Page 182 n. 1: Match each picture with the corresponding revolution

A. The Agrarian Revolution: Mechanical horse-drawn reaper invented by Rev. Patrick bell around 1828 in Scotland

B. The Industrial Revolution: Cotton factory in Preston, Lancashire, in 1830. Private Collection.

C. The French Revolution: Eugene Delacroix, Liberty leading the people, 1830. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.

Page 183 n. 4: Match the halves to make words and phrases about the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions

Technologies; inventions; sources of power; steam engine; manufacture; waterways; enclosure; improvements.

Page 183 n. 5: Make sentences about the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions using the words and phrases from exercise 4.

• New technologies and inventions brought radical changes and improvements in both agriculture and industry.
• The steam engine uses water as a source of power. The use of water allows industries to be placed anywhere, and not necessarily close to the source of power.
• New technologies caused an increase in manufacture and a decrease in employed people.
• New waterways allowed an increase in trade.
• The enclosure of open fields and common lands caused rural population to decrease.

Page 184 n. 1: Discuss. How are great inventors generally celebrated in your country.

When someone’s invention becomes famous, people tend to remember his/her name. An example is Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist known for inventing the battery. Nowadays his name is used in Physics as a unit of measurement – Volt (V). Important people are often remembered in streets’ and squares’ names.

Page 185 n. 1: Discuss in pairs. The poet William Blake used the phrase “dark satanic mills” to refer to the effects of the early Industrial Revolution on people’s lives. What are the possible ways in which industrialisation affected the life of urban people?

I think one of the main drawbacks on people would deal with health: working in industries probably had bad consequences because of pollution and because of breathing bad materials. However, industries surely had positive consequences: machines made people’s lives less hard and probably longer, since they had to labour less.

Pag 185 n. 2: Read the text; then look for these words and write down the noun, adjective of phrase they are associated with. Use the phrases you have made to report orally about industrial society.

• Population – population moved from to north and midlands
• Coal fields – coal fields provide fuel to factories
• Towns – workers lived in “mushroom towns”
• Women and children – women and children were employed in factories but were paid less
• Working hours – labourers worked for many hours
• Living conditions – worker’s living conditions were terrible
• Public services – cities didn’t have public services
• Air and water – Industries caused air and water to get polluted
• Houses – the workers’ houses were overcrowded
• Life expectancy – worker’s life expectancy was very low

Page 185 n. 3: Open cloze. For questions 1-12, read the text about the explaination of children during the 18^th century and think of the word which best fits each gap. Use only one word in each gap.

How child labour changed the world

Child labour was a crucial ingredient which allowed Britain’s Industrial Revolution (1) to succeed. By the early 19^th century, England had (2) more than a million child workers accounting for 15 (3) per cent of the total labour force.

Early factory owners – located in the countryside so that they (4) could exploit powers from rivers – found that local labour (5) was scarce and that those agricultural workers (6) who were available were unsuitable for industrial production. They (7) had decided to create a new work force composed of children, tailor-made for their factories.

(8) Factory owners were looking for cheap, malleable and fast-learning work forces – and found (9) them ready-made (10) in the children of the urban workhouses. They weren’t paid – simply fed and given dormitory accomodation. The exploitation of children massively increased as newly emerging factories began their operations in the late 18^th century.

The use of working-class children to provide much of the labour force for the Industrial Revolution was, (11) actually, merely an expansion and extension of an already long-established practice of working-class children employed (12) by farmers or artisans.

Pag 185 n. 4: Answer these questions about the text above.

1. What was the percentage of child workers during the Industrial Revolution? It was around 15 per cent.
2. Why were they chosen as a work force? Children were chosen because they were cheaper, malleable and able to learn fast.
3. Was this a new practice? No, it wasn’t. Farmers and artisans already employed children before the Industrial Revolution.

Page 191 n. 1: look at the pictures and fill in the table with the benefits and drawbacks brought about by industrialisation and technological advances.

Page 191 n. 3: Guess the meaning. Find the words in bold in the article and discuss their meaning in pairs.

• Life expectancy: how much one person can expect to live
• Welfare benefits: benefits that may deal with people’s living conditions
• To mine fossil fuels: to look for fuels, such as petrol, underground
• Manufactured goods: raw materials after being worked in factories
• Consumption: how much energy, fuel, and other things are used by people
• Global phenomena: a particular behavior that affects the whole world