Left for dead on Mars, one astronaut survives by growing food from nothing — and almost everything about how he does it is real science.
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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.
Ridley Scott's The Martian (2015), based on the novel by Andy Weir. 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 the surface of Mars, a monstrous dust storm tears into the camp of a six-person NASA crew halfway through their mission. As they scramble for their escape vehicle, a flying piece of debris smashes into astronaut Mark Watney and hurls him away into the storm, his suit torn open. With visibility collapsing and the ship at risk of tipping over, Commander Lewis is forced to make an agonising call: leave now, or lose everyone. Watney's suit telemetry shows no life signs. Certain he is dead, the crew evacuates without him and begins the long journey home, grieving a man they believe they left behind on an empty planet.
But Watney is not dead. He wakes alone in the settling dust, a piece of antenna driven into his side, his oxygen almost gone. Alone and in agony, he drags himself back to the crew's abandoned base — the "Hab" — treats his own wound, and takes stock of what's left: a small greenhouse, a limited stockpile of food, and no way, yet, of telling anyone back on Earth that he's alive.
Facing the wreckage of his situation, Watney records a video log of his own, half joke and half survival plan: he is stranded on a planet with no food source, and the next mission to Mars isn't due for another four years. He will have to find a way to survive far longer than his supplies were ever meant to last.
1. Why does the crew leave Mars without Watney?
2. What does Watney discover once he wakes up alone?
1. A dust storm hits the camp, debris injures Watney, his suit shows no life signs, and with the ship in danger the commander must evacuate without him, believing him dead.
2. He's alive but badly wounded, alone on Mars, with the next rescue mission not due for roughly four years and not nearly enough food to last that long.
Watney is a botanist, and it may be the one skill that can save him. To survive years alone, he calculates exactly how much food he needs and builds a farm inside the sealed Hab: he mixes Martian soil with the crew's own biological waste as fertiliser, plants the whole crew's supply of potatoes — saved, ironically, for a Thanksgiving meal — and manufactures water by carefully burning rocket fuel to release hydrogen, then combining it with oxygen. Days become an endless, meticulous routine of measuring, rationing and recording, and slowly, improbably, the potatoes begin to grow.
Just as the farm starts to thrive, disaster strikes: a sudden decompression blows out part of the Hab, killing most of his crop and nearly killing him. He rebuilds anyway, refusing to give up, and eventually manages to reach an old, buried NASA rover — Pathfinder — reactivating it to send the first signal Earth has received from him in months. NASA, watching satellite images, had already begun to suspect he might be alive; now they know for certain.
Back on Earth, a young engineer proposes a bold, unofficial plan to intercept Watney's own former crew and send them looping back to Mars — a manoeuvre nobody at NASA had officially authorised.
1. How does Watney manage to grow food, and how does he make water?
2. What disaster nearly destroys his progress, and how does NASA learn he's alive?
1. He grows potatoes in Martian soil fertilised with human waste, inside the sealed Hab; he makes water by burning fuel to release hydrogen and combining it with oxygen.
2. A decompression destroys most of his crop; he reactivates an old NASA rover, Pathfinder, and uses it to signal Earth, confirming he's alive.
Once his old crew learns Watney is alive, they face a choice: follow NASA's official, safer plan, or defy it. Without waiting for permission, they vote as a crew to alter their own return journey — swinging back around Earth to pick up speed and race back toward Mars themselves, rather than let a slower, official rescue attempt alone. It's a decision that puts all of them at risk to save one man.
On the ground, engineers strip an ascent vehicle down to almost nothing to make it light enough to reach orbit and meet the returning ship, a plan so extreme that Watney himself has to physically puncture a hole in his own suit to use its escaping air as a makeshift thruster and close the final gap in space.
In the end, hand reaches hand: Watney is pulled aboard, alive, against odds that were never supposed to work out in his favour. Back on Earth, sitting in front of a new class of astronaut trainees, he reflects simply that when things go wrong, you solve one problem, then the next one, and the next — until, eventually, you're home.
1. What decision does the original crew make once they learn Watney is alive?
2. How does Watney finally close the gap during the rescue?
1. They vote to defy the safer official plan and loop their own ship back around Earth to speed up their return to Mars and rescue him themselves.
2. He punctures a hole in his own spacesuit and uses the escaping air like a thruster to close the last distance to the ship.
