Man Finds $100,000 Comic Book Being Used as Wallpaper

Before you read: some questions to help you think about the topic and the words you might need.

What kinds of things that are old could have a very high value?

Have you ever collected something like old coins? Do you know someone who has? Why do they collect them?

Can you imagine doing some work on your house and finding a fortune hidden for many years? Well this is exactly what happened to a man in Minnesota USA. When David Gonzalez was replacing the walls in his house he noticed that old newspapers had been used to insulate the walls against cold from the outside. However, what was unusual was that some of the newspapers were actually old comics. In particular a comic that was very valuable. It was the very first comic to ever have an action superhero. In this case, action comic number 1 from 1938 and the action superhero was Superman.

Gonzalez knew that it was worth money, but he had no idea how much. At this time it is being bid at an auction and the highest bid is currently $113,000. This is not bad when you consider that he originally bought the house where he found the comic for $10,100. However, the comic could have been worth a lot more except that his wife grabbed it from him because she was so excited and when he tried to take it back they accidently ripped the cover. As a result experts downgraded the comic book’s condition to a 1.5 on a 10-point scale. To put that in comic-book context, a 9.0-grade Action 1 fetched more than $2 million recently. For this comic book that means that this is a $75,000 accident and according to the experts this comic would have been a 3.0 on the scale.

Auctioneers say it’s hard to fathom that you could discover a comic that nobody knows about and that it’s miraculous that the comic survived more than 70 years in the wall of a house and had only one owner.

So if you’ve got a small fortune burning a hole in your pocket, you might like to buy this comic.

Try to guess the meaning of the words in bold and match them with their closest meaning from the choices in the right. Some of the answers are very close and have similar meaning.

 The answers are below the table.