A billionaire clones living dinosaurs for a theme park — and discovers, too late, that some experiments should stay in the ground. The real science is stranger than the film.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word is shown in a situation that gives its meaning away — no need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), based on Michael Crichton's novel. Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; we're here to talk about it.)
On a private island off Costa Rica, the billionaire John Hammond has built something no one has ever seen: a theme park stocked with living, breathing dinosaurs, cloned from genetic material found in prehistoric mosquitoes trapped in amber. When an accident with a raptor spooks his investors, Hammond invites a small group of outside experts to endorse the park before it opens: the paleontologist Dr Alan Grant, the paleobotanist Dr Ellie Sattler, and the mathematician Dr Ian Malcolm, along with the park's lawyer and Hammond's own grandchildren, Lex and Tim.
The tour begins in wonder. A towering Brachiosaurus rears up on its hind legs to reach the treetops, and Grant, a lifelong sceptic of theme parks, is reduced to speechless awe. But the cracks show quickly. A sick Triceratops worries the scientists, and in the laboratory, Grant is horrified to learn that the dinosaurs — engineered to be all female, to make breeding impossible — have somehow found a way around it, using genetic material borrowed from frogs capable of changing sex.
Malcolm, whose entire career is built on chaos theory — the study of how small, unpredictable events can spiral through a complex system — warns Hammond bluntly: no system this complicated can ever really be controlled, whatever the engineers believe. Hammond is charmed by his own creation, and deaf to the warning.
1. What has Hammond built on the island, and how were the dinosaurs cloned?
2. Why does Malcolm say the park can never really be safe?
1. A theme park of cloned, living dinosaurs, made from DNA taken from ancient mosquitoes preserved in amber, with gaps in the DNA filled using frog DNA.
2. Because it is such an enormously complex system that unpredictable, chaotic events are certain to occur, no matter how well it is engineered.
That night, a tropical storm rolls in — and so does betrayal. Dennis Nedry, a park programmer secretly paid by a rival company to steal dinosaur embryos, shuts down the island's computer systems to cover his theft, cutting the power to every electric fence at once. The tour vehicles, carrying Grant, Malcolm, the lawyer and the two children, stall right beside the paddock of the park's single most dangerous resident: a full-grown Tyrannosaurus rex.
Without its fence, the rex breaks free. It flips one vehicle, kills the fleeing lawyer, and Malcolm is badly injured shielding the children. Grant manages to get Lex and Tim to safety, but the group is now scattered across the island in the dark, with the power down and no way to call for help.
Meanwhile, Nedry — lost in the storm and hunting for his getaway route — meets a small, almost comical-looking dinosaur, a Dilophosaurus, that turns out to be far more venomous and dangerous than anyone at the park had bothered to warn him about.
1. Why do the park's electric fences fail?
2. What happens to the tour group when the T. rex escapes?
1. Nedry sabotages the security system to cover up his theft of embryos, cutting power to the electric fences during the storm.
2. Their vehicle is stranded beside the T. rex paddock; the rex attacks, kills the lawyer, injures Malcolm, and scatters the group across the island in the dark.
Grant and the children survive the night by improvising: sleeping in trees, wading past a herd of Gallimimus fleeing the rex, and finding proof, in an abandoned nest, that the dinosaurs really are breeding on their own. Back at the visitor centre, Sattler and the park's game warden risk the darkened grounds to restore the power, with help from Lex's genuine talent for computers.
But restoring power reactivates every system at once — including the door to the raptor enclosure. Two Velociraptors, the smartest and most calculating predators on the island, stalk the reunited group through the empty kitchens and corridors of the visitor centre, in the film's tensest sequence.
Just as the raptors are about to corner them all, the escaped T. rex crashes through the wall and finishes the fight instead. The survivors escape the island by helicopter, Hammond's dream in ruins — and Malcolm's warning proven right: the people who built this park were so consumed by whether they could do it that nobody had properly asked whether they should.
1. How do Grant and the children discover the dinosaurs are breeding?
2. What finally saves the group from the raptors?
1. They find hatched eggshells out in the wild, proof that the frog DNA let the "all-female" dinosaurs reproduce anyway.
2. The escaped T. rex bursts in and attacks the raptors, letting the group escape while the two predators fight each other.
Jurassic Park is a film built on one contrast: what science could do versus what it should do. English has several tools for holding two contrasting facts in a single thought — some soften the contrast as a concession ("yes, but…"), others simply set two facts side by side.
Look at what follows the gap, then choose although / even though / though (+ clause) or despite / in spite of (+ noun/-ing).
1. the raptors' cage was reinforced steel, they still worked out how to open the door.
2. decades of research into the animals' behaviour, nobody at InGen expected the raptors to hunt as a coordinated team.
