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CONVERSATION LESSON

TURNING POINTS IN HISTORY

Turning points in history. That’s the topic of this month’s lesson.

Turning points in history

What was the turning point in the history of Deep English.

The turning point in the history of Deep English. That’s a good question Dan.

I think it is when I took you aside and I said, you need to quit all this ballet, all this tap dancing and become an English teacher and change the world.

Yeah, I think that was it. That would have been the turning point.

And you haven’t tap danced since, right?

That’s right, I have given it up completely.

Ballet, too.

Yep.

Some people said you had a ….

I still have my ballet shoes though.

Right, right.

They are hiding a little box.

A lot of people don’t know that. We will break that out for a lesson one day. Turning points in history. We started off this story with Hitler.

Yeah Adolf Hitler, one of the most infamous of all war criminals.

Right, the most notorious.

Notorious, that’s right.

I read about that Hitler didn’t have any children, of course, but he had nephews. I read that they have decided to never procreate, to never have children.

That’s interesting. I wonder if that’s true.

If it came out of my mouth, there’s a good 50/50 chance.

There’s a good chance, 50/50 chance. Okay, fair enough. Well they do say, Believe half of what you read and none of what you hear, so I’m not going to believe it.

Let’s try to keep it a little simpler. Just believe everything I say. No, but apparently they felt that it was irresponsible, that maybe there was something locked in their DNA that could create another monster that could destroy the world or set off another war or do something horrible.

Wow.

Which is interesting because obviously they had morals in that they were worried about it.

Yeah, I cannot help but wonder if the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler was a combination of many different things. It wasn’t just his genetic makeup, but it could have been his life circumstances, a situation.

It was 100% the art school.

It was the art school, that’s what did it, huh? He just got rejected and that was it. It flipped the switch.

That’s what our storyline is and of course it wasn’t all, it couldn’t have just been art school. I mean he probably would have been a different kind of tyrant. Maybe, he would have been a tyrant at …

An art tyrant of some sort.

Yeah, at some kind of museum curator. Maybe, he would have been a tyrant in the art world.

What I find kind of fascinating about this month’s theme is the fact that one small little thing can have such a huge consequence.

Right.

But if we reverse it and say that okay, let’s say that Adolf Hitler did actually get accepted to art school, okay he never would have become this notorious war criminal that he became.

But, that may have opened the door for some other person to come in who could have been worse.

That’s true.

I mean so, what do they say, Hindsight is 20/20? Something like that, yeah.

Right, yeah, it could be. I mean it could be that one of the people that was under him would have risen to power in his place.

Yeah, but interesting how a little rejection could have set off the events that later affected so many millions of people’s lives.

The topic we bring up in the story is the hypothetical time machine question and what would you do?

Oh, yeah, I thought about that.

What you go back and kill Hitler?

If it meant saving the lives of millions and millions of people, is that how you present the …

Yeah, the whole time machine quandary is we don’t know what will happen.

It is a hard question to answer. The short answer is of course I would, of course, but what would that be the effect? Would really those people be saved or would it cause some other kind of disastrous series of events in the future? We just don’t know. This comes back to that whole butterfly effect where the flapping of the butterflies wings sets off a series of events in a very complicated world where months later or years later it causes a giant hurricane that destroys some country or series of cities or whatever. Yeah, the short answer is sure, of course, I would do that to save millions of people but really would that

You won’t even kill a mosquito. Isn’t that true? Didn’t you once tell me that you got a thing about killing bugs.

Well, I mean, I try not to kill for matters of convenience.

A little Gandhi in you. You won’t kill a mosquito?

It’s not that I won’t, I don’t.

And you want to take out Hitler.

I didn’t say I wanted to.

That ain’t gonna happen. You don’t get the keys to the time machine.

Okay, fair enough. What about you? What would you

Oh, yeah I would take him out.

You would take him out.

