Read the following passage and do the tasks.
Candle Making in Colonial America
The primary material used in making candles today is paraffin1 wax, which is derived from petroleum. In the process of refining crude oil, refiners “crack” the oil, thereby separating it into different products such as gasoline, heating oil, and kerosene. Paraffin wax, originally produced by plants that lived 100 to 700 million years ago to protect their leaves, is inert and remains suspended in the decayed vegetable matter that eventually becomes crude oil. In the refining process, paraffin wax is separated out and sold as a by-product.
Paraffin was not discovered until the early 1800s. At that time, paraffin was derived by a process of distilling bituminous schist, now known as shale oil. In 1850, Dr. James Young, a Scottish industrial chemist, applied for a patent for obtaining paraffin oil and paraffin from bituminous coals. Shortly after that, under a license from Young, paraffin was being produced from coal on a large scale in the United States. Because petroleum is now readily available, Young’s original process for obtaining paraffin is no longer profitable, and paraffin is currently produced from crude oil.
Before the discovery of paraffin, candle making had for centuries relied on different materials. Chemically, those materials were also hydrocarbons; however, they were derived directly from insects, animals, or plants.
In colonial times in America, beeswax was highly valued for making candles. Even today beeswax, though more expensive, is highly regarded because pure beeswax candles emit no smoke when burning, whereas paraffin candles produce a black, slightly oily soot. Beeswax is secreted only by female worker bees. As a worker bee eats honey, her wax glands exude the wax as oval flakes that form on the underside of her last four abdominal segments. The bee then removes the wax flakes and chews them, mixing the wax flakes with her saliva to soften them. When the wax is sufficiently pliable, she attaches it to the honeycomb. As the wax comb is built up, each pocket is filled with honey and then sealed with more wax.
Given the numerous uses and considerable value not only of honey but also of the bees themselves and their beeswax, beekeeping was an important part of American life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of the early settlers brought honeybee hives with them from Europe. Not indigenous to North America, the European honeybees nonetheless thrived and often escaped into the wild. In 1785, writing in Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson observed, “The bees have generally extended themselves into the country, a little in advance of the white settlers. The Indians, therefore, call them the white man’s fly, and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlements of the whites.” Eventually, the Native Americans as well as the colonists used beeswax and honey in the frontier bartering system that grew up in the absence of readily available coinage.
Another source of colonial candle material was animal fat or tallow. Cattle and sheep were the most common sources of tallow. Pork fat was not used because candles made from it dripped too much and were dangerous. Additionally, the odor of burning pork tallow was particularly offensive. Chicken and duck fat were too soft to make candles. The tallow was rendered - heated in a cauldron until the fat melted - and then strained numerous times to remove any gristle, meat fibers, and as many impurities as possible. Straining reduced, but did not entirely eliminate, the extent to which the candles smoked and emitted a noxious odor. Tallow candles needed to be stored in tightly closed containers, usually made of tin or wood, to keep out rodents and other animals that might eat them.
In the New World, the colonists discovered a native plant high in a natural waxy substance that could be extracted and used for candle making. The plant is the bayberry shrub, also known as candleberry. Bayberry shrubs are dense and semievergreen. The plants are extremely hardy, grow to as much as nine feet high, and do well even in salt-laden, coastal soil unsuitable for other horticulture. In winter, the female plants bear clusters of blue-gray berries, which lend their color to the wax. The colonists boiled the berries to separate the waxy matter from the pulp and then skimmed the wax off the top. Although making bayberry candles was more labor intensive than making tallow candles, bayberry candles were considerably superior, burning longer and producing less smoke. Further recommending them, they had a pleasing scent. Compared to beeswax, bayberries were available in greater quantities, and the colonists found that bayberry wax was harder than beeswax and thus also burned longer.
Because the bayberry clusters were harvested in winter and because making the candles was very time-consuming, the candles were often saved for special occasions, particularly Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Eventually, they became a holiday tradition and gave rise to the saying, “Bayberry candles burned to the socket, puts luck in the home, food in the larder, and gold in the pocket.” Fortunate indeed was the colonial household with brightly burning candles and a holiday feast.
1This paraffin is different from the British word parafin, which is called kerosene in the United States.
Paraffin is _____.
Paraffin was first obtained from _____.
James Young was _____.
