TEST 1.

Ivory is a smooth material that can be found in the tusks of mammals. Elephants, walruses, hippos and whales are the primary sources of ivory. Because it is so valuable and expensive, ivory has been traded around the world for centuries.

Egyptian sculptors carved ivory objects for their pharaoh. Ancient Greeks and Romans used ivory to create art, religious objects and jewellery. Even large statues were made of ivory. The ancient Chinese got ivory from traders that brought it from India and Southeast Asia. For centuries it was used as a currency.

At first people used ivory from Asian elephants but then saw that the ivory of African elephants was easier to carve. Traders started moving in on Africa and the ivory trade started to boom. Before plastic was invented ivory was used for making objects of everyday life, like knife handles, piano keys, combs and billiard balls.

The best known form of ivory is in an elephant’s tusks. They can grow to a length of over 3 metres and weigh up to a hundred kilograms. The outside of a tusk is often dark, whereas the inside is white or cream-coloured. Ivory is a hard material that can be easily carved into different shapes. In many countries handicrafts, souvenirs and jewellery are made from ivory.

Ivory is also preserved in the tundra of Siberia, northern Canada and other polar regions where prehistoric mammoths roamed the continents thousands of years ago. Some of these tusks are larger than the tusks of mammals that exist today. However such fossil ivory is harder to carve.

Walrus tusks are especially popular in North America, where they were used by Native Americans for hundreds of years.

Today trading ivory from elephants and other endangered animals is illegal. During the 20th century large parts of the elephant population were reduced because of ivory trade. The poached ivory is smuggled out of the country and sold at a very high price.

Since the end of the 20th century governments of African and Asian countries have focused on capturing poachers and clamping down on illegal trading rings. Tons of ivory are seized by authorities every year. In the last few years these actions have stabilized the elephant population. Some countries have put elephants into reserves, where they can be closely monitored.

TEST 2

The Louvre is one of the most famous museums in the world.  Situated in the heart of Paris along the Seine River, it presents its visitors with an impressive collection of art from all over the world.  Almost 10 million people visit the Louvre every year. The museum has over a million pieces of art, but at the moment only 35,000 are on display, spread over an area of 60 000 square metres.

The Louvre was built as a fortress in the 12th century. As time went on it expanded, as some parts were rebuilt and new wings added. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Louvre served as the royal palace for French kings.  It became an art museum when the French king Louis XVI moved his residence to Versailles. During the French Revolution, the Louvre became a public museum. New collections have been added ever since.

            The museum offers collections ranging from early Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Egypt, the Roman Empire down to the impressionists of the 19th century.

            The most famous painting in the Louvre is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.  The Renaissance painting is protected by bulletproof glass and flanked by museum guards. Other popular works of art include the Code of Hammurabi, the Venus of Milo and The Dying Slave by Michelangelo. 

            IN the 1980s, the Louvre was completely redesigned. A gigantic complex was built under the courtyard. In front of the Louvre, there is a glass pyramid, through which people enter the museum. It is in contrast to the baroque architecture of the museum itself.

            The Louvre consists of three separate wings that span four floors. It is so huge that you simply cannot see everything in a single day.  The museum offers many guided tours ranging from introductory tours that show the museum’s masterpieces to theme tours of a specific period of art

BÀI 3

Pisa, in the middle of Tuscany, is home of one of the most famous towers in the world.  The Leaning Tower is unique because it has been leaning to one side since the Middle Ages. Apart from the Leaning Tower, Pisa’s cathedral square also includes a baptistery and a church. Built to symbolize Tuscany’s wealth, it attracts millions of visitors from around the world. In the past two decades, efforts have been made to restore the tower and save it from collapsing.

Construction work began in the 12th century.  When the first three storeys of the eight-storey building were finished engineers noticed that the building did not sink into its  3-metre deep foundation evenly. The soil underneath the building was made up of soft clay .

Construction was halted for over a century. Workers tried to strengthen the foundation of the building by putting more cement into it. When construction was resumed construction workers tried to compensate the slant by building the uppers storey taller on the side that was sinking in.

The 185 meter tall Leaning Tower of Pisa is made out of white marble. It weighs about 14 000 tons. Inside there are two spiral staircases that lead to the bell chamber. A total of seven bells, one for each note of the musical scale, were completed up to the beginning of the 16th century.

In the 1990s authorities closed the tower to visitors. It had reached an angle of 5 degrees. Engineers and restoration workers made efforts to stabilize the tower, which was sinking at 1.2 mm a year. In May 2001, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was reopened  to the public. Since then the tower has been under constant observation.  In 2008 tourism authorities announced that sinking had stopped and the tower was expected to be stable for the coming centuries. In 1989, the Leaning Tower of Pisa became a World Heritage Site. 

BÀI 4

Drawing

Drawing is creating a picture with a variety of tools, in most cases pencils, crayons, pens or markers.  Artists draw on different types of surfaces, like paper or canvas. The first drawings were discovered in caves, that date back about 30,000 years.

