Apollo 11 or Apollo 15?

FYI: This week in English class I had to write a "letter to the editor"...so I did. Here it is! Enjoy!

~Photobug

To Whom It May Concern at Bob Jones University:

Before I start into this letter I want to say how much I have enjoyed your English (Writing & Grammar 11, 2^nd Edition) curriculum. While I do not particularly excel in English, your course is the best and most interesting English course I have ever found. Most of the time I have found that the pictures are well suited to accompany the sentences.

However, I felt mislead by the fact that on page 105 your seventh sentence (“Your grandparents will probably be happy to share how they felt when WWII ended or when a man first walked on the moon.”) and picture below do not match.

As an avid reader on the Apollo space program, I immediately recognized the picture, which is of Jim Irwin on Apollo 15. I felt misled by the fact that the sentence read “when a man first walked on the moon” and the accompanying picture shows the eighth man on the moon.

There are several clues that show the picture is from a later Apollo mission. First of all, the Lunar Rover (the car-type vehicle on the right) was only on Apollos 15, 16 and 17.

Second, at the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed, there are no such mountains as there is at the Apollo 15 landing site, Hadley Rile. (The mountain in the background is Hadley Mountain.)

There are a variety of ways you could fix this discrepancy. You could either change the sentence to read, “when men walked on the moon”, or change the picture to an image of Buzz Aldrin, who accompanied Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11. Apollo 11 and Apollo 15 are both note-worthy missions, but when talking about either I would highly recommend that you use a picture or sentence from the correct mission.

Sincerely,

Tennessee Photobug