Thing Explainer Complicated Stuff in Simple Words

Pdf Book Name: Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words
Author: Randall Munroe
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN-10, 13: 9780544668256,0544668251
Year: 2015
Pages: 64 Pages
Language: English
File size: 105.50 MB
File format: PDF,EPUB

Thing Explainer Complicated Stuff in Simple Words Pdf Book Description:

This is a book of pictures and simple words. Each page explains how something important or interesting works, using only the ten hundred words in our language that people use the most. This page is here to say hello and explain why the book is like this. I’ve spent a lot of my life worried that people will think I don’t know enough. Sometimes, that worry has made me use big words when I don’t need to. One thing that I’ve sometimes used big words for is the shape of the world. The world is round, but it’s not exactly round. Because of how it spins, it’s a little wider around the middle. If you’re building a space boat that’s going to fly around the world, you have to be clear about what shape the world is, and there are some big words that you can use instead of “round.” But most of the time, it doesn’t matter exactly what the shape is, so people just say “round.” When I was in school, I learned about space boats and learned to use lots of big words for things like the shape of the world. Sometimes I would use those big words because they were different from the small words in an important way. But a lot of the time, I was really just worried that if I used the small words, someone might think I didn’t know the big ones. I liked writing this book because it made me let go of my fear of sounding stupid. After all—when you’re saying things like “space boats” and “water pushers,” everything sounds stupid. Using simple words let me stop worrying so much. I could just have fun making up new names for things and trying to explain cool ideas in new ways.

Some people say that there’s no reason to learn big words in the first place all that matters is knowing what things do, not what they’re called. I don’t think that’s always true. To really learn about things, you need help from other people, and if you want to understand those people, you need to know what they mean by the words they use. You also need to know what things are called so you can ask questions about them. But there are lots of other books that explain what things are called. This book explains what they do. Okay, I’m done talking about the book now. Turn the page to learn about space! This building flies through space just above the air. People from different countries built it and fly up to visit it in space boats. Because the house is falling around the Earth, things inside it hang in the air instead of dropping to the floor. Inside the house, normal things like water act very strange, and you can fly around by kicking off the walls. Everyone says it’s a lot of fun. The people in the house spend their time working, playing, and taking pictures of Earth. They do work for people on the ground, helping to learn how things like flowers and machines work in space. Most of the time, there are six people in the house, with each person staying for half a year.