Shadowing Practice: Marie Curie – The Woman Who Won Two Nobel Prizes || Learn English Naturally ✅ - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Hello, my friends.
252 sentences
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Hello, my friends.
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Welcome to Storytime English.
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I am so glad you are here today.
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Take a slow breath, make yourself comfortable, and let the story begin.
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Now, imagine for a moment, you want to read the private notebooks of one of the greatest scientists who ever lived.
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You travel to a library in Paris.
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You ask to see the notebooks.
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And the librarian tells you, yes, but first you must sign a special document.
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A document that says you understand the risk.
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Because these notebooks, written more than 100 years ago, are still radioactive today.
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They are stored in lead-lined boxes.
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Lead is a heavy metal that blocks radiation.
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To hold one of these notebooks is to touch something still alive with energy, even after a century.
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Those notebooks belonged to Marie Curie, and this is her story.
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The year was 1867.
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In the city of Warsaw, in the country of Poland, a girl was born.
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Her name was Maria Sklodowska.
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Later, the whole world would know her as Marie Curie.
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But when Maria was born, Poland was not a free country.
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It had been taken over by the Russian Empire.
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The Russian rulers controlled everything, including what children were allowed to learn.
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Polish history could not be taught in schools.
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The Polish language could not be used in classrooms.
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Everything had to be taught in Russian.
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Maria's father was a teacher.
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He taught mathematics and physics.
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He had once had a good position at a school in Warsaw.
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But the Russian authorities did not trust him.
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They removed him from his job.
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The family became poor.
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Despite this, her father believed in learning.
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He kept his scientific instruments at home, glass tubes, small measuring tools, the equipment of science.
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Young Maria would look at these objects for long stretches of time.
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She wanted to understand how they worked.
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She wanted to understand how everything worked.
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She was an exceptional student.
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She had a remarkable memory.
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She could read by the age of four.
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She remembered everything her teachers said.
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At school, even though lessons were officially taught in Russian, she answered every question correctly.
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Her teachers noticed her.
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She stood apart.
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But in Warsaw at that time, there was one door that was firmly closed to her.
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Girls could not attend university.
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The university in Warsaw did not accept women.
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Not because they were not intelligent.
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Not because they could not learn.
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Simply because they were women.
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For Maria, this was a painful wall.
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She wanted to study science, but the door was locked.
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So she and her friends found another way.
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A small group of young women in Warsaw started their own secret school.
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They called it the Floating University Floating because the location was always changing.
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One week, classes were held in someone's kitchen.
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The next week, in a quiet back room somewhere else.
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They moved constantly so the Russian police would not find them.
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It was dangerous.
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If they were caught, they could be arrested.
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But they kept studying anyway.
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And Maria made a plan with her older sister, Bronya.
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It was a pact.
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A serious agreement between two people.
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Here was the plan.
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Maria would go to work as a governess to earn money.
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A governess is a woman who lives with a family and teaches their children.
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Maria would send her salary to Paris so that Braunya could study medicine at university there.
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And when Braunya was finished, she would send money back, so that Maria could come to Paris and study too.
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It was a plan that required patience, and sacrifice giving up something important for a larger goal.
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Maria worked as a governess for five years.
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Five years in other people's houses.
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Far from Warsaw, far from her family, teaching other people's children while her own dreams waited.
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She sent almost everything she earned to her sister in Paris.
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She kept only enough to survive.
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But she did not waste those five years.
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At night, when the children were asleep and the house was quiet, she opened her books.
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Mathematics, physics, chemistry.
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She wrote long letters to Braña, asking for reading suggestions.
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She taught herself as much as she could with no teacher and no classroom.
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She was preparing herself for a future she could not yet see, but refused to stop believing in.
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And then, at the age of 24, Maria finally got on a train to Paris.
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It was 1891.
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Paris was the center of the scientific world.
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The Sorbonne, the great university of Paris, was one of the finest universities in Europe.
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And unlike Warsaw, the Sorbonne accepted women students.
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When Maria arrived, she made a quiet but meaningful decision.
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She changed the spelling of her name from the Polish Maria to the French Marie.
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She was not hiding who she was.
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She was stepping into a new world.
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She was ready.
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But Paris was not easy.
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She lived in a tiny room near the university.
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There was no heating.
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In winter, she could see her own breath inside the room.
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Sometimes, the water in her small washing bowl froze overnight.
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She had almost no money.
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Some days she ate only bread and a little chocolate.
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Sometimes she fainted from hunger in her lectures.
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But she studied.
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She sat in the great university halls, one of very few women in the room.
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Some of the male students and professors found it unusual to see a woman there.
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But Marie did not look at them.
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She looked at the board.
