Exploring British Village
The Neolithic longhouse was a long, narrow timber dwelling built by the first farmers in Europe beginning at least as early as the period 5000 to 6000 BC. The origin of the name blackhouse is of some debate. It could be less than 150 years old and may have been synonymous with inferior. On Lewis, in particular, it seems to have been used to distinguish the older blackhouses from some of the newer white-houses (Scottish Gaelic: taigh-geal, Irish: tí geal, tí bán), with their mortared stone walls. There may also be some confusion arising from the phonetic similarity between the ‘dubh’, meaning black and taghadh meaning thatch. The houses in Scotland were built high rather than wide; however, some were built small and wide.
The buildings were generally built with double-wall dry-stone walls packed with earth and wooden rafters covered with a thatch of turf with cereal straw or reed. The floor was generally flagstones or packed earth and there was a central hearth for the fire. There was no chimney for the smoke to escape through. Instead, the smoke made its way through the roof. The blackhouse was used to accommodate livestock as well as people. People lived at one end and the animals lived at the other with a partition between them.
It is estimated that there are over ten thousand villages in Britain, yet defining the term ‘village’ isn’t as simple as it may at first sound. When does a hamlet become a village? And when does a village become a town?
Strictly speaking the term ‘village’ comes from the Latin ‘villaticus’, which roughly translates as ‘a group of houses outside a villa farmstead’. Today a village is understood as a collection of buildings (usually at least 20) that is larger than a hamlet, yet smaller than a town, and which contains at least one communal or public building. This is most commonly the parish church, though it can be a chapel, school, public house, shop, post office, smithy or mill. Villagers will share communal resources such as access roads, a water supply, and usually a place of worship
A hamlet is a smaller grouping of buildings that don’t necessarily have any public or service buildings to support it. A significant difference is that it won’t have a parish church like a village does, and most hamlets contain only between three and twenty buildings.
The point at which a village becomes a town is difficult to determine and is probably best defined by those who live there. However, since the Middle Ages, the term ‘town’ has been a legal term that refers to the fact that the community has a borough charter. The situation is confused by the fact that there are many town-like suburban communities calling themselves villages (for example, Oxton Village in Birkenhead), as well as designed suburban ‘villages’ such as those built under the Garden Village Movement.
The 2001 census shows us that approx 80% of people in England live in an urban environment, with under 7% living in rural villages (the remainder live in rural towns or outside concentrated settlements). This is the exact opposite of the situation two centuries ago, when under 20% of the population lived in the town, and the majority lived in rural villages. As late as 1851 agriculture remained the largest single source of employment in Britain, yet today under 3% of us work on the land.
It is essential to remember that villages were created and have evolved because of particular combinations of geographical, commercial, economic and social factors. They expand, decline, move and fluctuate with the times. This article introduces some of the common forms of the village to be found in Britain.
The Medieval Village
When we think of a British village we probably imagine a settlement of traditional cottages around a village green with a church and ancient manor house as a backdrop. This common form of the village has its roots in the medieval period when many villages started out as a cluster of agricultural dwellings
Today farmsteads tend to be scattered about the landscape, but back in the medieval period those working on the land tended to live in small nucleated settlements (villages) and worked ‘open-field’ agriculture where land wasn’t enclosed. In fact, over much of Britain in the period up to 1800, it would have been unusual to have seen a farm or cottage outside of a settlement boundary.
By the time that the Domesday Book was written in 1086 most of the good agricultural land in Britain was already under cultivation, and England was a densely populated country. Two centuries later nucleated settlements were to be found over much of Britain, typically consisting of well-organised village settlements sitting within open fields.
Over lowland Britain on good soil you would typically find a settlement every couple of miles, and the communities would use the open agricultural land around where they lived. The average village would have its church, manor house, and cottage tenements all clustered together, and the open land around would usually be divided into thin strips. In some villages, you can still see the remnants of medieval strip field systems around the periphery of the settlement. There would often be meadows, pasture and woodland held ‘in common, and only the lord of the manor would have his own, private land or ‘demesne’. In the medieval village, virtually everyone would have earned their living on the territory, hence the community had to be relatively self-sufficient.
‘Green Villages’ were a common village form, where houses clustered around a central green of common land. They are often the remnants of planned settlements introduced after the Norman Conquest in the 19th century. It is suggested that this arrangement allowed for easier defence, especially compared to the village form most common before the Normans, which was simple clusters of farms. However, there is also evidence of ‘village’ greens in Anglo-Saxon settlements, and even at Romano-British sites.
The village green was soon adopted as the main social space within a village, as well as its focal point alongside the church or chapel. Village greens often take a triangular form, usually reflecting the fact that the village was at the meeting of three roads. The continuing importance of the village green to modern-day communities is reflected in the fact that this is usually where the war memorial is seen, as well as village notice boards, where local cricket matches are played, and where public benches are placed. The Open Spaces Society states that in 2005 there were about 3,650 registered greens in England and about 220 in Wales.