Classify the following information as descriptive of
|
A. paraffin B. beeswax C. tallow D. bayberry wax |
was often made from the fat of cows:
is made from a bush that grows near the sea:
needs to be filtered before being made into candles:
was not used before the nineteenth century:
produces smokeless candles:
produced candles that were attractive to hungry mice and rats:
is bluish in color:
was brought to colonial America by European settlers:
was often reserved for holiday use:
has a pleasing aroma:
was often used for trading in place of money:
Read the following passage and do the tasks.
Paleolithic Cave Art
Students of art history tend to be familiar with the images of horses and bison discovered in the famous cave art site in Lascaux, France, in 1940. Less well known but vitally important to understanding Ice Age art and culture is the art discovered by three cave explorers in the Chauvet Cave near Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in southern France in 1994.
The Chauvet Cave hosts one of the largest group of Paleolithic drawings yet discovered on one site, as well as the fossilized remains of a number of now-extinct animals. The art found in the Chauvet Cave differs from that found in most other European cave art sites, which primarily feature prey animals such as horses, bison, wild cattle, and reindeer. The Chauvet paintings include many animals that humans would have feared - panthers, bears, lions, hyenas, and rhinoceroses. While the Chauvet paintings also include many species that would have been hunted by the artists - horses, aurochs, bison, and extinct species of moose and deer - the presence of non-prey animals calls into question a common theory that the primary purpose of cave art was to magically ensure plentiful game. Perhaps the discovery of the Chauvet art points to a shift in emphasis from the hunters’ predators to the hunters’ prey over time, but more evidence is needed.
Carbon-14 dating has established three of the paintings (one bison and two rhinoceroses) as being 31,000 years old. This discovery pushes the common understanding of the date range for European cave art much further back than what had been assumed. It has also clearly disproved theories that earlier cave art was cruder and more primitive because these older images are equally sophisticated in execution.
In addition to the hundreds of animal paintings, the Chauvet Cave also has an image of a being, referred to as the Sorcerer, with the body of a human and the head of a bison. There is also part of an image of a woman. In addition, explorers found the skull of a cave bear placed on a squared-off altarlike rock. The cave had been untouched for thousands of years due to a rock slide that had sealed off the cave; the floor of the cave contains the footprints of humans and cave bears, and fire pits, stone tools, remnants of torches, and bones from meals. After scientists collected data and recorded images, the site was placed off-limits to pre vent the damage that has occurred at many other caves known for their rock art.
Ice Age paintings in certain European caves have been extremely well preserved and have reached iconic status because of their beauty and the artists’ skill in execution. As a result, many people assume that the art of early hunters and gathers was limited to cave paintings. While the artwork in the deep caves has been the best preserved, artwork was also done on the walls of rock shelters and on rock faces out in open light. Paleolithic artists not only painted with pigments but also created engravings by scratching designs into rock with pointed tools, as well as creating low-relief sculptures. Often the artists seemed to have seen a suggestion of an animal’s shape in a rock, and then added detail through incising lines, incorporating clay, or applying pigment. In addition to animal images, most sites also have geometrical designs, including dots and quadrangles. Archeologists have also discovered small sculpted figures from the same time period.
Images of hands, created either by wetting the palm of the hand with paint and pressing the hand onto rock or by applying paint around the hand, perhaps by spitting pigment from the mouth, are common. However, full images of humans are rare in the European caves. Images combining human and animal elements such as the Chauvet Cave Sorcerer have been found in various sites as have partial images of women, but portrayals of a full human are few and far between, and they tend to be simple abstract depictions. Most of the animal images, on the other hand, are detailed, realistic portrayals of an individual animal species, not simply an abstract symbol meant to depict an animal such as a horse or bison.
As compared with the Chauvet Cave, the cave art site in Lascaux is _____.
The art discovered in the Chauvet Cave differs from other European cave art because _____.
According to the passage, a common belief about the function of cave art is that _____.
As compared with other European cave art sites, the art in the Chauvet Cave is _____.
Images found in the Chauvet Cave include _____.
In addition to art, other discoveries in the Chauvet Cave include _____.
No humans had visited the Chauvet Cave for thousands of years because _____.
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
People often believe that Paleolithic art consisted only of .
Ice Age artists used pointed tools to make and sculptures on rocks.
As well as pictures of animals, are common in most sites.
Pictures of were sometimes made by wetting the palm with paint.
It is unusual to see an image of a in European cave art.
Rather than being symbolic, paintings of animals are images.
Read the following passage and do the tasks.
Bovids
A. The family of mammals called bovids belongs to the Artiodactyl class, which also includes giraffes. Bovids are a highly diverse group consisting of 137 species, some of which are man’s most important domestic animals.