I would wait until, I would get him early, why he was little. He was already little but he might about been a strong little guy. Yeah, Hitler, that was one turning point, the art school rejection letter. Could that have changed things? Maybe, he just would have gotten frustrated even if he had gotten into Art University because apparently he was not that good. I mean I have seen his paintings, they look okay to me.

Oh you have seen his paintings.

Yeah, you can see them on Wikipedia. You can see them online. They look okay. They are nothing amazing but the university that he applied to thought it was pretty average and not good enough.

They were looking for exceptional students.

Apparently, they have shown it to Art University like Contemporary Modern Art University entrance exams and not said, this is Hitler’s paintings just to get a reaction and they have gotten similar responses, yeah, it’s okay but it not up to snuff.

Well, that is not saying a whole lot though because apparently, there was a chimpanzee or a gorilla that did some paintings and they did a similar thing where they showed it to art critics. They didn’t say it was from an ape and in fact some of them said that it was a high quality painting. Yeah, I don’t buy all of that.

It could have been a talented ape.

Well that’s true.

That’s species-ism…racism. I think the other story we covered was Watergate and in speaking of infamy and notorious leaders, President Nixon is probably on the list of the most untrustworthy, crooked.

Tricky Dick.

Right.

Tricky Dick.

I am not a crook, Nixon, that’s what he said right before he left the White House.

Right, yeah, a piece of tape, that was all it took.

Yeah, one little piece of tape.

One little piece of tape.

Yeah, but I kind of feel he had it coming anyway. Maybe, if that tape hadn’t played the role that it had, that something else would have brought him down.

Yeah, he was really ripe to be taken down.

He was a house of cards, he really was.

In that he recorded every conversation. For somebody, that is doing illegal stuff, you shouldn’t be recording. It’s not a good idea.

No, no, I wonder why he did that.

I think it was just humorous. He just thought he was so powerful that nobody could ever get access to his secret tape recordings.

Yeah, but why would he tape record?

Maybe, he wanted to use it later on to write his book and he wanted to be able to go back and he thought there was no risk of anybody ever accessing.

I see, I see. I wonder if he had grown up in this day and age with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, would he have done things differently.

Well, he probably never would have made it to President.

No.

Those kinds of decisions, but yeah I mean I think that a lot of people’s mistrust of the government, or not just from Nixon, but I mean that is a prime example of how you cannot trust the man.

Right, stick it to the man.

Yeah, so I think that time in U.S history, especially was a lot of mistrust of the government. Nobody really believed in what, I cannot say everybody, but I would most young people didn’t believe in the war in Vietnam and didn’t believe in the reasoning behind the war.

Well, yeah, and then after Reagan came through and then Bush and then Clinton got into power, the U.S. experienced a pretty thriving economy and it wasn’t until George W Bush and the Iraq war that people started to distrust government again. Now, it is at an all time high don’t you think.

A lot of people distrusted Bill Clinton, called him Slick Willie.

That’s true.

And I think a lot of that has rubbed off on Hillary Clinton. A lot of people don’t trust here and some of it is from decisions that she has made as a politician but I think some is a little bit of a crossover from her husband.

I think just the opinion, not just the presidency, but of politicians in Congress and in the House of Representatives as at an all-time low, like their approval rating. A lot of people want to see drastic change which is why guys like Trump are rising to power.

Yes, lunatics like Donald Trump, makes me ashamed to be an American.

Yeah, I don’t know what this world is coming to Dan.

Yeah, so Frank Willis, he was the security guard, two dollar and fifty cent raise.

Frank Willis, huh?

Yes.

Two dollars and fifty cent raise.

He was only making 80 bucks a week.

The raise was to two dollars and fifty cents and or it was two dollars and fifty cents above what he makes.

Above.

Okay, so that was pretty significant then.

No, it was nothing.

No, I mean it was significant, if you are only making 80 dollars a week, if you are getting an extra two fifty an hour.

No, no, a week, it was actually two fifty a week which is six or seven cents an hour extra.

Oh, two hundred fifty dollars a week. Okay, that’s nothing then, I misunderstood you.