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She filled her notebooks.
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She worked harder than almost anyone around her.
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In 1893, she finished her degree in physics.
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She graduated first in her class.
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One year later, she completed a second degree in mathematics.
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She graduated, second in her class.
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Think about that for a moment.
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She studied in a frozen room.
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She ate almost nothing.
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She worked in a language that was not her own, and she finished at the top of her class, twice.
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But the world was not finished giving her challenges, and she was not finished answering them.
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It was in Paris that Marie met a quiet, gentle man named Pierre Curie.
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He was a physicist, a scientist, who studies the physical world.
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They began to talk about science, and then they began to talk about everything.
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In 1895, they married.
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Marie wore a dark blue dress to the wedding, not white.
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She could not afford a dress she would only wear once, So she chose blue, practical, dark, a dress she could also wear in the laboratory.
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That small detail tells you a great deal about Marie Curie.
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Together, they worked in a small, damp laboratory.
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The building was cold in winter and too hot in summer.
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The walls leaked.
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The roof was low.
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By almost any measure, it was not a proper place for great science. But they kept working.
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They were investigating something that a scientist named Henri Becquerel had recently observed.
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Certain natural materials seemed to produce invisible rays energy that could pass through solid objects without any obvious source.
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Nobody fully understood this yet.
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Marie began to study it more deeply, and she made a discovery that changed the history of science.
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She found that these invisible rays did not come from two materials reacting with each other.
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they came from inside the atoms of the material itself.
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It was a quality of the matter built into its very structure.
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She gave this quality a name.
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She called it radioactivity.
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The word comes from the Latin radius, which means ray.
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Radio from ray.
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Activity, because the material is always producing energy, always active.
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That word was her invention, radioactivity.
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Then, in 1898, Marie and Pierre made an announcement that amazed the scientific world.
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They had found two new elements, materials that existed in nature but had never been identified before.
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The first they named Polonium.
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Polonium comes from Polonia, the Latin name for Poland.
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At that time, Poland still did not exist as a free country.
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It had been divided and controlled by other empires for more than a century.
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By naming this element after her homeland, Marie was saying something clear to the world.
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She was saying, Poland exists.
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Poland matters.
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We are here.
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The second element they named radium.
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Radium from radius, the ray.
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This material produced a faint, beautiful blue glow in the dark.
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In their cold laboratory at night, Marie and Pierre could see it shining on the shelves.
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It was light that no one had seen before.
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Light born from invisible work.
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Marie and Pierre processed several tons of a mineral called pitch blend.
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All of that work was to produce even a tiny amount of pure radium.
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They did this by hand, stirring, filtering, separating in their cold room, year after year.
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The physical work was enormous.
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The patience was extraordinary.
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But slowly, from tons of ordinary rock, a small and glowing thing appeared.
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In 1903, Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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A Nobel Prize is one of the highest honors in the world.
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It is given each year to people who done great work in science, literature, or peace.
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She shared the prize with Pierre and with Henri Becquerel.
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She was the first woman in history to receive a Nobel Prize.
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But then, in 1906, something terrible happened.
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Pierre was crossing a street in Paris on a rainy afternoon.
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The road was wet and crowded and noisy.
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A horse-drawn carriage moving too fast came around a corner.
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Pierre did not see it in time.
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He was knocked down.
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He died that same day.
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Marie was completely alone.
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She had lost her partner, her closest friend, and the person who had believed in her more than anyone.
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For a long time, the world felt empty.
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The grief was deep and very real.
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But she did not stop working.
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The University of Paris offered her Pierre's teaching position, she accepted.
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In doing so, she became the first woman to teach as a full professor at the Sorbonne.
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On the day she walked into the lecture hall for the first time, the room was full.
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Students, journalists, and curious visitors had come to see this moment.
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She sat down.
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She opened her notes.
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She began to speak from the exact point where Pierre had left his last lecture, from the same sentence, as if he had never been gone.
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The room was silent.
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And then, in 1911, Marie Curie received a second Nobel Prize,
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this time in chemistry, for the discovery of polonium and radium and the isolation of pure radium.
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She remains, to this day, the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two completely different sciences.
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But even then, the French Academy of Sciences refused to accept her as a member.
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She was nominated, the scientists voted, and she lost by a single vote, because she was a woman.
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The world that had once told her she did not belong was still not ready to say she did.
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But Marie kept working.
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During the First World War, she designed mobile x-ray units.
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These were vehicles fitted with equipment to photograph the inside of the body.
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Doctors used them to find broken bones and pieces of metal inside wounded soldiers.
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She called these vehicles Petites, Curies, Little Curies.
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She drove them to field hospitals near the front lines herself.
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She trained nurses to operate the equipment.
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It is estimated that more than one million soldiers were helped by her mobile units during the war.
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In 1934, Marie Curie died.
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She was 66 years old.
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The cause was a plastic anemia, a condition where the bone marrow can no longer produce enough blood cells.
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Bone marrow is the soft material inside bones that makes blood.
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Her illness was caused by decades of exposure to radiation.
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The very thing she had discovered, named, and spent her life studying had slowly made her ill.
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Her notebooks are still radioactive today.
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Her body still contains measurable radiation.
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And the element polonium now has its permanent place on the table of elements.
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Every chemistry student in the world studies it, the element she named after a country that was not yet free.
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And so, my friends, the story of Marie Curie comes quietly to its end.
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She was told from the beginning that science was not for her.
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Not because she lacked ability.
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Not because she lacked intelligence.
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simply because she was a woman.
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The doors were locked.
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The rooms were cold.
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The world said no in a hundred different ways.
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She kept going anyway.
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And somewhere in a small, damp laboratory in Paris, in the darkness of a winter night, there was a soft blue glow.
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Radium.
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The element she had found.
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Light made from invisible work.
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Light that had never existed in the world before she looked for it.
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Now, my friend, I want to say something to you.
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You have your own kind of darkness.
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Maybe English still feels difficult.
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Maybe there are moments when the words do not come easily.
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Maybe there are days when the progress feels very slow.
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But here you are.
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You are in your own quiet room, doing your own quiet work, and every word you learn is a small glow.
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Not visible to anyone else, perhaps, but real and growing.
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Marie Curie worked for years in the cold and the dark before the world noticed what she was building.
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You may feel that way, too, that you are working quietly and progress is hard to see.
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But it is there.
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Every story you listen to is light.
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Every sentence that becomes a little clearer is light.
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Every new word your mind holds onto that is light you are making.
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Slowly, steadily, the way she did, and steady, as Marie Curie showed us,
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is the most powerful thing of all.
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Keep listening.
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Keep learning.
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Keep glowing.
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This is Storytime English.
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If Marie Curie's story moved you today, please leave a comment below.
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Tell me, what part of her journey surprised you most?
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Was it the radioactive notebooks?
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The two Nobel Prizes?
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Or the blue glow of radium in the dark?
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I would love to hear from you.
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There are many more stories waiting right here.
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Come back soon, my friend.
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Until next time, take care of yourself and never stop learning.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
Practicing your speaking skills with the video "Marie Curie – The Woman Who Won Two Nobel Prizes" offers a unique opportunity to engage with a captivating story about a groundbreaking scientist. By following along with the narrated content, you can learn English with YouTube effectively while immersing yourself in historical context. This video captures the spirit of Marie Curie's journey from a young girl in Warsaw who faced societal barriers to becoming a two-time Nobel Prize winner. The emotional narrative helps you remember phrases and vocabulary better, as you're connecting them with real-life experiences.
Additionally, using the shadow speech technique, where you repeat what you hear immediately after the speaker, helps reinforce pronunciation and intonation. This practice not only builds confidence in spoken English but also allows you to comprehend complex ideas more readily. Over time, you'll notice a significant improvement in your fluency and a deeper understanding of how to convey your thoughts in English.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
Throughout the video, there are several key grammatical structures and expressions that are particularly advantageous for learners:
- Past Simple Tense: The video uses the past simple tense to recount historical events, such as “Maria was born” and “her family became poor.” This structure is essential for describing completed actions and helping English learners articulate their own stories.
- Passive Voice: The use of passive voice, as in “the notebooks are still radioactive,” emphasizes the importance of the object, which can be an advanced grammatical point to master.
- Adverbial Clauses: Phrases like “when Maria was born” and “despite this” provide context and show relationships between ideas; these are crucial for constructing sentences that convey complex notions.
By focusing on these grammatical points as you practice, you can enhance your ability to express yourself clearly and effectively in discussions about history, science, or personal experiences.
Common Pronunciation Traps
While watching the video, you may encounter some pronunciation challenges that are beneficial to focus on:
- Names and Titles: Words like “Marie Curie” may be mispronounced due to their unique sounds. Make sure to practice saying her name clearly, stressing the correct syllables.
- Technical Vocabulary: Terms such as “radioactive” and “scientific instruments” can be tricky. Pay attention to how the speaker articulates these words, focusing on vowel and consonant clarity.
- Intonation: The storytelling nature of the video means that intonation plays a significant role. Listen closely to how the speaker varies their pitch for emphasis, as this is crucial when trying to convey emotions in your speech.
By overcoming these challenges and refining your skills through shadow speak, you'll improve English pronunciation significantly, making your spoken English sound more natural and fluent.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.