No story rewards careful verb patterns more than The Martian. When one verb follows another, English sometimes needs the -ing form (a gerund) and sometimes needs to + infinitive — and a resourceful, step-by-step survival story gives you every pattern you need.
Read the sentence and choose the form the verb before the gap needs.
1. He knew rescue was years away, so he decided (ration) his food carefully from day one.
2. Every night he kept (record) his measurements in a log, hoping someone would one day read it.
3. Even in the worst moments, he avoided (give) up completely.
1. to ration (decide + to + infinitive)
2. recording (keep + -ing)
3. giving up (avoid + -ing)
Each sentence has the right idea but the wrong pattern. Write the corrected verb phrase.
1. He managed (grow) enough food to survive for hundreds of extra days.
2. NASA suggested (send) a resupply mission as fast as possible.
3. The crew refused (leave) him behind once they learned he was alive.
1. to grow (manage + to + infinitive)
2. sending (suggest + -ing)
3. to leave (refuse + to + infinitive)
Fill each gap with the correct form. Read it aloud when you're done.
Watney refused (lose) hope, even in the loneliest weeks. Determined to survive, he stopped (worry) about the odds and focused on one task at a time. Every few hours he stopped (eat) a small, carefully measured meal, then went straight back to work. By the time the rescue ship arrived, he had managed (survive) alone on Mars for longer than anyone thought possible.
to lose · worrying · to eat · to survive
Notice the shift: stop + -ing means the worrying itself ends; stop + to + infinitive means he pauses one activity in order to do another.
Carry both patterns into the Speak tab — this whole story is really a chain of things Watney manages to do and things he keeps doing until they work.
Here's what makes The Martian unusual: the science behind it was researched with real care, and NASA itself later got involved. But the story does bend the truth in at least one big, deliberate way — and it quietly leaves out one uncomfortable fact about real Martian soil.
Andy Weir, a software engineer with a long-standing interest in orbital mechanics and space travel, spent years researching the physics, botany and chemistry behind his novel, publishing chapters online and letting readers who were genuine scientists and engineers catch his mistakes. NASA later invited Weir to visit Johnson Space Center, and the agency consulted on the film to help keep both the science and the technology as plausible as possible.
The plan at the heart of the rescue — sending Watney's own crew looping back around Earth to gain speed before heading back to Mars — uses a genuine, long-tested technique called a gravity assist, or slingshot. A spacecraft that swings close enough to a planet can "steal" a little of that planet's own orbital momentum and leave travelling significantly faster, without burning extra fuel. It is the same principle that would have brought the early Apollo crews home safely if their engines had ever failed, and it has carried real probes — including Cassini, on its long journey to Saturn — across the solar system.
Growing food in Martian soil is also an active area of real research, not pure invention: scientists have successfully grown crops, including potatoes, in soil designed to mimic the Martian surface's chemistry, and space agencies are seriously studying how astronauts might one day farm there. What the story quietly skips over: real Martian regolith is laced with toxic chemical compounds called perchlorates, harmful to human health, which would need to be washed or filtered out of the soil before any crop could safely be grown in it — a step Watney's potato farm never has to deal with.
The disaster that strands Watney in the first place could not really happen. Mars's atmosphere is only around one percent as dense as Earth's, so even a violent, fast-moving Martian dust storm would feel, at most, like a light breeze — nowhere near strong enough to topple a spacecraft or drive a metal antenna through an astronaut's side. Andy Weir has openly admitted that he knew this and built the storm into the story anyway, because he needed a fast, dramatic way to strand his character and get the plot moving. It is the one acknowledged cheat at the centre of an otherwise carefully researched story.
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 The Martian in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: the storm and the evacuation → Watney waking up alone and injured → building a farm inside the Hab and signalling Earth → the crew's decision to defy the official plan → the final rescue in orbit.
Work in at least five key words (marooned, sustenance, meticulous, ingenuity, resourceful, arduous, improvise, subsist, tenacity, barren), and use verb + -ing / verb + to + infinitive patterns as you describe what he manages to do and keeps doing.
Watney's old crew defies NASA's safer, official plan and risks their own mission and lives to go back for him. Build an argument: is it right to break from an organisation's official decision to save one person, even if it puts others at risk — or should the official, safer plan always be followed? Bring in other examples you know — rescue workers, soldiers, whistleblowers.
Watney survives almost entirely through calm, methodical problem-solving, done alone, one task at a time. Is that kind of steady, patient thinking more valuable in a crisis than raw courage or luck? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: