tailieunhanh - IELTS Academic Reading Sample 113 - The history of the biro

Với mong muốn giúp các bạn đạt kết quả cao trong kì thi, đã sưu tầm và chọn lọc gửi đến các bạn IELTS Academic Reading Sample 113 - The history of the biro. Mời các bạn cùng tham khảo! | Questions 1-12 Read the passage below and answer Questions 1-12. The history of the biro A One chilly autumn morning in 1945 five thousand shoppers crowded the pavements outside Gimbels Department Store in New York City. The day before Gimbels had taken out a full-page newspaper advertisement in the New York Times announcing the sale of the first ballpoint pens in the United States. The new writing instrument was heralded as quot fantastic . miraculous . guaranteed to write for two years without refilling quot Within six hours Gimbels had sold its entire stock of ten thousand ballpoints at each - approximately 130 at today s prices. B In fact this new pen was not new after all and was just the latest development in a long search for the best way to deliver ink to paper. In 1884 Lewis Waterman had patented the fountain pen giving him the sole rights to manufacture it. This marked a significant leap forward in writing technology but fountain pens soon became notorious for leaking. In 1888 a leather tanner named John Loud devised and patented the first quot rolling-pointed marker pen quot for marking leather. Loud s design contained a reservoir of ink in a cartridge and a rotating ball point that was constantly bathed on one side with ink. Loud s pen was never manufactured however and over the next five decades 350 additional patents were issued for similar ball-type pens though none advanced beyond the design stage. Each had their own faults but the major difficulty was the ink if the ink was thin the pens leaked and if it was too thick they clogged. Depending on the climate or air temperature sometimes the pens would do both. C Almost fifty years later Ladislas and Georg Biro two Hungarian brothers came up with a solution to this problem. In 1935 Ladislas Biro was working as a journalist editing a small newspaper. He found himself becoming more and more frustrated by the amount of time he wasted filling fountain pens with ink and cleaning up ink smudges. What