听写训练营Day30

1.So we’ve been talking about the printing press, how it changed people’s lives, making books more accessible to everyone. More books meant more reading, right? But, as you know, not everyone has perfect vision, this increase in literacy, um, in reading, led to an increase in demand for eye glasses, and here’s something you probably haven’t thought of. 

2. This increased demand impacted societal attitudes towards eyeglasses, but, first let me back up a bit and talk about vision correction before the printing press, and what did people with poor vision do, I mean, especially those few people who were actually literate? What did they do before glasses were invented? 

3. They had different ways of dealing with not seeing well, if you think about it, poor vision wasn’t their only problem, I mean, think about the conditions they lived in: houses were dark, sometimes there weren’t any windows, candles were the only source of light. So in some places, like ancient Greece for example, the wealthiest people with poor vision could have someone else read to them. 

4. Another solution was something called a reading stone, around 1000 CE European monks would take a piece of clear rock, often quartz, and place it on top of the reading material, the clear rock magnified the letters, making them appear larger, it’s like what happens when a drop of water falls on something, whatever’s below the drop of water appears larger, right? Well, the reading stone works in a similar way. 

5. But record shows that they were invented in both Europe and China at about the same time, by the way, we call this independent discovery.  Independent discovery means when something is invented in different parts of the world at the same time and it’s not as unusual as it sounds, you can look at the timeline charts in the back of your textbook to see when things were invented in different cultures at about the same time to see what I’m talking about.