Well hello and welcome to the Learn Everyday English Podcast, your roadway to English proficiency.
Hey, you've come to the right place to improve your listening comprehension skills and mastery of the English language.
My name is Gary and I will be your host today.
I'm a native English speaker born and raised in the United States, living in a small Texas town about one hour north of Houston, and I'm also a retired civil engineer.
And also I'm a language learner just like you, so I know what it is like to learn a new and different language.
Hey, so now let's jump right in to today's episode.
Hey howdy y 'all, what's up everybody and welcome to this episode of the Learn Everyday English Podcast.
This is going to be episode 21 and I'm going to be talking about interesting facts and things about the city of Houston, Texas, a city that I know quite a bit about because I lived there for a long time and grew up there.
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Hey, so without further ado, let's get going.
Well, in today's episode we're going to be talking about Houston, Texas.
I don't know if you've heard of Houston, but it's a very big city in the south part of the United States, and I lived a large part of my life in Houston, so I know Houston very well.
The information that I'm going to be going over I just want to acknowledge.
I got from two different websites or sources.
The first is called TheCultureTrip .com, and it's 10 unique facts about Houston you didn't know.
Also, I got some information from a site called VisitHoustonTexas .com, so I just want to give them a shout out, as we say in English, or give them some credit for this information.
So first off, what is the history of Houston, Texas?
Well, in 1836, on April 21st, General Sam Houston's army won Texas's independence from Mexico in the Battle of San Jacinto, or maybe other people may say the Battle of San Jacinto, but Texas used to be under the control of Mexico but gained its independence, and the city of Houston is actually named
after General Sam Houston.
And also in 1836, Houston was founded on August 30th by two brothers, Augustus C.
and John K. Allen, who paid just over $1 .40 per acre for 6 ,642 acres near the waters of Buffalo Bayou.
And today in Houston, downtown, there is a Buffalo Bayou and Buffalo Bayou Park, which is very popular for residents to go bicycle, walk around, walk their dogs, and that sort of thing.
And in 1837, General Sam Houston, who was the first president of the Republic of Texas, signed an act, or like a law, authorizing or allowing Houston to incorporate, or like to become official.
And Houston was the capital of the Republic from 1837 to 1839, but today Houston is not the capital of Texas.
The capital of Texas is actually Austin, Texas.
Houston is a very large city.
It encompasses, or it is made up of about 655 square miles, so that's very large.
So the city of Houston could actually contain the following cities inside of it.
New York City, Washington, D .C., Boston, Massachusetts, San Francisco, California, Seattle, Washington, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Miami, Florida.
So wow, that is pretty large.
Let's talk about the population and the demography of Houston.
Demography is like demographics, like the people that live in Houston.
What are they made up of?
So Houston has a very diverse racial population, or we could also say ethnic composition.
37 .3 percent are Anglo, or sometimes you may hear that referred to as white Americans.
36 .5 percent are Hispanic.
16 .9 percent are African American.
7 .5 percent are Asian or other.
1 .8 percent are other.
So you can see the Hispanic population is expanding or increasing very quickly in Houston, and it is estimated they will pass or surpass the Anglo population, maybe within the next five, ten years or so.
Actually, also people from Houston are called Houstonians, and nearly one in Houstonians are foreign -born, or they were born in another country, so that's 25 percent.
Houston's nickname is called the Space City, because in Houston there is NASA Space Center, and we're going to talk about that a little bit more.
The median income in Houston is $51 ,140, and the median price of a home in Houston is almost $200 ,000.
It's actually $196 ,400.
Some more interesting facts.
Houston residents eat out more times a week than any other city in the United States, and this is probably due to the fact that the average meal costs less than the food and restaurants in the country.
Houstonians dine out, which means to eat out, more than residents of any other city, 6 .9 times per week, compared with the national average of 4 .9 times per week, and the average meal in Houston is $35 .57, and that's less than the national average of $36 .40.
Like I said before, Houston has a lot of restaurants and has one of the best culinary scenes in the country.
Culinary just means a restaurant or where food is prepared, and Houston has more than 10 ,000 restaurants, which represents more than 70 countries from around the world.
Houston has more than 75 national categories of cuisine and has over 600 vegan -friendly restaurants, more than 150 farm -to -table restaurants.
That means the food at the restaurant comes directly from the farm to the restaurant, and more than 700 food trucks, which you can find all throughout the city.
Houston is also home to the largest medical center in the world called the Texas Medical Center, and it contains 54 medicine -related institutions.
