JAMES: Good morning, Professor Austin, how are you doing?

PROFESSOR AUSTIN: Good morning, James. I am doing well. And you?

JAMES: I’m great, thank you. This is my friend Emma. She is thinking about applying to this college. She has a few questions. Would you mind telling us about the process, please.

PROFESSOR AUSTIN: Hello, Emma! It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m more than happy to speak with you. Please stop by my office next week.

EMMA: It’s a pleasure to meet you, professor. Thank you so much for helping us.

PROFESSOR AUSTIN: Don’t mention it. Hopefully, I will be able to answer your questions!

Practice Listening, Reading & Comprehension

Formal Introductions

Passengers flying on some routes could have to spend almost $80 more to help European airlines pay for sustainable fuels.

According to European Union (EU) rules, airlines will have to use more sustainable fuel starting in January. Two percent of the fuel they use will have to be sustainable in 2025, but that will increase to 6% in 2030 and 70% in 2050.

This is part of the EU's plan to reduce carbon emissions, with the airline industry said to produce 2% of the world's carbon emissions.

However, sustainable fuels are much more expensive than normal jet fuel, and German airline Lufthansa has announced that travelers will have to pay more for flights leaving on or after January 1, 2025.

Lufthansa said it spends billions every year on new technologies, and has been working to help make flying more sustainable. It added that it has also supported research into global weather and climate, but that it can't pay for sustainable fuels without help from customers.

Passengers will have to pay extra on any flight leaving from any EU country, as well as from Norway, Switzerland and the UK.

Any flights booked for 2025 from now on will include the extra cost, and customers flying on any Lufthansa-operated airline will have to pay. The Lufthansa group also operates Eurowings, Austrian Airlines, Swiss Air, Brussels Airlines and Lufthansa City Airlines.

People taking short-haul flights in economy class may only need to pay about $5 more, according to Reuters, while those flying long-haul in first class could pay almost $80.

Many other airlines have said they won't be increasing prices, but they want governments to do more to help them.

Airline to Increase Prices to Pay for Green Fuel

NASA has given SpaceX an $843 million contract to build the vehicle that will help to destroy the International Space Station (ISS).

Space X, a company that's controlled by Elon Musk, will build the vehicle but the mission will be led by NASA.

The ISS was launched in 1998 and it's likely that it will have to be removed from space in the next few years.

The station is operated by space agencies from the US, Europe, Japan, Canada and Russia. All the countries involved have said they'll operate the station until 2030 except Russia, which has said it will operate it until 2028.

Teams of astronauts have been living in the space station since 2000. During that time, they have done more than 3,300 experiments in space.

It's expected that the SpaceX vehicle will pull the ISS through space before landing it in the sea. Both are likely to break apart as they re-enter Earth's atmosphere.

NASA said that it will be focusing on "commercially owned space destinations closer to home" as life on the ISS comes to an end.

The contract is seen as another vote of confidence for the company that Musk founded in 2002.

But experts say it won't be easy bringing such a large space station back to Earth safely.

Meghan Bartels from Scientific American said it will be a "delicate" challenge.

She said it took 42 different launches to send the ISS into space, where it was put together in orbit.

She added: "The orbiting laboratory contains about as much internal space as a six-bedroom house spread over an area the size of a football field," and that it weighs almost as much as three blue whales.

It's not yet known what the vehicle will look like or exactly when the mission will take place.

SpaceX Given Contract to Destroy Space Station

How long do you want a movie to last? When do you start looking at your watch and wonder when you can leave the darkness of the cinema?

Or maybe it doesn't matter because you watch everything on streaming services, and you can pause anytime you like.

But according to a survey from the US, the perfect movie length is 92 minutes — about the same as a soccer match.

A polling company called Talker Research asked 2,000 people how long movies should be.

Only about 2% said they thought movies should be longer than two and a half hours, while just 15% want to watch a movie that's more than two hours long.

Movies like Dodgeball, Kung Fu Panda and Toy Story 2 are all about 92 minutes long.

But data suggests that the most popular movies are getting longer and longer.

A website called What to Watch found that the average length of the most successful movies has increased from 110 minutes in 1981 to 141 minutes in 2022.

The Guardian reports that nine out of the top 10 most successful films of all time are longer than two hours. Three of them are longer than three hours.

However, some say it's not the length of the film that's important, but how good it is.

There are really long films that feel much shorter because they're so interesting, and there are shorter movies that you wish would just end fast!