Ancient Egyptians drew on papyrus, Greeks and Romans made drawings on other objects, like vases. In the Middle Ages drawings were sketches that were made on parchment. When paper became common in the Renaissance, drawing became an art perfected by Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and others.

Painting

Painting is often called the most important form of visual art. It is about putting colours on a canvas or a wall. Painters express their ideas through a mixture of colours and different brush strokes .

Painting is also one of the oldest forms of visual art.  In old caves prehistoric people painted hunting scenes onto walls. Paintings became important in ancient Egypt, where tombs of pharaohs were covered with scenes of everyday Egyptian life.

Printmaking

Printmaking is art that is made by covering a plate with ink and pressing it on the surface of another object. Today prints are mostly produced on paper today but originally, they were pressed onto cloth or other objects. Plates are often made out of wood or metal.

The first prints were probably made in ancient Mesopotamia. Later on they became popular in ancient Egypt and China .Printmaking spread to Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages.

Photography

Photography is making pictures by letting light through the lenses of a camera onto a film. In analogue photography  light was recorded onto a film, which had to be chemically developed. Images could then be printed onto special paper. Today most photography is digital. Cameras have no film, the images are recorded onto silicon chips.

Filmmaking

Filmmakers make moving images that they turn into films. It is a very expensive and complicated form of art, involving many tasks, for example scriptwriting, casting,  and editing film sequences before they can be shown to an audience. A full-length feature film often takes many weeks or months to produce.

Computer art

Today, art is no longer limited to brushes, paint and pencils.  In the last few decades artists have been working with computers to capture images and change them . Computer art consists of a wide variety of different forms, from capturing and changing sound to creating video games.

Sculpture

Sculptures are three-dimensional pieces of art that are created by shaping various kinds of material. Among the most popular are stone, steel, plastic, ceramics and wood. Sculpture is often referred to as plastic arts.

Sculpture goes back to ancient Greece. It has been important in various religions of the world over many centuries. In the Renaissance Michelangelo was one of the masters of the art. His most famous piece of work was David, a marble statue of a naked man.

TEST 5

Claude Monet was a French painter and one of the leading artists of the impressionist period. His paintings became famous around the world.

Monet was born in 1840 is Paris. His father had a shipping company while his mother cared for the family. At the age of five Monet and his family moved to Le Havre, where he went to school. His talent for drawing came out at an early age because the boy always liked to be outside.

In 1859 Monet went back to Paris to study art. There he met other artists of the time, including Renoir and Sisley. Together with them he started experimenting with painting in nature.

By the middle of the 1860s Monet was famous throughout the European art world. However his life started to change. He spent too much money and sank deeper into debt.  In 1870 Claude Monet married his long-time mistress Camille, with whom he had a son, Jean. His wife died after becoming seriously ill in 1879.

Claude Monet - Water Lilies

In 1874 Monet and some of his fellow artists decided to show their paintings in an exhibition. Critics started to call them impressionists, named after Monet’s painting “Impression:Sunrise”. Many people visited the exhibition but the group did not sell any paintings.

In the 1880s and 90s Monet became famous in the United States and made money from selling paintings. In 1892 he married a second time. In his later life Monet travelled to London and Venice where he painted a series of landscapes.  He died in 1926 in Giverney, France at the age of 86.

Monet’s style of impressionism was all about nature. In his works he tried to capture nature as it appeared to him at the moment. He also experimented with light and shadow and how they changed during different times of the day.  Some artists of the time criticised Monet and his style because they lacked detail and did resemble finished paintings.

Monet used strong colours, which he did not mix. He painted them onto the canvas in short brush strokes. He was also criticized for abandoning classical painting techniques.

In his later life he became fascinated with garden scenes. In Giverney he created a series of paintings called Water Lilies, impressions from a pond in his own garden.  

TEST 6

Monuments are objects or buildings that have been created to honor an important person or a historic event that happened.

People have built monuments for thousands of years. In many cases they are symbols of ancient civilizations, like the pyramids of ancient Egypt or the Greek Parthenon.  These monuments were so large that it took thousands of people to build them. During the past two hundred years monuments have become famous landmarks of cities. The Statue of Liberty in New York welcomed immigrants who came to the New World from Europe. The Eiffel Tower in Paris was built at the entrance of the 1889 World Fair.

Planned cities have often been built around man-made structures. The Washington Monument was built before the planning and construction of the city started. Brazil’s new capital Brasilia was built around monumental structures.

Over history big structures have been built for many other purposes.  The Great Wall of China is the largest man-made object on Earth. It was built to keep invaders out of China. Political monuments have been built throughout history to show the power of a country or its society. Statues of the Soviet Union’s founder, Lenin, are found all over Moscow and other Russian cities. East Germany built the Berlin Wall to keep its citizens from fleeing to the West.

