Official News - page 9

REAL LIFE NEWS: ONE SMALL WORD FOR A MAN

by Hazed

Many people have commented that Neil Armstrong's very famous quote, made when he became the first man to set foot on the moon in 1969, doesn't make sense:

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind

They have a point: in this context, the word man sounds like it refers to every member of the human race - and so does mankind, so the two words mean the same thing.

Mr Armstrong always insisted that he meant to say "one small step for A man" - which makes a lot more sense - but with hindsight he couldn't be sure what he had actually said.

Now, almost forty years on, the spaceman has been vindicated. Using high-tech sound analysis techniques, an Australian computer expert called Peter Ford has found that missing "a". He ran the NASA recording of the quote through sound-editing software, and it could see an accoustic wave from the word "a" which means he did say it after all. However, he spoke it at a rate of 35 milliseconds, which is ten times too fast for it to be audible.

In other words, the first man on the moon mumbled!

NASA is now going to run its own tests to see if it agrees with Mr Ford's findings.

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