Web Page: Great Interviews of the 20th Century
Web Site: Exoplanets
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To Conduct/Give an Interview
- Question the situation for your interview.
- Subject: Who will you interview? Who will interview you? What will you talk about? What should you focus on?
- Purpose: Why are you holding this interview? What do you want to result from this interview? How can you achieve your purpose?
- Audience: Who will watch or listen to the interview? Is there a specific audience or a general one? How much does the audience know and need to know?
- Plan your work by completing a planning sheet. (See page 361.)
- Research your topic.
- Topic: Read, write, view, think, and discuss before you have the interview.
- Questions: If you are the interviewer, prepare a list of questions, focusing on those that require more than a yes or no or single response.
- Answers: If you are the interviewee, think of the questions you might be asked, and write responses.
- Practice: Rehearse the interview with another person playing the other part.
- Visuals: Gather books, props, film clips, or other visuals that you might want to include in your interview.
- Create your interview.
- Beginning: If you are the interviewer, create a beginning that catches the audience’s attention, introduces the topic, and introduces the person who will be interviewed.
- Middle: If you are the interviewer, ask the questions that you have prepared. Be ready with follow-up questions to help the interviewee elaborate on ideas. If you are the interviewee, listen to each question and provide your response. Speak clearly, and connect with the interviewer and the audience.
- Ending: If you are the interviewer, wrap up the discussion by focusing on an interesting point. Remind the audience who the interviewee is, and make a graceful exit. Thank the interviewee for his or her time.
- Improve your interview.
- Evaluate: View a recording of your interview, thinking about the ideas exchanged, the emotional connection between the participants and the audience, the voice and body language of the participants, and overall effectiveness. Think of at least two improvements you could make in future interviews.
- Present your interview by posting excerpts on your Web site or on YouTube. (See also pages 423–428.)
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Interview Transcript
The following transcript comes from an interview with a high school physics professor about the search for exoplanets.Interview with Keri Johnson
The beginning introduces the podcast, the interviewer, and the interviewee.Darius: Hey, everybody, this is Darius for another installment of the Dare We Ask podcast. Today, I’m talking to physics teacher and exoplanet enthusiast Keri Johnson. Thank you for joining me.
Mrs. Johnson: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Darius: So, the big question—“dare we ask”—is how soon human beings will be living on exoplanets.
Mrs. Johnson: I wish I could say “tomorrow” or even “within a hundred years,” but it’s going to be closer to a thousand.
Darius: A thousand! But you said that scientists have found nearly a thousand exoplanets, and some are earthlike and in the habitable zone. What’s the holdup?
Mrs. Johnson: Well, it comes down to a few factors. The first earthlike planet proven to be in the habitable zone of its star was Kepler 22b. It’s about twice Earth’s diameter but probably about 40 Earth masses. That means it would have about 70 Gs of gravity on the surface. Your weight times 70.
Darius: You’d be crushed flat.
Mrs. Johnson: Right, unless you could be in a water ocean. Our bodies are 70 percent water, so if we were in the ocean, we could stand the tremendous gravity. But this planet is nearly 700 light years away. Even traveling at the speed of light, which is impossible, it would take 700 years to get there.
Darius: So I can give up hope of going where no man has gone before?
Mrs. Johnson: Not entirely. The problem is human bodies. We’re perfectly suited to life here on Earth. But human-made machines, and the computers in them, can happily live elsewhere. The Mars Rovers that were supposed to survive just a few months lasted years. And the Voyager probes sent out in 1977 are now outside the reach of the sun’s charged particles and are heading into interstellar space.
Darius: Are you saying that, while human bodies can’t live easily off our planets, our minds—at least in the form of human-built machines—can live out there happily forever?
Mrs. Johnson: If we design machines to do so, they may be carrying on the torch of human civilization into the future.
Darius: Thanks so much for your time, Mrs. Johnson. That’s it for another episode of Dare We Ask!