Unit 6 Section 1 Reading

A switch-off weekend

by Daisy from Grade 7

Last week, our science teacher, Mrs Brown, taught us about electricity and how important it is. Then she gave us a special task: to try living without electricity for a weekend. Our family thought it sounded interesting, so we decided to do it together.

However, it turned out that it was very hard to live without electricity. After it got dark, my little brother Benny and I could only read and write by candlelight. We usually watch a movie together on Friday nights, but the TV doesn’t work without electricity. Instead, we played video games for a while, but then our tablet ran out of battery. “What about tomorrow?” we thought.   

Since there wasn’t any electricity, some things in the fridge quickly went bad. When we woke up on Saturday morning, we discovered that we couldn’t eat our breakfast cereal—we didn’t have any milk or yogurt! By noon, it got really hot inside our apartment, but we couldn’t turn on the air conditioner. Even worse, most household tasks became very difficult without electricity. For example, we had to wash all our clothes by hand, and this took us a lot of time.                    

However, there were also nice things about living without electricity. On Sunday, we went on a bike trip and visited my grandparents in the countryside. We enjoyed a picnic in their garden, and we also played chess and painted pictures together. At night, we sat under the stars and listened to my grandad’s stories.

This was a really interesting experience, but I cannot imagine living without electricity for more than a few days.