The Onion Reports: Science is Hard

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The Onion is a well known newspaper published in the U.S., but be careful about getting your news from it. None of the stories are true.

The Onion is a parody (imitation; false) newspaper that publishes satirical (using humor to expose or make fun of other people) articles about local, nation, and international events. This was one of their recent “news stories,” with a few excerpts (short parts or sections):

National Science Foundation: Science Hard

INDIANAPOLIS—The National Science Foundation’s annual symposium (academic or scientific meeting) concluded (ended) Monday, with the 1,500 scientists in attendance reaching the consensus (agreement) that science is hard…

The science-is-hard theorem (scientific explanation) first posited (offered as an explanation) by a team of MIT (Massachusett Institute of Technology; a university in Boston) professors in 1990, was slow to gain acceptance (to be accepted; to be considered true) within the science community…

“We now believe that the theorem is 99.999% likely to be true, after applying these incredibly complex (complicated; with many parts) statistical (analyzing numbers) techniques that gave me a splitting (very painful) headache,” one of the scientists said.

If you like satire, this is the newspaper for you.

~ Lucy

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7 Responses to The Onion Reports: Science is Hard

  1. Jokes and satires are nice way for learn English.
    At least English café (#123) was talked about trips drew by Charles Schultz.
    Here in Brazil there is a popular drawer called Mauricio de Souza. He write and draw trips and stories for children
    called Monica´s Gang.

    We opened a discussion about this subject (Learning with Trips) at ESL Podcast Google Group.

    Thank you…

    Ed.

  2. Valeriy says:

    I’d like to mention here one great world-famous author who dealt with jokes and humor in his books alright. It’s Jerome K. Jerome. It’s just impossible to read his things without a smile. By starting to learn English some years ago I used then adapted English books for reading which were much more easy to understand. There was one book among them I’ll never forget, perhaps. It was his short stories. In spite of being adapted they were excellent and could make anyone laugh to death.

    P.S. ESL Podcast Blog is a really good thing, pleasant to read. So, continue!

  3. Jamshid says:

    Hi Lusy
    I believe it’s very important that how good someone mastered of a language.
    Humor and satires are dependent to our knowledge about culture and literature .
    I am about 20 years in Germany . I can speak and understand German language as good as my mother language , I work with German people everyday but sometimes I need to ask
    about humor and jokes because there are not funny to me perhaps jokes have root in culture. sometimes I try to translate a Farsi joke to German language too but I know it’s not so
    funny as in Farsi . I think there are a lot of people who have the same problem.

    Jamshid From Berlin

  4. chan bo says:

    How interesting!

  5. Chaoz says:

    I really love the Onion’s sense of humor.

    But I guess it will really be a hard time for NSF and sciences in general: the war is wasting the US a lot of money and Bush is trying to help the economy at the same time. Given the conservation of wealth, I would guess, though I am not sure, they will cut some fundings for scientists.

  6. Good view point Jamshid.
    I agree..

  7. Sergio Ramos says:

    Hi Lucy,

    I’m confused about a sentence that I read in your post. You start it with the phrase: “The Onion is a well known newspaper published the U.S., but be careful … “. The part that makes me wonder its meaning is “… published the U.S. …” Is this means that the place where the newspaper is published is the U.S. ?? If I understood correctly, should be this way: published in the U.S. ???

    Thank you in advance,
    Sergio Ramos

    [It was a mistake and we’ve corrected it. Thanks, Sergio, for letting us know!–ESL Podcast Team]

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