سؤال قراءة ستيب محلول — فهم التفاصيل (تدريب 7016)

statistical form: before 1600, 12 famines swept through England every 100 years; in the next century, thanks to agricultural innovation, there were only four. In 1750, the journey on horseback from London to Edinburgh took 10 to 12 days; by 1850, it took 17 hours by steam train. (2) These fundamental changes to the way we lived were the result of invention on an unprecedented scale, the scientific revolution that accompanied the Renaissance had borne technological fruits and the evolution of a self-conscious technique of innovation: what has come to be called ‘the invention of the invention’. (3) With a political, commercial and social environment that valued inventors and inventions, Britain led the world in applying scientific enquiry to technological improvement, which it used to expand its world influence. The main examples are Robert Boyle’s and Otto von Guericke’s experiments with gases and vacuums, which led to the invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. This has effects throughout industry and society, not least because steam power, developed to pump water from mines, created a demand for fuel that in turn prompted the coal industry to expand and innovate. A product of this was Richard Trevithick’s invention of the steam train to move coal from the pit. (4) That conditions in Britain in the early 18th century were ripe for innovation was partly the result of the invention in 1701 of the seed drill by Jethro Tull, an English farmer. Often seen as the beginning of the Agrarian Revolution, this event was in fact the trigger of the Industrial Revolution. In the early 18th century, improvements in cultivation techniques, the wider use of horses as draught animals, the policy of enclosure and the mechanization of agriculture begun by Tull, meant that for the first time the majority of men were liberated from the daily struggle for subsistence. As a result, large portions of the rural population moved to towns (London’s population grew from more than 100,000 in 1600 to more than one million in 1800). This stimulated an even larger requirement for more efficient food production and provided the unskilled labor needed to work in the factories that emerged following James Watt’s development in 1781 of rotary steam power to drive the wheels of industry. (5)Steam power transformed the metal industry, increasing supplies of coal to smelt iron and produce steel, and enabling new techniques of working with metals. The improvements in iron manufacture can be seen in the progression from the cast- iron bridge, known as the ‘Stonehenge of the Industrial Revolution’ and completed in 1779 at Ironbridge in Shropshire, to the elegant glass-and-iron Crystal Palace exhibition hall erected in Hyde Park in 1851. (6)With the harnessing of steam, technology truly released the brake of history, leading to an extraordinary quickening in the rate of change in manufacturing that far outpaced the innovation we are currently experiencing in electronics and computers. Capital and banking systems were established to initiate investments in mass-production techniques that saw more than 100,000 power looms with 9,330,000 spindles put into service in England and Scotland between 1790 and 1830. (7)The unpleasant consequence of the Industrial Revolution was a devaluation of the craft skills of artisans, as cottage industries gave way to mechanized manufacturing in the mills. The creation of the modern factory, which relied on unskilled labor doing tedious tasks, introduced the concept of payment by wages rather than the quality of the finished goods, a change that discouraged further innovation. How many hours did it take to travel from London to Edinburgh by steam train?