NEW WAYS OF TEACHING HISTORY
In technology and the media-driven world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get our students’ attention and keep them absorbed in classroom discussions. This generation, in particular, has brought a unique set of challenges to the educational table. Whereas youth are easily enraptured by high-definition television, computers, Pods, video games, and cell phones, they are less than enthralled by what to them are obsolete textbooks and boring classroom lectures. The question of how to teach history in a digital age is often contentious. On the one side, the old guard thinks the professional standards history is in mortal danger from flash-in-the- pan challenges by the digital that is all show and no substance. On the other side, the self-styled “disruptors” offer overblown rhetoric about how digital technology has changed everything while the moribund profession obstructs all progress in the name of outdated ideals. At least, that’s a parody (maybe not much of one) of how the debate proceeds. Both supporters and opponents of the digital share more disciplinary common ground than either admits.
When provided with merely a textbook as a supplemental learning tool, test results have revealed that most students fail to pinpoint the significance of historical events and individuals. Fewer still are able to cite and substantiate primary historical sources. What does this say about the way our educators are presenting information? The quotation comes from a report of a 1917 test of 668 Texas students. Less than 10 per cent of school-age children attended high school in 1917; today, enrollments are nearly universal. The whole world has turned on its head during the last century but one thing has stayed the same: Young people remain woefully ignorant about history reflected from their history tests. Guess what? Historians are ignorant too, especially when we equate historical knowledge with the “Jeopardy” Daily Double. In a test, those specializing in American history did just fine. But those with specialities in medieval, European and African history failed miserably when confronted by items about Fort Ticonderoga, the Olive Branch Petition, or the Quebec Act–all taken from a typical textbook. According to the testers, the results from the recent National Assessment in History, like scores from earlier tests, show that young people are “abysmally ignorant” of their own history. Invoking the tragedy of last September, historian Diane Ravitch hitched her worries about our future to the idea that our nation’s strength is endangered by youth who do poorly on such tests. But if she wer e correct, we would have gone down the tubes in 1917!
There is a huge difference between saying “Kids don’t know the history we want them to know” and saying “Kids don’t know history at all.” Historical knowledge burrows itself into our cultural pores even if young people can’t marshal it when faced with a multiple-choice test. If we weren’t such hypocrites (or maybe if we were better historians) we’d have to admit that today’s students follow in our own footsteps. For too long we’ve fantasized that by rewriting textbooks we could change how history is learned. The problem, however, is not the content of textbooks but the very idea of them. No human mind could retain the information crammed into these books in 1917, and it can do no better now. If we have learned anything from history that can be applied to every time period, it is that the only constant changes. The teaching of history, or any subje ct for that matter, is no exception. The question is no longer whether to bring new technologies into everyday education; now, the question is which technologies are most suitable for the range of topics covered in junior high and high school history classrooms. Fortunately, technology has provided us with opportunities to present our Civil War lesson plans or our American Revolution lesson plans in a variety of new ways.
Teachers can easily target and engage the learners of this generation by effectively combining the study of history with innovative multimedia. PowerPoint and presentations, in particular, can expand the scope of traditional classroom discussion by helping teachers to explain abstract concepts while accommodating students’ unique learning styles. PowerPoint study units that have been pre-made for history classrooms include all manner of photos, prints, maps, audio clips, video clips and primary sources which help to make learning interactive and stimulating. Presenting lessons in these enticing formats helps technology-driven students retain the historical information they’ll need to know for standard exams.
Whether you’re covering Revolutionary War lesson plans or World War II lesson plans, PowerPoint study units are available in formats to suit the needs of your classroom. Multimedia teaching instruments like PowerPoint software are getting positive results the world over, framing conventional lectures with captivating written, auditory and visual content that helps students recall names, dates and causal relationships within a historical context.
History continues to show us that new times bring new realities. Education is no exception to the rule. The question is not whether to bring technology into the educational environment. Rather, the question is which technologies are suitable for U.S. and world history subjects, from Civil War lesson plans to World War II lesson plans. Whether you’re covering your American Revolution lesson plans or your Cold War lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations are available in pre-packaged formats to suit your classroom’s needs.
Meanwhile, some academic historians hold a different view on the use of technology in teaching history. One reason they hold is that not all facts can be recorded by film or videos and literature is relatively feasible in this case. Another challenge they have to be faced with is the painful process of learning a new technology like the making of PowerPoint and the editing of audio and video clips which is also reasonable especially to some elderly historians.
LIGHT POLLUTION
If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go into darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals, or Earthlings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.
This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it’s not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted.
Now most of humanity lives under intersecting domes of reflected, refracted light, of scattering rays from overlit cities and suburbs, from light-flooded highways and factories. Nearly all of nighttime Europe is a nebula of light, as is most of the United States and all of Japan. In the south Atlantic the glow from a single fishing fleet squid fishermen during their prey with metal halide lamps—can be seen from space, burning brighter, in fact, than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro.
We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and in many species, it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately.
Insects, of course, cluster around streetlights, and feeding at those insect clusters is now ingrained in the lives of many bat species. In some Swiss valleys, the European lesser horseshoe bat began to vanish after streetlights were installed, perhaps because those valleys were suddenly filled with light-feeding pipistrelle bats. Other nocturnal mammals—including desert rodents, fruit bats, opossums, and badgers-forage more cautiously under the permanent full moon of light pollution because they’ve become easier targets for predators.
