

radio transmitter system.

The agency said that

for some reason, Voyager one's fault

protection system was activated when NASA sent a command

for the spacecraft to turn on one of its heaters.

This activation, meant to save power,

led Voyager one to start sending signals

to a different radio transmitter system.

Then it normally uses.

This meant NASA had to listen

for the signals on the S-band instead of the usual X-band.

Once they did this, they were able

to start receiving data again.

NASA has said the S-band is much weaker

than the X-band, so engineers were seeking

to get the X-band radio communication system

back online for long term use.

NASA said the agency had not used

the S-band since 1981.

Voyager one and Voyager two are NASA's

most distant operating spacecraft.

The agency has reported Voyager one is exploring space

from about 24,000,000,000km from Earth,

while Voyager two is operating

from about 20.5 billion kilometers away.

Because of this great distance, NASA says its communication

with the two Voyagers takes about one day to receive data

and another day to send information back from Earth.

The two Voyagers were first

designed to explore Jupiter and Saturn.

Both spacecraft successfully

carried out studies of those planets.

Later, Voyager two made the first ever

close observations of Uranus and Neptune.

In 1989.

The two spacecraft then began a new mission

to explore distant areas of space.

In 2013, NASA

announced Voyager one had crossed over the border

dividing our solar system from Interstate stellar space.

The term interstellar means between stars.

Scientists say interstellar

space begins where the sun's continuous flow of particles

and its magnetic field stop.

Voyager two first entered

interstellar space in 2018.

NASA said the spacecraft was more than 17.7

billion kilometers from the sun at the time.

Both Voyagers are the only spacecraft so far

to explore interstellar space.

The space agency says the Voyagers are studying

how the interstellar medium interacts with the solar wind.

Solar wind is the continuous flow

of charged particles released by the sun.

The spacecraft have also provided data on the heliosphere,

a kind of protective bubble around our solar system.

Suzanne Dodd is the current project manager

for the Voyager mission at NASA's Jet

Propulsion Laboratory in California.

She recently said in a statement

the agency has no plans to retire the two Voyagers

as long as they are communicating with mission

members back on Earth.

Dodd said the spacecraft are currently centered on observing

how interstellar space and the heliosphere interact with each other.

We wouldn't be doing Voyager

if it wasn't taking science data, she added.

Dodd noted one reason the Voyagers have been operating

for so long is that the engineers who built them

provided multiple backup systems

to avoid future problems.

She said some who worked on Voyager in its earliest days

have even come back from retirement to pass on knowledge

to the next generation of scientists and engineers.

From where I sit as a project

manager, it's really very exciting to see young engineers

be excited to work on Voyager, Dodd said.

To take on the challenges of an old mission and to work side by side

with some of the masters, the people that built the spacecraft.

They want to learn from each other.

I'm Bryan Lynn.

Welcome to the

lesson of the day on the Learning English Podcast.

My name is Andrew Smith.

And my name is Jill Robins.

Thanks for joining us.

Today's lesson will help you learn more about the English you hear.

In our video series, let's Learn English.

The series shows animate Teo and her work and life in Washington, D.C..

Here's Ana introducing herself.

Hello.

My name is Ana Mateo.

In our previous lesson of the day,

we heard Ana and her friend Bruna

talk about hopes and wishes.

In today's podcast lesson, we're

going to give you more ways to practice using the verb wish.

But first, let's listen to Ana and Bruna again.

This is from lesson ten of level

two of the Let's Learn English series.

Hi, Ana.

Hi, Bruna.

What's up?

I thought we could meet for lunch today.

I wish I could, but I can't.

I have to research Peru for a story.

How's it going? Not so good.

I've been reading about Peru and listening to Peruvian music.

I really want to understand Peru.

I hope it's enough.

We wish for things we can't do, have or be.

That means we wish for things

that are different from how things are now.

To show this difference, English changes

the form of the verb or modal that follows

the word wish, for example, can change

this to could have changes to had

is changes to were

was, changes to had been, and so on.

So it sounds like this.

I wish I could.

I wish I had.

I wish I were. I wish I had been.

Of course, those are not complete sentences.

So now we'll explain how you can practice

making sentences with the word wish first.

Right?

Or think of a sentence that describes a real situation in the present

or in the past.

Then use a sentence with which to express the idea

that we want a different situation.

Jill and I are going to give you some examples.

First we say one thing

and then we wish that thing were different.

Are you ready, Jill?

Ready?

I can't swim.

I wish I could swim.

I don't understand the question.

I wish I understood the question.

My head hurts.

I wish my head didn't hurt.

Okay.

Notice that after the word wish,

we use a word that sounds like we are talking about the past.

But we are not talking about the past.

Listen again to this example.

I don't understand the question.

I wish I understood the question.

The verb understand changes to understood.

But we're not talking about the past.

In fact, we want to understand the question now.

But because.

Which means that it is not possible at the present time for us to understand.

We change the verb to understood.

We could also say, I wish I could understand the question.

This change of the verb form

also happens in conditional statements,

like sentences that start with the word.

If right.

For example, we say, if I had more time, I would study more.

The verb had does not mean the past.

Instead, it shows a situation that is not real because it comes after the word. If.