B. Bovids are well represented in most parts of Eurasia and Southeast Asian islands, but they are by far the most numerous and diverse in the latter. Some species of bovid are solitary, but others live in large groups with complex social structures. Although bovids have adapted to a wide range of habitats, from arctic tundra to deep tropical forest, the majority of species favour open grassland, scrub or desert. This diversity of habitat is also matched by great diversity in size and form: at one extreme is the royal antelope of West Africa, which stands a mere 25 cm at the shoulder; at the other, the massively built bison of North America and Europe, growing to a shoulder height of 2.2m.
C. Despite differences in size and appearance, bovids are united by the possession of certain common features. All species are ruminants, which means that they retain undigested food in their stomachs, and regurgitate it as necessary. Bovids are almost exclusively herbivorous: plant-eating “incisors: front teeth herbivorous”.
D. Typically their teeth are highly modified for browsing and grazing: grass or foliage is cropped with the upper lip and lower incisors** (the upper incisors are usually absent), and then ground down by the cheek teeth. As well as having cloven, or split, hooves, the males of ail bovid species and the females of most carry horns. Bovid horns have bony cores covered in a sheath of horny material that is constantly renewed from within; they are unbranched and never shed. They vary in shape and size: the relatively simple horns of a large Indian buffalo may measure around 4 m from tip to tip along the outer curve, while the various gazelles have horns with a variety of elegant curves.
E. Five groups, or subfamilies, may be distinguished: Bovinae, Antelope, Caprinae, Cephalophinae and Antilocapridae. The subfamily Bovinae comprises most of the larger bovids, including the African bongo, and nilgae, eland, bison and cattle. Unlike most other bovids they are all non-territorial. The ancestors of the various species of domestic cattle banteng, gaur, yak and water buffalo are generally rare and endangered in the wild, while the auroch (the ancestor of the domestic cattle of Europe) is extinct.
F. The term 'antelope' is not a very precise zoological name – it is used to loosely describe a number of bovids that have followed different lines of development. Antelopes are typically long-legged, fast-running species, often with long horns that may be laid along the back when the animal is in full flight. There are two main sub-groups of antelope: Hippotraginae, which includes the oryx and the addax, and Antilopinae, which generally contains slighter and more graceful animals such as gazelle and the springbok. Antelopes are mainly grassland species, but many have adapted to flooded grasslands: pukus, waterbucks and lechwes are all good at swimming, usually feeding in deep water, while the sitatunga has long, splayed hooves that enable it to walk freely on swampy ground.
G. The sub-family Caprinae includes the sheep and the goat, together with various relatives such as the goral and the tahr. Most are woolly or have long hair. Several species, such as wild goats, chamois and ibex, are agile cliff – and mountain-dwellers. Tolerance of extreme conditions is most marked in this group: Barbary and bighorn sheep have adapted to arid deserts, while Rocky Mountain sheep survive high up in mountains and musk oxen in arctic tundra.
H. The duiker of Africa belongs to the Cephalophinae subfamily. It is generally small and solitary, often living in thick forest. Although mainly feeding on grass and leaves, some duikers – unlike most other bovids – are believed to eat insects and feed on dead animal carcasses, and even to kill small animals.
I. The pronghorn is the sole survivor of a New World sub-family of herbivorous ruminants, the Antilocapridae in North America. It is similar in appearance and habits to the Old World antelope. Although greatly reduced in numbers since the arrival of Europeans, and the subsequent enclosure of grasslands, the pronghorn is still found in considerable numbers throughout North America, from Washington State to Mexico. When alarmed by the approach of wolves or other predators, hairs on the pronghorn’s rump stand erect, so showing and emphasizing the white patch there. At this signal, the whole herd gallops off at speed of over 60 km per hour.
In which region is the biggest range of bovids to be found?
Most bovids have a preference for living in _____.
Which of the following features do all bovids have in common?
Match each characteristic with the correct subfamily, A, B, C or D.
|
List of subfamilies A. Antelope B. Bovinae C. Caprinae D. Cephalophinae |
NB You may use any letter more than once
can endure very harsh environments
includes the ox and the cow
may supplement its diet with meat
can usually move a speed
does not defend a particular area of land
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
What is the smallest species of Bovid called?
Which species of Bovinae has now died out?
What facilitates the movement of the sitatunga over wetland?
What sort of terrain do barbary sheep live in?
What is the only living member of the Antilocapridae subfamily?