The Medical Center gets an average of 7 .2 million visits per year, and that's more than the populations of Los Angeles, Houston, and San Francisco combined, or sometimes we say put together.
Hey also, did you know that more heart surgeries are performed in the Texas Medical Center than anywhere else in the world?
And the first successful human heart transplant was performed in Houston by Dr.
Denton Cooley in 1968.
Hey some more facts, Houston is the fourth most populous city in the nation or has the fourth largest population or number of people in the country with about 2 .3 million residents and making it the largest city in Texas and in the south portion are part of the United States.
Houston only trails behind New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago when it comes to population.
And another interesting fact is more than 145 different languages are spoken in Houston.
I find that to be quite incredible.
So Houston has the third largest number of languages spoken in the United States just behind New York City and Los Angeles.
Like I said before, more than 145 different languages are spoken in Houston and that's the third largest, like I said, behind New York and New York actually has 192 different languages in LA, 185.
And more than one third, or sometimes we say more than a third, of Houstonians older than five years old speak a language other than English at home.
And while Spanish and English are prevalent in the area, or prevalent means it occurs a lot or is very popular, you will hear people speaking languages like Vietnamese, Chinese, Hindu, German, and Tagalog.
Another interesting fact, or sometimes we use the word tidbit, which is kind of like an item, is that the first traditional Hindu mandir, which is just their word for temple in the nation, was built in Houston.
It's called the Bapsri Swaminarayan, sorry if I mispronounced that name, mandir, and it was assembled in Houston like a puzzle.
It consists of 33 ,000 pieces of Italian marble and Turkish limestone.
The temple was carved by hand and took 28 months to build, I hear.
And actually, when I lived in Houston, I actually went and took a tour of that temple and it was very fascinating.
The temple came from India and they had to ship over all the different pieces and reassemble them stone by stone.
And not only is this the first temple built in the US, but also the largest of its kind in Texas.
And did you know that Houston has an underground pedestrian tunnel system?
Pedestrian means just like for people walking around.
So underneath the city of Houston below the street, there is a tunnel system or a system of tunnels.
And I worked in downtown Houston for 30 years.
And when I first started working there, I didn't know there was a tunnel system, but it's very, very big, very long.
And it's very interesting.
The tunnel is 20 feet below the ground and runs for seven miles linking 95 city blocks together.
The tunnel originally connected to downtown movie theaters, but now connects much, much more, including all the major city buildings, restaurants, retail stores.
So it is really almost like a mini mall and it's very impressive to say the least.
Also Houston has something called the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which is one of the biggest, if not the biggest or largest rodeos in the world.
And Livestock is just another name for like animals like cows and horses and sheep.
So this month long rodeo attracts over 2 .5 million attendees each year.
And there is also part of this is the world famous barbecue cook -off competition.
There's a very large carnival as well as rodeo performances like horseback riding, horse roping, bull riding, and live concerts featuring world famous artists.
But of course, last year in 2020, the Livestock Show and Rodeo was canceled due to the coronavirus.
And I hear this year the rodeo was canceled as well.
So that's a big impact as a negative impact to the economy of Houston because the Livestock Show and Rodeo generates a lot of revenue for the city.
And actually Houston is home to Texas's largest shopping mall called the Houston Galleria or sometimes just the Galleria, which opened in 1970.
It has over 370 stores on four different levels or four floors.
And it's actually the ninth largest shopping mall in the United States.
Another interesting fact about Houston is home to the was called the Astrodome and opened in 1965.
And it served as the second home to the Houston Astros baseball team.
It's the world's first multi -purpose domed sports stadium.
But currently the dome is not in use.
The city built another sports venue, we say in English or a place where sports activities can occur and the Astrodome sat vacant for a long time.
In 2018, Harris County, which is a county where Houston is located in, the Harris County commissioners voted to renovate or like redo to fix up what is called the eighth wonder of the world.
So that's the Houston Astrodome was termed or called the eighth wonder of the world and make turn it into a multi -purpose sports and event center and a parking garage and they allocated or they set aside 105 million dollars for this project.
But according to the Washington Post, the plans for renovations came to a halt or that means it stopped because Harris County judge Lena Hidalgo said in 2019 that she wants the county to focus on criminal justice reform and flood control.
And if you didn't know, Houston is about one hour north of Galveston or hour away from the coast.
But Houston does have a somewhat serious flooding problem when it gets a lot of rain and a lot of homes get flooded.
And so I guess the county judge Lena Hidalgo wants to use that money to focus on trying to implement more flood control projects in the city.
