Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks

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The Printing Press and the Spread of Ideas

history of technology

When Johannes Gutenberg began printing with movable metal type in the mid-fifteenth century, books in Europe were expensive objects copied by hand. Within fifty years, printers were working in more than two hundred towns, and a book could be bought for a ______(1)______ of its former price. Cheaper books did not ______(2)______ create mass literacy, however. For most of the following century, reading remained a skill ______(3)______ to clergy, merchants and wealthy families. What printing did change was the way knowledge spread. Scholars in different cities could now work from identical copies of a text, ______(4)______ made it far easier to compare results and correct errors. Printed pamphlets also allowed new religious and political ideas to ______(5)______ large audiences quickly, which is one reason rulers in several countries tried to control the presses. Historians still debate how ______(6)______ the printing press was in bringing about these changes, but few doubt that it made new ideas much harder to suppress.

• 1.
• A. fragment
• B. section
• C. division
• D. fraction

• 2.
• A. accidentally
• B. previously
• C. automatically
• D. approximately

• 3.
• A. prevented
• B. limited
• C. excluded
• D. contained

• 4.
• A. which
• B. what
• C. who
• D. whose

• 5.
• A. arrive
• B. attend
• C. achieve
• D. reach

• 6.
• A. decided
• B. decisively
• C. decisive
• D. decision