I hope you enjoyed the audio article above about the first man on the moon! In this DailyStep Audio Word Study, you can learn some vocabulary and idioms about the moon. Here is Audio Word Study #053 from Jane Lawson at So, let’s move on now to our Audio Word Study, where you can learn some common words and idioms about the Moon. Now everybody talks about a manned mission to Mars and people seem to have forgotten about our closest neighbour the moon but on a clear night when I look up and see the moon, I still think of Neil Armstrong taking that first step. The astronaut Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon in 1972 (nineteen seventy-two), and will any human being ever stand on the moon again? Who knows? Since then there have been 5 successful manned missions to the moon, but the last one was 40 years ago. The mission had been an amazing success and Neil Armstrong and the other two astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, became world famous. If there had been just one tiny miscalculation, the spaceship would have missed the Earth and the astronauts would have died in space, but on July 24 th 1969 (July the twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-nine) they landed safely in the Pacific Ocean. The Apollo 11 rocket travelled hundreds of thousands of kilometres to reach the moon and many people feared that the return journey would be impossible.
The date of the first moon landing was 20 th July 1969 (the twentieth of July, nineteen sixty-nine) and people all over the world watched this historic moment live on TV and heard Neil Armstrong say those famous words as he put his foot on the surface of the moon for the first time, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." You can learn more about these words in the Famous Quotation box below. He must have been an extremely brave man. The Earth would have appeared like a bright, beautiful, colourful ball spinning slowly in the distance but I guess he felt like he was a very, very long way from home.
Sometimes I look up to the night sky, especially when I see a full moon just above the London rooftops, and I wonder what it was like for Neil Armstrong as he looked down on the Earth from the surface of the Moon.