Task 1. For questions 1-11 read an article about the Print Revolution and do the tasks below it. The Print Revolution [1] For more than five thousand years, from the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt.people in the West wrote by hand. Imperial decrees; sacred scriptures, commercial transactions , private letters - all required the skills of a select group of scribes, clerks, or monks. In Korea and China, however,mechanical printing using carved wooden blocks had been introduced by A.D. 750. Moveable type, using characters made of baked clay,was invented in China in the eleventh century.But the Chinese continued to prefer block printing well into the modern period.Written Chinese consists of thousands of ideographic characters The labor of creating, organizing, and setting so many different bits of type made it much simpler to cut individual pages from a single wooden block. European languages, which can be written with fewer than a hundred characters, were much better adapted to printing with moveable, reusable type. [2] It appears that the Mongol armies brought examples of Chinese printing - the Venetian Marco Polo described seeing paper money during his travels - to western Asia and Europe at the end of the thirteenth century. In the early fourteenth century.Europeans began using block printing techniques to produce religious images, short prayers, and even decks of playing cards. As with Chinese printing, European block printing was a slow and expensive process for printing large numbers of varied texts. The print revolution had to wait another century, until the innovations of the German goldsmith Johann Gutenberg (ca. 1399-1468) [3] Gutenberg drew on his knowledge of metallurgy to devise a lead tin-copper alloy that could be cast into durable, reusable type. His crucial invention was a type mold consisting of a flat strip of metal - stamped in the same way a coin is minted, leaving the impression of a single letter - inserted in the bottom of a rectangular brass box held together by screws. Molten metal was poured into it, producing a single piece of type An experienced type founder could produce up to six hundred pieces of type a day. No wooden-block carver could have approached that rate [A] To solve the remaining problems, Gutenberg adapted the screw press commonly used to produce linen, paper, and wine to make a printing press.[B] He followed the example of Flemish painters by adding linseed oil to the ink to make it thick enough to adhere uniformly to the metal type. In 1455, the Gutenberg Bible was published in Mainz, Germany - but not by Gutenberg. After years of costly experimentation, Gutenberg was forced to turn over his equipment and newly printed Bibles to his partner and creditor, the wealthy merchant and moneylender Johann Fust.[C] [5] The new technology, which enabled printers to create a thousand or more copies in a single print run, was highly efficient. Simple printed school texts cost only a quarter of the price of hand -copied texts. The leading bookseller in the university town of 41060 acrovpoce? Bologna managed to stock ten thousand copies of texts, treatises and commentaries. By 1500 even street singers sold printed copies of their songs [D]