English Unlimited HAK/HUM 2, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM

Mystery objects 74 The story of stuff 06 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE LOOK AGAIN EXTRAS Look at the three objects and talk about the following questions: Read the webpage and check your ideas. 7 8 Work in A/B pairs. Choose the rug, antique or jacket stall from p. 72. Role play together. Tell the class what you bought and how much you paid. Change roles and choose another stall. Role play again. A, you’re the stallholder. Decide on prices for things in the photo. B, you want to buy something for a good price. Choose something. SPEakING 6 a REadING 9 a 1 What do you think they are? 2 What material are they made of? 3 What were these objects used for? 4 Where do you think they were found? b b 13 BC: ( short for ) before Christ A B C http://www.mysteries.com/sar.htm The Voynich Manuscript This strange book was discovered in 1912 in Frascati, near Rome, by Wilfred Voynich, an antique book collector. It’s small, 25 by 18 cm, but thick, with 235 pages. The pages are illustrated with strange coloured pictures of different things, including unknown plants and herbs. The book uses a kind of writing which no one can understand. Some people think it’s written in an unknown, secret language. Others think the whole manuscript must be a very complicated (and expensive) joke. No one knows for sure where it came from, but many experts believe it was made in Europe, sometime between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Baghdad Battery This small pot, about 15 cm tall, was probably discovered in a village near Baghdad in the 1930s. It’s about 2000 years old and is made of light yellow clay, but also has two pieces of metal inside. In 1940, an article was written suggesting that the pot was in fact a very old electric battery. In the 1970s, a copy of the ‘Baghdad battery’ was made and filled with grape juice. It produced a small amount of electricity – 0.87 volts – so it seems possible that electric batteries were used in the ancient world, nearly 2000 years before their ‘invention’ by Alessandro Volta in 1800. The Saqqara Bird This object, made of wood, was found in 1898 in Saqqara, Egypt. It’s about 18 cm across and weighs about 40 g. At first it was thought to be a model of a bird, made in about 200 BC 13 , and it was put in a box in the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Then, in 1969, it was rediscovered by Dr Khalil Messiha. He believed that the object looked very similar to a modern aeroplane – for example, it has wings like an aeroplane, not a bird. The ancient Egyptians often made small models of things they planned to build, so could this be a model of a simple aeroplane that was built over 2000 years ago? Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv