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Jacques Cousteau

Jacques Cousteau
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 7 to 8
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   7.47

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    aqualung, gunsmith, minesweeper, producer, radioactive, mines, documentary, starfish, sunken, poverty, gunnery, activist, beginning, navy, officer, international
     content words:    Jacques Cousteau, French Naval Academy, World War II, Continental Shelf Stations, Conshelf Two, World Without Sun, Academy Awards, Mediterranean Sea

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     Spanish: Jacques Cousteau

Jacques Cousteau
By Sharon Fabian 		  
1     As a teenager, Jacques Cousteau loved two things, being around the water and building machines. In high school he got bored and started getting into trouble. He must have caused a lot of trouble, because his parents took him out of his school and sent him to live at a boarding school. Maybe the boarding school offered Jacques more of a challenge; he started to do very well in school there. He did so well that, after high school, he was admitted to the French Naval Academy.
 
2     In the navy, he worked as a gunnery officer, and also started to dive. Back then, divers had no way to carry oxygen with them, so a dive could only last about a minute, like the dive you might take in your swimming pool. Cousteau was still interested in building machines, and he noticed that the ship's gunsmith could build all kinds of things too. They began to work on a device to carry oxygen under the water. They ran into lots of problems along the way. Cousteau's dive with one of their early models nearly killed him, but finally they came up with a model that worked. Their invention, called an aqualung, allowed divers to stay underwater much longer than before. At first they used it to locate and remove enemy mines in World War II.
 
3     Cousteau kept diving with the aqualung, and he also began taking his camera along on his dives. His career as an oceanographer and film producer was beginning. For the first time, many, many people could see what it was like to dive. They could see schools of fish deep in the ocean. They could see whales and sharks, sunken treasures, and coral reefs.

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