He died in poverty. I guess he was just doing his job but he did something pretty important.

He did something pretty important. Then, we have the interesting and unlikely case of a speech saving the life of the man who wrote it.

Teddy Roosevelt.

That’s right and usually we think of a speech saving someone’s life as the meaning of the speech saving your life, but in this case it was the actual physical documents themselves that saved his life or played a role in saving his life.

Bull Moose, that is what they called him or maybe, he just called himself that.

I wonder, yeah, I wonder.

That is kind of an odd thing to get macho about a bull moose.

A bull moose, it seems kind of…

A lion I could see, an elephant.

Yeah, I picture a moose as a very large creature that blunders forward and charges and kind of knocks everything out of the way in the way that a bull might. I wouldn’t want that nickname.

At first I thought that they must have had some really wimpy guns back then that a 50page speech but apparently there was an eyeglass case in there too.

Well I am sure that helped, but yeah I’m sure that the guns back then had nothing like the power of guns these days, the penetration power, and that kind of thing.

Apparently, he refused to go to the hospital. The staff is telling him you have to go to the hospital you are bleeding from the chest.

Well, he kept giving his speech right.

Well, he wasn’t giving the speech, he was on his way to another speech and his staff are like we have got to get you to a hospital, you need to be checked. He said, no, no, I am good. I am good. He was a soldier before, so he had an experience.

It did penetrate his chest right.

Yeah, it was lodged in his chest. He felt blood on his chest but he said let me just check my mouth, if there is no blood coming of my mouth then I know it is not in my lungs, I am good for the next speech. When he got to his next stop and started making his speech, one of the points we didn’t include in the story, was he started off the speech with I have just been shot and somebody in the crowd immediately shouts out, “fake”.

Really.

Which reminded me of the modern YouTube here. You see anything amazing on YouTube and you go to the comments like in the first ten comments, somebody is going be like, “fake”.

Yeah, this is staged, it’s not real.

Apparently, he whipped out the speech papers that had a hole through it and he was like, here’s the proof.

Wow, that’s for writing long-winded speeches. You never know.

50 pages and an eyeglass case saved his life.

Maybe we should carry those around with us Dan.

Yeah, really, we should carry some of these now, maybe we have to write these a little longer.

Yeah, I know. What about you? Have there been any little turning points, crossroads in your life that came down to some very small thing that made a difference that you can think of?

Crossroads?

I mean, all of us have had crossroads in our lives and I just wonder. I don’t know, I mean I think we can all point to little things that made a difference. In our story, we are talking about profound effects on humanity and a whole society, but I am sure we all relate with this because we have had instances in our lives where little things have made a difference.

Right, I am sure you could pinpoint if you had a photographic memory, you could pinpoint all kinds of things. I remember I got into a very bad motorcycle accident and I got slammed into by a car, thrown off my motorcycle onto the windshield. I was pretty messed up for a while. I’m sure that if I had forgotten to brush my teeth and been out the door a minute earlier or if I had eaten a bigger breakfast and been out the door a minute later, I wouldn’t have been hit. I’m sure there are all kinds of little things that you can point to, but I cannot think of anything off the top of my head.

Yeah, me neither, I cannot think of anything profound, but I can definitely go back and look at crossroads in my life such as meeting my wife or getting into college or deciding whether or not I was going to get married or go travel. Things that had a significant impact in terms of the trajectory of my future, yeah, I can point to little things that made a difference.

Right.

But nothing profound.

Maybe this is the moment right here.

This could be it man.

This could be a crossroads.

This could be a major crossroads: us talking about crossroads.

Right.

This could be the beginning of something.

Us delving into the history of Hitler.

It could be something incredible.

It could be the stepping stone to your life in politics, when you realize that the smallest thing and this is your thing President Campbell.

This is the crossroads.

Well, with that you have got my vote my friend.

Well, thank you Dan and I’m glad I have your support.

Okay, don’t forget me when you are in the White House.

All right, fair enough.