≤084 Unit 8 Listening 1
C Listen to the first part of the talk and complete the table. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS OR A NUMBER for each answer. Voice: Good morning, again. I realize a few of you aren’t here yet, but I’ll make a start anyway. I’m going to talk this morning about an important aspect of history, and that is how history is recorded and how the way we record history has changed over the centuries. I’ll talk about how the storytelling of primitive man has developed into the modern methods of communication that we have today. I’ve got some images that I’ll show you as I talk, so just let me turn on the PowerPoint. OK, now – man has been on Earth for something
like two hundred thousand years, and we don’t really know when man first used language to communicate. But we do know that as soon as man did have language, he used it to tell stories. Now, these stories were the first example of man recording his history. The stories were passed on from one generation to the next, and children would have known something about the people that came before them. One problem, of course, with a spoken history is that it’s unreliable. The storyteller forgets facts and adds elements to the story that might not have been true. The earliest attempts to record day-to-day life in
anything other than spoken language were around 32 thousand years ago. That is when we believe the first cave paintings were made. Now, it might be that cave paintings were not an attempt to record history at all – the most common images in cave paintings are large wild animals, so perhaps man made them to bring him luck when he was hunting. They might have simply decorated his living space. Whatever they were for, they certainly are a record, and they tell us a great deal about how people so long ago lived their lives. Many people believe that history really began when man learnt to write down information, and for that reason we say that what came before man could write is ‘prehistoric’. However, you should remember that we have learnt a great deal from people in many parts of the world who could not write. The first people to record experience in written form were the Egyptians. Around 5 thousand years ago – that’s 3000 BC – the Egyptians used hieroglyphics, a system of symbols and sounds, to record beliefs and events on the walls of their temples and on their monuments. Who knows if this was an attempt to leave something for future generations to understand? The word ‘history’ comes from Greek, and it is the people of ancient Greece who, in around 500 BC, really began the long tradition of writing down everything that happened for future generations to read. In ancient Greece lived the first historians – the first people whose job was to record history.
194 Pathway to IELTS 1
≤085 Unit 8 Listening 2
A Listen to the second part of the talk and answer the questions. For questions 1–12, complete the table. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS OR A NUMBER for each answer. Voice: The next important development in how history is recorded came with print. In the eighth century, the Chinese invented paper and woodblock printing. Remember that up to this time very few people could read and write, and so only a very small number of people could understand written history. Suddenly, many books appeared, and many more people learnt to read. In the fourteenth century, the first printing press was invented in Germany. This reduced how long it took to produce books. The new printing technique quickly spread to other parts of the world, more books appeared and even more people learnt to read. The first printed newspaper appeared in 1605 and the first daily newspaper in 1702. Now, people could read news stories soon after the event happened and every event was recorded and stored. The problem with newspaper history is that newspaper reporters could tell the stories they wanted to tell and not necessarily the truth. Photography was the next important development. We generally agree that photography was born in 1839. Some of the earliest photographs that the public saw were images of the American Civil War. People were shocked by the photographs of dead soldiers, and for the first time saw the reality of war. By 1850, photographs appeared regularly in newspapers, and people now expected the truth. At the end of the nineteenth century came the first motion-picture camera. Soon, history was being recorded as moving images. In the 1930s, television brought moving images into people’s homes. More and more people saw history as it happened, and more and more history was recorded. Today, of course, we expect that every event in the world is recorded. Satellite TV and the Internet allow people to watch any event, anywhere in the world as it happens. It doesn’t matter if the TV cameras are not there – people carry around mobile phones and can record any incident, and then share it online. Families have their own video cameras and record their own history. Children now grow up watching their parents and grandparents on film. I’m sure you’ll agree that the transition from storytelling to what we have today has been dramatic, and I hope that ...
≤086 Unit 8 Listening 2
Pronunciation check
Century is pronounced /s en ə r i/. Listen to these phrases and then practise saying them.
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