And now let's talk about green spaces or open spaces.
These could be parks where people can go.
So Houston rates first in total park acreage among US cities with more than one million residents.
So of the 50 largest parks in the United States, Houston has four of them.
Cullen Park which ranks number 12 with over 9 ,000 acres.
George Bush Park ranks number 16th in the nation with over 8 ,000 acres.
There's Lake Houston Wilderness Park at number 25 with almost 5 ,000 acres.
And Bear Creek Pioneers Park at number 48 with a little over 3 ,000 acres.
There are also 198 golf courses within a 50 mile radius of downtown Houston, according to GolfLink .com.
So as you can see, people in Houston and the Houston area love to play golf and the weather is usually accommodating because it is usually not very cold here year -round.
The city of Houston also offers a 300 mile interconnected bikeway network spread over 500 square miles.
And the network includes bike lanes, bike routes, signed shared lanes, and shared use paths.
There are also two airports in Houston, Bush Intercontinental Airport.
This offers non -stop service to more than 70 international destinations.
And the second airport is Hobby Airport, which completed construction of an international terminal in 2015 and began service to Mexico and Latin America through Southwest Airlines.
And it now serves more than 55 destinations.
Also, Houston has a vibrant museum scene.
The Houston Museum District is one of the country's most visited and diverse cultural centers, and it has 19 museums in close proximity or nearby to each other.
So these museums provide rich experiences in art, history, culture, nature, and science.
And the district is divided into four walkable zones, each of which includes a group of museums.
In the museum district, there is the Children's Museum of Houston, and it is the highest attended youth museum in the country for its size and rated number one in the country by Parents Magazine.
The Houston Zoo has over 6 ,000 animals and attracts over 2 million guests each year.
The Manil Collection, which is an art collection, is considered one of the most important private art collections of the 20th century.
There is also a health museum, which is the most visited health museum in the country, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, which is the largest art museum in the Southwest United States, and there's also Rothko Chapel, the only ecumenical center of its kind in the world.
Also, education plays a great part in Houston, or the Houston area.
The greater Houston area has 14 major institutions of higher learning and more than 60 degree granting colleges, universities, and technical schools.
Rice University is the birthplace of nanotechnology and is ranked first among 30 best values in small colleges and the 30 best college values in the west or southwest, according to Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine in 2014.
Tier one research universities in Houston or the Houston region include Rice University, the University of Houston, and Texas A &M University in Bryan College Station, and the Houston region has some or about 100 trade, vocational, and business schools.
Finally, let's talk about space, and space I don't mean like empty area, I mean outer space, or the area outside the world we live in, because Houston is home to Johnson Space Center, the training base and home for our nation's astronauts, and the site of mission control that controls a lot of the operations
that occur in outer space.
So for more than three decades, Johnson Space Center, or sometimes we just refer to it as JSC, has been the world leader in human space flight operations for NASA, which you might have heard that name before, which stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Houston is home to Space Center Houston, which is the official visitor center of the Lyndon B.
Johnson Space Center, which is NASA's Center for Space Flight Activities.
And in 1969, Houston was the first word spoken from the moon when they sent a mission to the moon.
The Apollo 11 mission established a place in history for the city when astronaut Neil Armstrong spoke the now famous line, Houston, tranquility base is here, the eagle has landed.
And Space Center Houston is the home of the International Landmark Independence Plaza, the only place in the world where you can enter a space shuttle replica, resting on top of the original shuttle carrier aircraft, which was called or deemed NASA 905.
The exhibit immerses or places visitors in the science and history of the shuttle era and gives them a rare glimpse or insight into the ingenuity breakthroughs and technological advances, which impacted the future of space exploration.
So that was a little bit of information facts, fun facts about the city of Houston.
Hopefully you learned a lot today, might not have known much about Houston.
Like I said, I lived in Houston for a long time.
I moved there. And when I was about 11 or 12 years old, started school there in sixth grade in the early 1970s and lived in Houston up until about five years ago when I moved just a little bit north.
But I do go to Houston and visit Houston fairly often I have family that lives there.
So I'm very well acquainted with Houston.
And I like Houston and this part of the country.
So if you ever get a chance to visit the US in the south part of the country, hey, take a visit and check Houston out.
Well, that's it for now for this episode.
Thanks for listening.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Learn Every Day English podcast.
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Hey, well, that's it for now.
Be sure to check out our upcoming episodes.
Thanks for listening.
Hey, and goodbye.