3. being warned repeatedly by his own mathematician, Hammond refused to delay the park's opening.
1. Although / Even though / Though (followed by a full clause: "the raptors' cage was...")
2. Despite / In spite of (followed by a noun phrase: "decades of research...")
3. Despite / In spite of (followed by an -ing phrase: "being warned...")
Each sentence uses the wrong connector for its structure. Write the connector that should replace it.
1. Despite Nedry stole the embryos to sell them, he never made it off the island alive. (wrong: "despite" + full clause)
2. Although the chaos inside the park, Malcolm had predicted almost exactly how it would unfold. (wrong: "although" + noun)
3. The T. rex seemed to be the island's greatest danger; despite, the smaller raptors turned out to be far deadlier. (wrong: "despite" joining two sentences)
1. Although / Even though / Though ("Nedry stole" is a full clause)
2. Despite / In spite of ("the chaos" is a noun)
3. However (linking two separate sentences)
Fill each gap with although, despite, whereas or however as the context needs.
The park's investors were reassured by the electric fences and the motion sensors. , none of that technology mattered once the man in charge of the whole system had already sold their secrets. Grant had never trusted computers, Hammond trusted almost nothing else. And everything that went wrong on the island, Malcolm took no pleasure in being right — he had hoped, more than anyone, that his own theory would fail this time.
However · whereas · despite / in spite of
Notice the pattern: a new sentence needs however; two clauses side by side need whereas; a noun phrase needs despite / in spite of.
Carry these into the Speak tab — the whole film lives in one contrast: although the science was extraordinary, however impressive the park looked, nobody stopped to ask whether it should exist at all.
The film's central method for bringing back dinosaurs turns out to be scientifically impossible. But real "de-extinction" science exists, and it's stranger — and more careful — than the film ever imagined.
DNA breaks down steadily over time, no matter how well it is preserved. Research on DNA decay has found it has a "half-life" of only around 521 years even under ideal conditions, meaning that even in perfectly preserved remains, genetic information becomes too fragmented to read at all within roughly 1.5 million years at the very most — a tiny fraction of the 66 million years since the dinosaurs died out. Some researchers in the early 1990s (right around when Crichton's novel and the film appeared) reported recovering DNA fragments from insects preserved in amber tens of millions of years old, but no other laboratory has ever been able to repeat those results, and most scientists now believe the "ancient DNA" in question was really modern contamination. The amber-mosquito method at the heart of Jurassic Park is today considered scientifically impossible.
A real biotechnology company, Colossal Biosciences, is working to bring back the woolly mammoth — not by finding ancient mammoth DNA and growing it (mammoth DNA, though far better preserved than any dinosaur's since mammoths died out only a few thousand years ago, is still too fragmented to use directly), but by editing the genome of the Asian elephant, the mammoth's closest living relative, inserting mammoth traits such as a shaggy coat and cold tolerance directly into elephant DNA. The company reports producing stem cells that can be propagated indefinitely, and is aiming for mammoth-like embryos as early as 2026 and live calves by 2028.
The same company has already used a related gene-editing approach — not ancient-DNA cloning — to produce wolf pups with dire-wolf-like traits, though its own chief scientist has been candid that the animals are genetically modified grey wolves, not a true resurrection of the extinct dire wolf. Real "de-extinction," in other words, means editing a living relative's genome — not reviving a lost one.
Ian Malcolm's warning is grounded in a genuine field of mathematics called chaos theory, developed from the 1960s onward, which shows that complex systems — weather, ecosystems, financial markets — can be so sensitive to tiny starting differences that their future behaviour becomes fundamentally unpredictable, an effect sometimes nicknamed the "butterfly effect." Real scientists working on de-extinction today face a version of the same question Malcolm raised: even as gene-editing technology keeps improving, reintroducing a long-vanished species could have consequences for today's ecosystems that nobody can fully predict. The live debate isn't really about whether the technology will work — increasingly, it does — but about whether success would even be a good idea.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail.
Tell the story of Jurassic Park in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: the island and the invitation → the storm and the escaped T. rex → the raptors and the rescue.
Work in at least five key words (containment, havoc, unforeseen, reckless, resilient, lucrative, tamper, unleash, hubris, preoccupied), and use at least two of today's connectors (although, despite, whereas, however) as you explain what went wrong.
Ian Malcolm's argument is that some experiments should never be attempted, no matter how impressive the science behind them. Build an argument: is there ever a scientific discovery that's better left undiscovered — or is knowledge always worth pursuing, whatever the risk? Bring in other real examples you know: nuclear weapons, human cloning, artificial intelligence.
Real de-extinction science, like the mammoth project, is advancing fast. Should we actually try to bring back extinct species — or leave them extinct? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: