Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on the passage below.
The printing revolution
For most of human history, making a book was a slow and costly business. Every copy had to be written out by hand, letter by letter, by trained scribes who might spend months, or even years, on a single volume. In medieval Europe much of this work was done by monks in monasteries. Books were so rare and expensive that only the wealthiest people and institutions could own them, and because each copy was made by hand, small errors crept in with every new version, so that no two were exactly alike.
Printing itself was not new. In East Asia, the Chinese had been printing from carved wooden blocks for centuries, and movable type — in which each character is a separate reusable piece — had been invented there as well, using first baked clay and later metal. But the Chinese writing system uses many thousands of different characters, and cutting and sorting so many pieces of type made the method awkward, so hand-copying and woodblock printing remained common.
The decisive breakthrough came in fifteenth-century Europe, and is usually credited to Johannes Gutenberg. His achievement was not a single invention but the bringing together of several elements into one practical system. He developed a way of casting individual letters in metal, quickly and in large numbers; he created a new oil-based ink that stuck well to metal type; and he adapted a press of the kind already used for making wine and olive oil to press the inked type firmly onto paper. Crucially, the European alphabet needs only a couple of dozen letters, which made movable type far more practical than it had been in China.
The system was simple but revolutionary. Individual metal letters were arranged by hand to form a page of text, inked, and pressed onto sheet after sheet of paper; the type could then be cleaned and rearranged for the next page. In the time it had once taken a scribe to produce a single copy of a book, a printer could now produce hundreds of identical copies. The cost of books fell dramatically, and for the first time in history the written word could be reproduced quickly and in enormous quantities.
The effects were profound and far-reaching. As books became cheap and plentiful, reading was no longer the privilege of a tiny elite, and literacy slowly spread through society. Ideas could now travel faster and further than ever before. When religious reformers wished to challenge the Church, they spread their arguments through cheap printed pamphlets that reached ordinary people across the continent. Scientists, too, could publish their findings, build on one another's work and correct old mistakes, so that knowledge began to accumulate in a way it never had before.
Print also changed language itself. As the same texts were read across whole regions, spellings and grammar gradually became more standardised, and local languages grew more fixed and uniform. Later, the same technology gave rise to newspapers, allowing news to reach large audiences within days. Yet the power of print was not always used for good: the very speed with which ideas now spread could carry propaganda and falsehood just as easily as knowledge.
Historians often rank the printing press among the most important inventions ever made, arguing that it helped to bring about the modern world. Its impact has sometimes been compared to that of the internet in our own time — another technology that has transformed, at astonishing speed, how information is created, copied and shared among human beings.