Page 41 - Exercise 1

Page 41 - Exercise 1

1) Today you can travel from one side of the world to the other in one day. Travel in the past was dangerous and journeys took months or even years. At first people walked everywhere. Then, over 10,000 years ago they started to use boats, and, about 4,000 years ago, they started to use animals, such as horses, camels or elephants. After that things didn’t change until the nineteenth century, when people invented new forms of transport.

2) In 1817 Baron von Drais made the first bicycle in Germany. It was a heavy, wooden bike with no pedals. You pushed it with your feet. Later bikes had pedals, but some of them, like the Penny Farthing, with its large front wheel, were very dangerous.

3) In 1885 Karl Friedrich Benz made the first car and Gottlieb Daimler designed the first motorcycle. Early motor vehicles were very expensive and only rich people could buy them. Henry Ford changed that. In 1908 he started to build good, cheap cars, like the Model T, in his factory in the USA. Soon ordinary people had their own car.

4) Only ten years after the first car, the first motor bus appeared. People called it an ‘omnibus’ (This means ‘for everybody’ in Latin.) or ‘bus’ for short.

5) The bus wasn’t the first form of motor transport ‘for everybody’. That was the train. George Stephenson opened the first railway between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. He built the first train, too. It was called Rocket and it could travel at 45 kph. Soon people could travel hundreds of kilometres in just a few hours.

6) Today planes fly thousands of kilometres and they carry hundreds of passengers. The first aeroplane, however, carried only one person. The Wright Brothers’ plane, Kitty Hawk, flew for the first time in the USA in 1903. It flew for just 12 seconds and travelled 36 metres!