Stephen Hawking was a very famous scientist whose ideas changed the world. He studied space and time and taught people about the universe. Stephen was often very ill and his life was not easy, but it was extraordinary. Penguin Readers is a series of popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction, written for learners of English as a foreign language. The series is aligned to the Common European Framework and includes language activities that help develop key skills. The Extraordinary Life of Stephen Hawking, a Level 3 Reader, is A2 in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to three clauses, introducing first conditional, past continuous and present perfect simple for general experience. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear on most pages.