Okay.

Now let's give more examples with wish.

Are you ready again, Jill?

Ready?

I didn't see the game.

I wish I had seen the game.

He is not here.

I wish he were here.

I smoke cigarets.

I wish you didn't smoke cigarets.

They talk really fast.

I wish they didn't talk so fast.

Then you are not at the party.

I wish you had been at the party.

Notice that for real statements

about what people do, we change it to negative.

When we use wish.

They talk really fast.

I wish they didn't talk so fast.

In the same way,

the negation shown by the word not disappears

when we use wish.

I didn't see the game.

I wish I had seen the game.

Now it's your turn, listeners.

We will

say a sentence about a real situation,

and then give you time to say

a sentence using the word wish.

After you will hear us say a sentence

using the word wish so you can compare your answer.

Are you ready?

Okay, here we go.

Sentence number one I can't visit my family.

I wish I could visit my family.

Sentence number two.

I don't have a car.

I wish I had a car.

Sentence number three.

He is always late.

I wish he weren't always late.

Sentence number four.

They are not here.

I wish they were here.

Sentence number five.

I didn't go to the beach.

I wish I had gone to the beach.

Sentence number six.

She didn't help me.

I wish she had helped me.

Sentence number seven.

She never talks to me.

I wish she would talk to me.

Sentence number eight.

I don't know how to swim.

I wish I knew how to swim.

Listeners, how well did you do?

Was it easy or difficult to change your sentences

and use the word wish?

There are a lot of forms to learn,

so don't worry if you could not change all the sentences,

but you can always go back and play the examples again

and try to save the sentences with the word wish.

We hope these exercises will be helpful.

Now, before we finish, here's a little chart

with more examples using the word wish.

Ready? Listen.

I can't sing, but I wish I could.

And you don't dance. But I wish you would.

You don't cook and you don't try.

I wish you would cook. And I wish you would try.

I would if I could, but I don't have the time.

I wish we had a much longer day.

I do too, but what else can we say?

How about this?

We wish we had more time with you.

We wish we did. You know it's true.

But it looks like time is running out.

So one more thing before we go.

We hope you'll write us and let us know something that you wish

that we would do to help you learn and have fun, too.

Well, we really do have to go now.

Write to us and tell us your wishes at Learning

English at VOA News.com.

And remember, you can also find us

on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook.

I'm Jill Robbins.

Thanks for listening. I'm Andrew Smith.

And that's our show for today.

But join us again tomorrow to keep learning

English on the Voice of America.

I'm Caty Weaver.

And I'm Mario Ritter Jr.

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
designed /dɪˈzaɪnd/ B1	verb - to plan and make something
learners /ˈlɜːnərz/ A2	noun - people who are learning something
reports /rɪˈpɔːrts/ B1	noun - accounts given to someone verb - to give an account of something
ancient /ˈeɪnʃənt/ B2	adjective - very old
aircraft /ˈeəkˌræft/ B1	noun - a vehicle that flies
agriculture /ˈæɡrɪkʌltʃər/ B1	noun - the science or practice of farming
safety /ˈseɪfti/ A2	noun - the state of being safe
pilots /ˈpaɪləts/ B1	noun - people who fly aircraft
experiences /ɪkˈspɪəriənsɪz/ B1	noun - events or things that happen to someone
research /rɪˈsɜːrtʃ/ B2	noun - a careful study of something verb - to make a careful study of something
autonomous /ɔːˈtɒnəməs/ C1	adjective - able to operate independently
automation /ˌɔːtəˈmeɪʃən/ B2	noun - the use of machines to do work
pesticides /ˈpestɪsaɪdz/ B2	noun - chemicals used to kill pests
fertilizers /ˈfɜːrtɪlaɪzərz/ B1	noun - chemicals used to help plants grow
accidents /ˈæksɪdənts/ A2	noun - unintentional events causing harm
disrepair /dɪsriˈpeər/ C1	noun - a state of being in bad condition
deadly /ˈdedli/ B2	adjective - causing death

Key Grammar Structures

• So we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English.

  ➔ Adverbs of degree (a little), comparative adjectives (slower), and the adverb 'especially' to modify an adjective.

  ➔ The sentence demonstrates how the program adjusts its pace and vocabulary for learners. “A little” modifies “slower” indicating a slight reduction in speed. “Especially” highlights that the vocabulary is *particularly* designed for English learners.

• This program is designed for English learners.

  ➔ Passive voice ('is designed') and prepositional phrase ('for English learners').

  ➔ The passive voice emphasizes the action being done *to* the program, rather than who is doing the designing. The phrase 'for English learners' specifies the target audience.

• So we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English.

  ➔ Use of 'especially' as an adverb modifying the past participle 'written'.

  ➔ The word 'especially' emphasizes that the words and phrases are *particularly* created for the needs of English learners. It modifies 'written', indicating the specific quality of the vocabulary.

• But first. American companies are developing unmanned aircraft systems that are larger than drones.

  ➔ Relative clause ('that are larger than drones') modifying 'unmanned aircraft systems'.

  ➔ The relative clause provides additional information about the unmanned aircraft systems, specifying that they are bigger in size compared to typical drones.