Before you read:
1. Do you know Louis Pasteur?
2. Who was he? What did he do?
Read the text and fill out Pasteur's bio sketch below.
Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in Dole, France. He married to Marie Laurent and had five children; four girls and a boy. Three of his daughters died of typhoid fever. He graduated in 1842 from Besancon College Royal de la France with honours in physics, mathematics, Latin, and a first prize for drawing. He also attended Ecole Normale to study physics and chemistry. In 1849, he became a chemistry professor in Strasbourg.
In 1881, Pasteur began to study rabies, a deadly disease spread by the bite of animals. He spent long hours in his laboratory seeking a vaccine to prevent rabies. One day in 1885, a dog infected with rabies bit a small boy named Joseph Meister. The boy's parents begged Pasteur to save their son. Pasteur hesitated to use his new vaccine on a human, but he finally accepted. After a few weeks of treatment, the vaccine worked. The boy did not get rabies.
The Pasteur Institute was opened in his honour in 1888, and Louis Pasteur served as director of the institute until his death on September 28, 1895.
Bio Sketch: Pasteur
For each list, select the 'odd one out' (the word that doesn't fit) and explain why.
List 1
List 2
List 3
List 4
Use your notes from activity 3 and the questions below to write Einstein's biography.
1. When and where was Albert Einstein born?
2. Where did he study?
3. When did he graduate?
4. Who did he marry?
5. Where did he live in the US?
6. When did he get the Nobel Prize?
7. What was he famous for?
8. When and where did he die?
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany. He studied at the ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). He graduated in 1900. He was married twice, first to Mileva Marić and later to his cousin Elsa Einstein. From 1933 onwards, he lived in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. He is famous for developing the general theory of relativity and for the formula E=mc². Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey.
Riddle 1
"This man (980-1037) was an Arab physician, philosopher, astronomer, and poet. He wrote 'Canon of Medicine', which was used as a medical text for over 600 years. What is he called in Arabic?"
Riddle 2
"He was a mathematician who wrote important books about algebra and arithmetic. He introduced the numeral system we use today to Europe in the mid-1100s. Who is he?"