Great inventions Unit 2 Will books be replaced by the Internet? Reading and vocabulary Work in pairs. Read the title of the passage in Activity 2. Discuss and make a list of the advantages of books and the Internet. Read the passage and match the main ideas with the paragraphs. The world before printed books The world after the invention of printing Life with paper and printing Technology and books The future of books Will books be replaced by the Internet? Every morning, my father buys a newspaper on his way to work. Every day, I open my books in class and start my lessons. Every evening, my mother looks through magazines at home. And every night, I look at the photos of David Beckham and Yao Ming on my bedroom wall before I go to sleep. Can we imagine life without paper or printing? Paper was first created about 2,000 years ago in China. After its invention, people started to write on paper to make books. In those days, books were only produced one at a time by hand. As a result, there were not many books, and they were expensive. So, few people had the chance to learn to read. Printing was invented in China during the Sui and Tang Dynasties. Later, developments in printing made it possible to produce books more quickly and cheaply. A trade in books resulted, and more people learnt to read. Knowledge and ideas spread faster than ever before. In a way, we can compare the invention of paper and printing to the introduction of the Internet in the twentieth century. Although the Internet is still young, it is growing very fast, and may become more powerful than printing. A much larger amount of information can be stored in more varied forms on the Internet than in books. Someone with an Internet connection can find information much more easily than they can find it in printed forms. And the machines we use to read it are now small and light, often smaller and lighter than a single book. Computers and the Internet are used in classrooms now, and newspapers and magazines are already read online. So what direction will traditional printing take in the future? Will books be replaced by the Internet? Let's wait and see. To find information in a passage quickly, you can read the heading and the first sentence in each paragraph. This will often tell you what the passage is about.