Unit 4-Pre-reading activities

Unit 4 Heroes of our time


Pre-reading activities


On a New York City subway, it's hard enough to find someone who'll give up his seat to some stranger, let alone be willing to give his life for another person.


Fifty-year-old Wesley Austrey was a construction worker. One day he was standing on a subway platform with his two little daughters. Right in front of them stood a man. Suddenly the man slipped off the platform edge and fell to the tracks between the two rails. The headlights of a train appeared. Wesley had to make a quick decision. He jumped onto the tracks. He lay on top of the man, pressing him down in a space roughly a foot deep. There was only one half inch of space between the two men and the train. The train rolled overhead before it stopped and people got them out.


Wesley's children were extremely scared at the scene, and Wesley himself was scared too. “I got to talk to him,” later he told news reporters. “Sir, you can't move. I've got two kids up there looking for their father to come back. I don't know you and you don't know me, but listen, don't panic. I'm here to save you.”


The man Wesley saved is 20-year-old Cameron Hollopeter. Except for a few small wounds, Hollopeter was doing fine. Wesley refused medical help because, he said, nothing was wrong. He visited Hollopeter in the hospital before he went to work. “I don't feel like I did something extraordinary; I just saw someone who needed help,” he said. “I did what I felt was right.”