[00:04.70]Lesson 77
[00:08.25]1.Dialogue
[00:12.93]Susan is asking Mrs Zhu about the development of printing in China.
[00:20.30]What happened before printing was invented?
[00:24.84]People had to use other ways to record information.
[00:29.60]In the beginning they used to carve Chinese characters on stones
[00:35.37]to record important dates in history.
[00:39.42]Do you call that printing?
[00:42.68]No,not exactly.But later,people developed a way of printing,using rocks.
[00:50.34]After they carved the characters on rocks,
[00:54.60]they put a piece of wet paper on top of the characters and beat it lightly.
[01:00.97]Then they brushed ink on the paper.
[01:05.23]How did the printing come out?
[01:08.68]The characters on the paper were white,and the rest of the paper was black.
[01:15.02]That doesn't sound like modern printing.
[01:19.10]No.The next development was to carve the characters on piece of wood.
[01:25.16]They carved a whole page of characters back-to front in the wood .
[01:31.01]Then they brushed ink on to the characters.
[01:35.27]After that they pressed a piece of paper on top,
[01:40.13]and printed a whole page of a book.
[01:44.28]What was the problem with this method?
[01:47.94]It took a very long time to carve a page for a book.
[01:52.61]After you printed the book,you had to throw away the carved pieces of wood.
[01:58.36]You couldn't use them again.
[02:01.73]Lesson 78 Reading
[02:11.89]Read the passage to answer this question:
[02:16.54]What did people use for keeping records in the past?
[02:21.87]PAPER
[02:24.33]The Chinese have been making paper for two thousand years.
[02:30.60]Paper was one of the most important inventions in the whole of Chinese history.
[02:37.44]As a result of this invention,
[02:41.59]much is known about Chinese history because records were kept on paper.
[02:47.94]However,in other parts of the world,
[02:52.90]much of the history over hundreds of years is completely unknown.
[02:59.15]As there was no paper in these countries,no records were kept.
[03:05.81]It is believed that before writing was developed,
[03:11.06]people in China used to keep records by putting a number of stones together.
[03:17.59]As soon as writing was developed,people carved words on animal bones.
[03:24.96]Later,words were carved on metal pots;
[03:29.92]examples of these have been found from the 16th to the third century BC.
[03:37.78]Between the second and the fifth centuries AD
[03:43.71]people wrote on pieces of bamboo or wood
[03:49.75]and these were tied together to form a book.
[03:54.61]Although these were much more useful than the metal pots,
[04:01.14]they were still difficult to read and wre very heavy to carry.
[04:07.61]At the same time another kind of paper was developed,made from silk.
[04:16.26]Some silk books that have been found are over 2,140 years old.
[04:24.59]It was easy to write and draw on silk.
[04:29.56]The problem was that it was too valuable for everyday use.
[04:36.09]Because it was so expensive,
[04:39.95]people developed a kind of paper made from the fibres of plants.
[04:46.48]They used fishing nets,the outside of trees,pieces of old clothes and so on.
[04:55.13]These things were put in water for a few hours and then beaten again and again.
[05:02.89]The fibres joined together and were beaten flat and then dried in a sheet.
[05:10.62]This kind of paper was as soft and light as silk but much less expensive.
[05:18.35]By the first century the making of paper in some parts of China
[05:24.62]had been well developed and had become common.
[05:29.67]After a time,the invention reached other countries.
[05:35.02]In the eighth century a paper-making factory was set up in the Middle East,
[05:41.86]from which paper was sent all over Europe.
[05:46.54]Spain started making paper in 1150 and Russia started in 1567.
[05:55.50]Paper has been made in America since 1690
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