Page 52 - Traveller_2nd_Pre-Interm_SB_SE

4b Only time will tell

. READING

A. Discuss. B. Read the text quickly and choose the most suitable introduction
for it, a, b or c.
• What do you know
about the following? a. It is very difficult to make correct predictions about the future, but four
famous people have tried. So, let’s see what the future holds.
the Wright brothers
b. With the world changing so quickly, it is very difficult to make correct
IBM YouTube predictions about the future. Some people get it right, others get it wrong.
Some people, however, are a long way off. Here are a few examples.
20 Century Fox
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c. Nowadays, we fly planes, use computers and relax in front of the TV. We
don’t think it’s something special. But how about in the past? What was
life like then?
© MM Publications

‘Man will not fly for fifty years.’

Wilbur Wright, to his brother Orville (1901)
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I I In 1901, the Wright brothers tried out their flying machine for the first time
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but were very disappointed when they didn’t succeed. However, two years
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only 18 years after Wilbur made his prediction, Captain John Alcock and
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S i r A r t h u r W h i t t e n B r o w n m a d e t h e f i r s t n o n - s t o p t r a n s a t l a n t i c f l i g h t f r o m
Sir Arthur Whitten Brown made the first non-stop transatlantic flight from
Newfoundland, Canada to Ireland.
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‘I think there’s a world market
for about five computers.’
Thomas J. Watson, chairman of the board of IBM (1943)
This prediction seems ridiculous today, but it was true for ten
years after Watson said it. Even so, today there are about two billion
y e a r s a f t e r W a t s o n s a i d i t . E v e n s o , t o d a y t h e r e a r e a b o u t t w o b i l l i o n

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computers in use in the world. Experts predict there will be a lot more
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in the near future.
‘Television won’t last because people will soon
get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.’
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Darryl Zanuck, film producer, 20 Century Fox (1946) )
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Zanuck played a major role in the Hollywood studio system from 1922 to
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1970, but he definitely got it wrong about television. The total number of
TV sets in the world is over 1.5 billion. In the USA, there are over 2,000 TV
channels and on average, most adults watch over five hours of TV every day.
‘There’s just not that many videos
I want to watch.’ Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube (2005)
At the time, Chen was worried about the popularity of his site. Luckily for Chen, he continued with his
YouTube idea and almost two years later, on 13 November 2006, he made a lot of money when Google
bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. Today, YouTube is the Internet’s largest video-sharing website.
People from all around the world watch hundreds of millions of videos every day.
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