VOA常速英语:Top 5 Songs for Week Ending March 28

These are the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart, for the week ending March 28, 2015.

How to describe this week’s lineup? Well…it’s the same, but different. Hopefully that’s sufficiently mysterious for you to stick around.

Let’s begin in fifth place, where Rihanna, Kanye West, and Paul McCartney remain frozen with “FourFiveSeconds.” How did Paul get involved? He tells Britain’s NME that it started last summer, when he caught Kanye and Jay-Z in concert in London. He and Kanye began working together and to date, they’ve done three songs: “FourFiveSeconds,” “Only One,” and “All Day,” which traces its roots to an unreleased McCartney song from 1969.

Holding in fourth place is Ellie Goulding with “Love Me Like You Do.” Ellie has sold an estimated four million albums and 15 million singles worldwide. Aside from selling a lot of records, she’s also a bit of a do-gooder…She’s active in charity, participating in philanthropic projects for the British Heart Foundation, the Los Angeles Unified School District, Free The Children, and others. Ellie also sang in last year’s Band Aid 30 project to fight the spread of Ebola in Africa.

Falling a slot to third place is Ed Sheeran with “Thinking Out Loud.” He's touring Australia, and on March 24 was spotted in Sydney, shooting a cameo appearance for the popular TV show "Home And Away". The episode will air later this year.

Jumping a slot to second place we have Maroon 5 and “Sugar.” The band is on a world tour, with a couple of particularly intriguing stops on its schedule. On June 6, they play at the Mawazine Festival in Morocco, while September 19 finds them in Singapore at the Formula 1 Grand Prix.

Up at number one it’s still Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars with “Uptown Funk.” That makes 11 weeks, and that’s pretty special… It’s only the 19th single in Hot 100 history to rule for that long. It last happened in 2013, when “Blurred Lines” spent 12 weeks at the top.

So, that’s it for now, but as always…the charts never sleep! We'll be back next week with a brand new lineup.