1 st April is a day to be careful, or you could easily get tri cked by someone. It’s April Fool’s Day, a day when people tradi tionally like to try to make a fool of someone else and laugh at them.
There are lots of theo ries surrou nding the ori gins of the day, but one expla nation is con nected with the change in the ca lendar in the 16th century, which meant that 1st April was no longer the begin ning of the year. Those who still celebrated the New Year on 1st April were cal led fools.
So what kin d of pran ks do people play on April Fool’s Day? Well, there are lots of sim ple tri cks that you can play on your friends. For example, you could wear a black sweater and pull a piece of white thread through it, so that people try to pull it off. You could change the time on someone’s alar m clock so that they’re late for work. Or glue a coin to the floor and see how many people try to pick it up.
All these are small- sca le practi cal jokes which you might play on one other person or a few people. But there’s also a tradition of large companies attem pting to fool a lot of people. For example a bur ger res taurant once claim ed that they were introducing a left-handed burger!
In parti cular, the media often try to make people believe something which is not true. Newspapers pub lish some ludi crous stories every year, although some of them are actually true. It’s en ter taining to try to guess which stories are true and which are fa ke. In the April Fool’s stories, they often include a clue to the fact that it’s a joke. For example the name of an ‘ex pert’ quo ted in the arti cle might be an anag ram of ‘April Fool’.
Radio and television prog ram mes have also fooled many people by broad cas ting re ports which are un tru e. One prog ramme announ ced the inven tion of an ama zing new weight-lo ss product - water which contained minus calories!
And one of the most famous hoa xes ever was broad ca st by the BBC itself in 1957! A very serious news prog ram me called Panorama reported on the poor spaghetti harvest in Switzerland, and sh owed pictures of farmers picking spaghetti from trees! Hundreds of people were taken in and wrote to the BBC asking how to grow their own spaghetti. (BBC)
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