PRE READING-MATERIAL.

(Teacher must cut and choose at

random students for reading in public)
When most people think of saving the world, they picture Superman in at the last
minute, bomb squads barely defusing deadly devices, and scientists discovering
eleventh-hour. But the real-life heroes who have saved the world have much
better stories.
On Sept. 26, 1983, real-life hero Stanislav Petrov singlehandedly prevented a
worldwide nuclear war when he followed his gut and chose to ignore a missile
alarm.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Vasili Arkhipov made a decision that
historians would later come to believe prevented World War III.
In 1951, a poor black mother of five named Henrietta Lacks saved the world
without even knowing it.
Her doctor noticed a strange thing while he was studying her tissue sample. The
cells in the samples he had collected from other patients died off so quickly he
was unable to study them but Lacks’s cells continued to multiply at an incredible
rate.
Australian James Harrison, like Henrietta Lacks, was given the power to save the world
by chance – but it was his decision about what to do with his power that made him a
real-life hero.

It contained an unusual antibody that could be used to prevent a rare and potentially fatal
blood condition in babies known as rhesus disease or hemolytic disease of the newborn.

On the night of April 26, 1986, Alexander Akimov was at work as the shift supervisor of
the night crew of Chernobyl Plant Unit Four.

Akimov stayed in the poisonous air in the reactor building, manually pumping
emergency feedwater into the reactor without any protective gear.

In 1999, before the British pop star was famous for his melancholy tune “You’re
Beautiful,” he was a lead officer in the British Army.

When he was told to invade the airfield, he refused. The order had come from a U.S.
Army general, and by refusing, Blunt was risking being court-martialed.