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A) Complete the sentences with the proper forms of the Verb.
Writing at the beginning of the 17th century, Francis Bacon, an English philosopher of science, maintained that the three most important inventions were gunpowder, the magnetic compass and printing.
It __________________ (1 – modal / to seem) a long way from the inky blocks _____________ (2 – to use) in the first printing presses to the electronic bits and bytes that make up this article if you __________ __________ (3 – to read) it on the World Wide Web. But there is a _______________ (4 – to connect) thread. Like the current information revolution, the first (and more important) one, the invention of movable-type printing, depended on the recognition that messages ____________ (5 – modal / to break down) into units that are themselves almost meaningless, and that these meaningless units _____________________ _________ (6 – modal / then / to manipulate) in a variety of ways _________________ (7 – to create) a variety of meanings.
The origin of printing is controversial. But Pi Sheng, a blacksmith and alchemist who lived in China in the 11th century, has as good a claim as any __________________ (8 – to be) the person who had the insight on which all subsequent information technology is built. He made clay copies of the ideograms in which Chinese _______________ (9 – to write), and baked them in a fire. Then he stuck them on an iron plate __________________ (10 – to use) a mixture of ash, resin and wax, and held them in place with an iron frame. By ________________ (11 – to cover) the result with ink, and ___________________ (12 – to impress) it on paper, messages could be mass-produced.
Nobody knows how the idea of movable-type printing filtered from Asia to Europe. Nor is there any _______________ (13 – to write) evidence of a connection. But whether it was invention or plagiarism, the crucial moment happened in Strasbourg in the 1430s. This was when Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith, first had the idea of ______________ (14 – to produce) small, regular blocks of steel with letters on them. Eventually, instead of _________________ (15 – to print) from these directly, he employed them to stamp out dies (матрицы) which were then used as moulds _________________ (16 – mass / to produce) letter blocks ___________________ (17 – to make) of lead. These were fitted into frames (or “forms”), ______________ (18 – to cover) with ink, and, with the aid of an adapted wine-press, used to print individual pages.
In 1457, the first ________________ (19 – to print) book in Europe, the Mainz Psalter, came off Gutenberg’s press. It was followed by the Bible.
Although printing ______________________________ (20 – may / not / to improve) Gutenberg’s life, it revolutionized the lives of his fellow Europeans. Within three decades there were print shops in every corner of the continent. It is believed that as many books ____________ (21 – to be) produced in the 50 years after Gutenberg’s invention as in the 1,000 years before it. As printers sought new products, translations took off. Religious works as well as Latin and Greek authors ___________________ (22 – to translate) into modern languages. And since books were circulated widely, they tended ________________ (23 – to act) as linguistic standards. They helped, for example, to impose the dialects of London and Paris on England and France. Whether the Web, the printing press’s latest descendant, _________________ (24 – to make) Californian the language of the world, remains _______________ (25 – to see).
(After The Economist, Millenium special edition.)