[00:00.00]Unit 12 Difficult to believe
[00:04.88]4 While you read  Home alone
[00:13.14]’Home Alone’is one of the biggest box office successes in movie history.
[00:19.80]Along with its sequel,’Home Alone 2’,
[00:24.56]it grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide.
[00:29.91]If you ask me,they’re not particularly funny films.
[00:34.87]There’s too much slapstick humour for my liking
[00:39.24]-people slipping over or having their faces covered in cream
[00:44.80]-but there is something about the films which appeals to a deep-held fantasy
[00:50.96]we all had when we were children:
[00:55.01]the freedom to escape from our parents and do whatever we wanted.
[01:00.68]When I was in my teens,my parents went away for the weekend
[01:07.13]leaving me and my sixteen-year-old brother to fend for ourselves.
[01:12.49]We immediately rang up all our friends
[01:17.66](and our friends rang their friends)and we had a party.
[01:23.30]The police came and broke it up at three in the morning
[01:28.06]because the neighbours were complaining about the noise.
[01:32.32]When we cleared up the following day,
[01:36.26]I found hundreds of cigarette burns in the carpet.
[01:41.83]Luckily,we had an old piece of the same carpet lying around,
[01:48.17]so I got my younger brother to go round the house
[01:53.21]and stick little bits in the holes to cover them up.
[01:57.89]It actually looked quite good and when my parents got back,
[02:02.93]it seemed they didn’t notice a thing and I thogh we were in the clear.
[02:08.68]Unfortunately,when my mum came to do the hoovering later in the week,
[02:15.52]all the bits we’d put in the holes came unstuck.
[02:20.49]She was not very pleased and I was grounded for a week,
[02:26.42]while my brother got away with it because he said I’d forced him into it.
[02:32.69]Typical!Still,this little story is nothing compared to some of the other
[02:39.82]horror stories about kids who have been left’home alone.’
[02:45.85]Terry and Jerry Schneider didn’t just find a few cigarette burns when they came back,
[02:52.98]they found their whole house burnt to the ground.
[02:58.05]The couple had left their two children,aged twelve and fourteen,
[03:04.11]in the house,while they went on a romantic weekend
[03:09.47]to Las Vegas to celebrate their wedding anniversary.
[03:14.19]The children had bought what they thought were undoor fireworks
[03:20.54]and were playing with them.
[03:23.89]Unfortunately,the explosive Roman candle they lit was for use outside
[03:31.72]and it soon set fire to the sofa,
[03:36.08]curtains and carpet in the front room.
[03:40.53]By the time the children called the fire brigade half an hour later,
[03:45.88]the fire was already completely out of control.
[03:50.84]John thomas,a ten-year-old from Yorkshire,an area in the north of England,
[03:57.61]was arreted after he shot a dog and terrorised walkers near his home in keighley.
[04:04.87]He had taken the gun from a kitchen cupboard
[04:10.23]while his parents were out shopping
[04:14.30]and had decided to do some shooting practice in some fields nearby.
[04:20.55]’I didn’t realise I could kill anything,
[04:25.30]I just thought they were pretend bullets,’he explained.
[04:30.34]Lamine,a twelve-year-old French boy,
[04:35.20]went on a ten-day spending spree at the EuroDisney theme park near paris
[04:42.17]with the ten thousand pounds he found lying around in his parent’s home.
[04:48.73]As well as treating other children to ice creams,burgers and free rides,
[04:55.89]he hired a chauffeur-driven car
[05:00.25]and slept in a three hundred-pound-a-night hotel.
[05:05.82]Peter Kerry,a schoolboy of fourteen,went halfway round the world
[05:12.97]after he stole his father’s passport and credit card.
[05:18.22]He had visited three separate countries in twelve days
[05:23.97]and spent almost six thousand pounds before he was finally caought:
[05:30.53]his credit card was refused after his father cancelled it.
[05:35.99]It wasn’t actually the first time it had happened.
[05:40.95]Two years earlier he spent a week on his own in Germany.
[05:46.51]’I like travelling,’he said.
[05:50.59]1 While you read  Urban myths
[06:03.76]Safety first!
[06:08.20]Did you hear about the plane which crashed somewhere in South America
[06:13.97]as it was coming in to land?
[06:17.31]Apparently,it was fitted with a device
[06:22.59]which warns the pilot that he’s approaching the ground
[06:27.45]-a Ground Warning Alarm(GWA)system.
[06:32.41]Some pilots find this warning irritating,so they switch it off.
[06:38.05]When the black box was examned,the crash was blamed on pilot error.
[06:44.01]The dicision had been easy to reach.When the plane had been coming in to land,
[06:50.17]the GWA had gone off,telling the pilot he was too colse to the ground.
[06:56.65]On the tape the pilot can be heard saying,
[07:01.51]’Shut up,you stupid machine!’Then you hear the sound of the crash.
[07:07.47]Drowned in a drain
[07:15.72]A man from Wakefield in Yorkshire
[07:19.67]went out one night for a few drinks at his local pub.
[07:24.63]He left his car in the street near the pub.
[07:29.20]When he decided to go home,he went out to his car,
[07:34.24]took out the keys,and then accidentally dropped them down a drain in the road.
[07:40.41]He could see the keys down the drain on top of some leaves.
[07:46.08]So,he managed to lift the drain cover,
[07:50.23]but the keys were too far down for him to reach.
[07:55.27]He lay down in order to reach them.
[07:59.43]Suddenly,he fell into the drain head first.
[08:04.99]Just as he did that,it started to rain heavily.
[08:09.74]Nobody heard his cries for help.The next morning he was found drowned,
[08:17.19]his head down the drain,his legs sticking up in the air.
[08:22.65]What a rat!
[08:29.81]Then there was the story of the couple who were in Thailand on holiday.
[08:35.08]The morning after they arrived,
[08:38.84]they found a thin little cat sitting on their balcony.
[08:43.60]They immediately fell in love with it.They cleaned it and fed it.
[08:49.55]By the time they were ready to leave,they couldn’t bear to be parted from it.
[08:55.48]They arranged for the cat to come home was with them.
[09:00.21]Waiting at home was their pet poodle.
[09:04.57]The poodle and the cat seemed to get on together very well,
[09:09.62]so the couple decided to go out for dinner.
[09:13.87]When they got back,they found their sitting room covered in poodle hair
[09:19.83]and the dog halfway down the cat’s throat!
[09:25.16]it turned out the cat wa not a car,but an enormous Thai water rat!
[09:32.29]Sunk by flying cow
[09:41.56]A few years ago,the crew of a Japanese fishing boat
[09:47.62]were rescued from the wreckage of their boat in the Sea of Japan.
[09:52.77]They said theat their boat had been sunk by a cow falling out of the sky.
[09:59.85]Nobody believed them.
[10:03.51]A few weeks later the Russian Air Force admitted
[10:09.15]that the crew of one of their planes had stolen a cow in Siberia
[10:15.11]and put it into the plane’s cargo hold.
[10:19.68]At 30,000 feet the cow started to run around the plane out of control.
[10:27.54]The crew decided there was only one thing they could do.
[10:32.69]So,they opened the cargo door and the cow umped out,
[10:38.46]landing on top of the Japanese fishing boat.