Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

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fl ying 
jumpers
, and then I decided I was gonna do it, so 
my wife bought me one jump for a birthday present. She 
said, “You’re just gonna do this once.” I said, “Yeah, that’s 
it.” So here we are, several hundred jumps later, and I’m 
still at it. And since I started at age sixty, uh, you know, a 
lot of people wonder why I do that. Th
ey-they doubt my 
psychological stability because I jump out of airplanes.
INTERVIEWER:
But you obviously enjoy it?
MAN:
Oh, yeah. And you, I’ve met more nice people sky-
diving, and, uh, I’ve, I mean, there was an 
esprit de corps
with the state police because you’re involved in a situa-
tion where you have to depend on each other a lot but 
skydiving is-is a stronger esprit de corps, esprit de corps 
to me than with the state police, just because of the peo-
ple involved and you’re doing a sport that’s, you know, 
potentially dangerous, so everybody’s sort of lookin’ out 
for everybody, you know. It’s like when you jump, you, 
in the plane, you’re looking at another guy’s equipment 
to see if maybe everything’s hooked up alright, and the 
other guy’s lookin’ at your stuff , too, so you-you know, 
you’re lookin’ out for each other. And it’s a sport that not 
too many people do—what, there’s thirty thousand of us 
in the United States?
DEFINITIONS
All-American:
A designation given to collegiate athletes 
in the United States who are among the best in their par-
ticular sport.
BASE jump (BASE jumping–Building Antenna Span 
Earth):
A kind of skydiving in which the participant 
jumps from a fi xed object on the ground instead of from 
an aircraft. 

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