ЕГЭ по английскому языку (аудирование №11: понимание запрашиваемой информации)

Anna:      Our history class was so boring! I think that the 19th century was really interesting. So much happened in technology and industry, there were revolutions and new countries were created — like Italy and Germany.
David:      What do you mean? Italy and Germany have been there since the Romans!
Anna:      Italy became a nation state in 1861 and Germany in 1871. Before that they were a collection of small territories.
David:      So recently! That’s amazing. But why is your class so boring?
Anna:      It’s not so much what we learn that is boring but how we learn. I understand that we need to know about the passing of laws, important dates and so on. But these things are, if you like, the punctuation marks of history. Punctuation is important but it doesn’t alone give a sense of what really happened.
David:      What do you mean? How can you study history without names, dates, laws, acts and so forth?
Anna:      You of course need to know dates and important events. But real history is about the lives of people. Were they hungry, or comfortable? Did they live in fear? Did they care about and understand all that was happening at government level? What did they really believe and hope for? What did they really talk about? That is real history!
David:      So you think that diaries, letters, newspapers and so forth are more important and more interesting in studying history?
Anna:      I do. But I accept that we need to learn about the big events as well. The problem with my history class is that it’s all about headline events and what we think about them now. Not about how the people living through it all felt. Our lessons seem like a skeleton version of history — with no flesh or life.
David:      Have you talked to your teacher about how you feel? It’s Mr Hansen — right?
Anna:      I did actually, and he was quite nice about it. He said that you’ve to have the skeleton first as without structure there’s no hope of understanding history.
David:      And do you agree with him?
Anna:      I suppose so. I’ll just have to accept that it’ll be boring for a while and hope that it gets more interesting later on. My brother, older brother—Victor, does history at university and he really loves it.