Unit 8 Buy, Sell, Trade Lesson 2 The world in a box

Talk about inventions

Speak and read

1. Work in pairs. Look at the title of the article and the pictures.

     Discuss what you think the article is about. Read it to check your ideas.

Inventions that changed the world

At 399 metes long (the length of the soccer fields), Maersk Triple-E-class container ships are the world’s largest man-made moving objects. They can transport up to 18,000 containers-enough space for 36,000 cars. But despite their breathtaking size, it isn’t the ships that have changed our world, it’s the 20-foot-long steel boxes they transport.

To appreciate their impact on our lives, it’s necessary to look back on how things were done before they were invented. Until the 1960’s, ships had to be unloaded by hand. It would take a hundred men two weeks to do that on big ships. It was a slow, labor-intensive process that made it expensive to import goods.

The idea of using containers occurred to America trucking company owner Malcolm McLean one day in 1937. Frustrated by how long it took for his cargo to be unloaded at the docks, he realized that if larger quantities of freight could be moved off the ship at the same time, he would get his cargo faster.

McLean, on the right in the picture above, developed his idea, and almost 20 years later he was ready to put it into action. On April 26, 1965, 58 shipping containers were loaded onto two converted oil tankers in Port Newark, New Jersey, and transported to Houston, Texas. The revolution had started.

Containers could be moved quickly by crane and transferred unopened onto trucks and trains. Large ships could now be unloaded in less than 24 hours by just a handful of workers. The cost of importing goods, which had once accounted for around 30 percent of their price, eventually fell to less than 1 percent, according to some estimates.

The result was that goods manufactured more cheaply in one place could be sold for the same price on the other side of the world. Electronic goods that had been imported from Japan, for example, could now be sold at a competitive price in stores across Europe and the USA. The age of globalized consumerism had begun.

Despite his hugely successfully business career, McLean was relatively unknown when he died in 2001. But on the day of his funeral, ships’ horns around the world rang out as a tribute to the man whose invention changed the world.

2. Decide what the words in green in the article refer to.
3. 20-foot-long steel boxes – containers
4. their – containers’
5. things – unloading ships
6. that – unload ships
7. it – import goods
8. it – unloading his cargo at the docks
9. freight – cargo
10. on the right – the position of McLean in the photo
11. which – the cost of importing goods
12. that – electronic goods
13. his – McLean’s
14. man – Mclean
15. Choose the correct answer.
16. McLean’s idea …
17. was quickly put in action
18. frustrated him
19. saved a lot of time at the docks
20. The main reason containers were revolutionary was that …
21. they made it cheap to transport goods by sea
22. they could also go on trains and trucks
23. they allowed Japan to export electronic goods
24. The article’s main purpose is to …
25. show how big container ships are
26. show how important the container is
27. tell us about Malcolm McLean

Answer:

1. c
2. a
3. b
4. React Work in pairs. Discuss the article.

    Do you think Malcolm and McLean deserves to be more famous?