номер 2, страница 114 - гдз по английскому языку 11 класс (spotlight) учебник Афанасьева, Дули

ICT across the curriculum six.

Exercise two.

Page one hundred and fourteen.

Getting the message across.

How do you prefer to contact distant friends? Mobile phone? Instant messenger? Email perhaps? Well, take your pick, because one thing is for sure, it's never been easier.

But how did people get messages to one another in the past? Well, they didn't have modern technology, but they certainly had creativity.

Stop that pigeon.

Did you know that a pigeon will return to its loft, no matter how far or long it is separated from its home? Or that until the nineteenth century, the pigeon, which can travel up to sixty miles an hour, was the fastest means of communication?

Since the ancient Greeks used pigeons to announce the winners of the Olympic Games to the Athenians, pigeons have been used throughout history to deliver news about wars, battles, and even the latest stock prices. In fact, probably the world's first regular airmail service was Mr. Howie's pigeon post service, which started in New Zealand in eighteen ninety-six.

Later on, during World War One, one particularly heroic pigeon was even awarded a medal for delivering twelve important messages, despite being shot once.

Say it with fire.

North American Indians use smoke signals to send messages. After lighting a fire on a hill, they would cover it with a blanket, and then remove it, causing a puff of smoke to rise up into the air.

They managed to change the number, size, shape, and color of the puffs, and also the time between them in order to convey different messages, such as, Attention, All's well, or Danger.

The messages could be seen from up to fifty miles away.

The Indians, however, are not the only ones to have used fires to send messages. The Greeks learned that the city of Troy had fallen in the twelfth century BC by using fires to signal from mountain peak to mountain peak and from island to island, until the message was carried nearly four hundred miles.

For crying out loud!

The ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks all used a highly efficient system involving a messenger running or riding to a station with a message, and then shouting or passing it on to another waiting messenger, and so on, until the message reached its destination.

A variation on this system was a network of people shouting their message from field to field, and from farm to farm.

Or, how about whistling to get your message across?

On the island of La Gomera, in the Canary Islands, Spain, before the arrival of roads or telephones, the islanders discovered that whistles carried much further than shouting.

Up to two point five miles, in fact.

This system became so popular that it developed into a whole language. A study in nineteen forty identified more than three thousand different words.