Columns have been used in history to build temples or hold the weight of ceilings.  Some stand alone and have a statue of a famous person at the top, like Nelson’s Column at Trafalgar Square in London. Many cities have arches, spanned over streets, which show success in wars and conflicts. Among the most famous is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Obelisks are four-sided pyramids that are very narrow and tall.

Memorials are built to honor dead people, often soldiers that have been killed in a war, like the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.  One of the most famous memorials is Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota. It is a sculpture of the faces of famous presidents, carved into a mountain.One of the most recently built structures is the World Trade Centre Memorial at Ground Zero , which commemorates thousands of people who were killed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

TEST 7

Impressionism is an art style that developed in France in the late 19 th century. Young painters used new techniques to paint outdoor scenes. They experimented a lot with different forms of light and color. Impressionists wanted to show the viewer how a landscape looked at different times of the day. They did not put so much emphasis on the detail of objects. Many critics of impressionism thought these artists were sloppy and did not care so much about their work.

Two of the most famous painters of this period were Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Monet, for example, painted the same scenic pictures at different times of the day to show the viewers different impressions.

Before impressionism began painters created pictures of historical objects and followed strict rules. They liked to show things as detailed as possible. Starting in the 1860s painters tried something different. Edouard Manet caused a scandal by painting in sketchy strokes. He did not concentrate on the object but on the colors and light around it.

Many other artists followed Monet’s style. They did not work in their studios any more but went outside and observed nature. They liked to work with natural light. But impressionists not only painted pictures of landscapes. They also drew paintings of factory buildings, railway trains and other things they saw around them.

Claude Monet’s painting Impression: Sunrise in 1872 gave the style its name. Painters adopted this style as symbol of what they wanted to achieve: to give an impression of what they see.

The impressionists held a number of art shows in which they displayed their works. They created their most important works from 1870 to about 1910. This style influenced other artists of later generations, like Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh.

TEST 8

The baroque was a style of art that existed from the late 1500s to the middle of the 18th century. The works of art were rich, dramatic and had a lot of detail. Baroque was a contrast to the Renaissance, which dominated much of European life in the period before. Renaissance art was orderly and balanced. It often used geometric figures and shapes. Baroque artists and architects concentrated on curves and arches.

Many European rulers wanted to show how powerful they were during the baroque period. They paid architects to build palaces with great gardens in baroque style. Versailles near Paris and the Belvedere in Vienna are examples for such architecture.

Baroque buildings were not the same in all of Europe. In Austria, Spain and Latin America the inside of these buildings were covered with many decorations. Baroque architecture of France was more classical and orderly. In England, Sir Christopher Wren was the prime architect of the period. He rebuilt London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral after it had been burned down by a fire in 1666 and replaced the old Gothic with a newer baroque style.

Baroque sculpture was characterized by movement. The most famous representative was Giovanni Bernini of Italy. He created marble sculptures, designed fountains and made altarpieces. He also played an important role in rebuilding St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In the 1650s he designed the great square, or piazza, in front of the Catholic world’s most important cathedral.

Baroque paintings were famous for their large forms. Italian artists painted the ceilings of churches with massive colourful figures. Michelangelo Caravaggio was thought to be the first great painter of the baroque era. We worked mainly in Rome, where he painted scenes of the New Testament on large canvases. He chose biblical stories and put them into modern settings.

In Flanders, present-day Belgium, Peter Paul Rubens was the main baroque artist. He painted majestic scenes of Christ’s birth, as well as altarpieces and other religious objects. All of them were huge and expressed dynamic movement. In Holland, Rembrandt was the great painter of the era. He painted portraits of individuals, groups and sometimes himself. Jan Vermeer specialized in painting the interior of rooms of middle class houses.

In Spain, Velazquez created scenes of everyday life, as well as portraits of the Spanish royal family and other historical figures.

TEST 9

Petroleum or oil is a thick, yellow to black liquid found in rock layers. It is made up of organic material, formed millions of years ago from dead plants and animals.  Deep in the ground pressure and heat transformed them into oil.  Crude oil is oil in its natural state. Many other products are made out of petroleum. Every day our planet consumes about 90 million barrels of oil. Because oil needs millions of years to develop we will run out of the energy, which we so much depend on.

History of oil

Oil has been used in one form or another over thousands of years but it has become really important to our economy in the last 2 centuries. It has been the most important source of energy since the end of World War II.

The first oil well was created in the middle of the 19th century in Pennsylvania.  By 1870 oil production had spread to other American states. During the latter part of the 19th century oil was also produced in Canada and in European countries.

The automobile boom of the early 20th century led to a higher demand of oil. It played an important role as the main fuel for tanks and planes in the two world wars.

By 1950 the United States had become the world’s largest oil producer.  In the second part of the 20th century Saudi Arabia and Russia produced even more than the USA.

Today more than 90 percent of all vehicles are powered by oil products. It is the most important source of energy in our world.  About 80% of the world’s oil reserves are located in the Middle East. Other notable producers are Venezuela, Great Britain and Indonesia.