Some birds—blackbirds and nightingales, among others—sing at unnatural hours in the presence of artificial light. Scientists have determined that long artificial days— and artificially short nights induce early breeding in a wide range of birds. And because a longer day allows for longer feeding, it can also affect migration schedules. One population of Bewick’s swans wintering in England put on fat more rapidly than usual, priming them to begin their Siberian migration early. The problem, of course, is that migration, like most other aspects of bird behaviour, is a precisely timed biological behaviour. Leaving early may mean arriving too soon for nesting conditions to be right.
Nesting sea turtles, which show a natural predisposition for dark beaches, find fewer and fewer of them to nest on. Their hatchlings, which gravitate toward the brighter, more reflective sea horizon, find themselves confused by artificial lighting behind the beach. In Florida alone, hatchling losses number in the hundreds of thousands every year. Frogs and toads living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behaviour out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses.
Of all the pollution we face, light pollution is perhaps the most easily remedied. Simple changes in lighting design and installation yield immediate changes in the amount of light spilt into the atmosphere and, often, immediate energy savings.
It was once thought that light pollution only affected astronomers, who need to see the night sky in all its glorious clarity. And, in fact, some of the earliest civic efforts to control light pollution—in Flagstaff, Arizona, half a century ago—were made to protect the view from Lowell Observatory, which sits high above that city. Flagstaff has tightened its regulations since then, and in 2001 it was declared the first International Dark Sky City. By now the effort to control light pollution has spread around the globe. More and more cities and even entire countries, such as the Czech Republic, have committed themselves to reducing unwanted glare.
Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives, one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.
Part 1
Questions 1-7
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A and C-G from the list below.
List of headings
(i) Questions arise to be answered.
(ii) Contrast data between present and past.
(iii) Initial response of association on the village.
(iv) Origin of a certain ancient building.
(v) Inner structure of the building.
(vi) Layout of the village to persist in micro-environment.
(vii) Terms of the village explained.
(viii) Definition of village type.
(ix) Difference between village and town.
(x) Elements need to be considered in terms of the village.
Paragraphs
- Paragraph A 1
- Paragraph B 2
- Paragraph C 3
- Paragraph D 4
- Paragraph E 5
- Paragraph F 6
- Paragraph G 7
Questions 8-13
Complete the following summary.
Use No More than ONE Word from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Village Green layout and Extending
Impression of British Village usually takes forms of old-styled 8 with church and manor house. However, records in 9 indicated that England was already a cultivated and populated country in the 11th century. During medieval times, farmers literally could support themselves and the community, therefore, needed to be 10 in general.
Green village was usually 11 of dwellings after the invasion from Norman, and it was gathered mainly for the purpose of 12 . Village Green’s 13 shape had a connection with its location among the roads, and nowadays it still can be seen in some public venues such as memorial and sports sites.
Part 2
Questions 14-20
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list below.
List of Headings
(i) Unavoidable changing facts to be considered when picking up technology means
(ii) A debatable place where the new technologies stand in for history teaching
(iii) Hard to attract students in traditional ways of teaching history
(iv) Display of the use of emerging multimedia as teaching tools
(v) Both students and professionals as candidates did not produce decent results
(vi) A good concrete example illustrated to show how multimedia animates the history class
(vii) The comparisons of the new technologies applied in history class
(viii) Enormous breakthroughs in new technologies
(ix) Resistance of using new technologies from certain historians
(x) Decisions needed on which technique to be used for history teaching instead of improvement in the textbooks
Paragraphs
- Paragraph A 14
- Paragraph B 15
- Paragraph C 16
- Paragraph D 17
- Paragraph E 18
- Paragraph F 19
- Paragraph G 20
Questions 21-23
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage? Write:
YES if the statement agrees with the writer
NO if the statement does not agree with the writer
NOT GIVEN if there is no information about this in the passage.
- Modern people are better at memorizing historical information compared with their ancestors. 21
- New technologies applied in history teaching are more vivid for students to memorize the details of historical events. 22
- Conventional ways like literature are gradually out of fashion as time goes by. 23
Questions 24-27
Complete the following summary.
Use No More than THREE Words from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Contemporary students can be aimed at without many difficulties by integrating studying history with novels 24 . Conventional classroom discussion is specially extended by two ways to assist the teachers to interpret 25 and at the same time retain students’ distinct learning modes. PowerPoint study units prepared beforehand comprising a wide variety of elements make 26 learning feasible. 27 like this can also be helpful in taking required tests.
Part 3
Questions 28-33
Which paragraph contains the following information?
- A reason that contributes to light pollution 28
- A city has lessened light pollution successfully 29
- The importance of darkness 30
- The popularity of light pollution in the world 31
- Methods to reduce light pollution 32
- The reason why we have changed the night 33
Questions 34-35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.
Questions 36-40
Light pollution has affected many forms of life.
Use the information in the passage to match the animals with the relevant information below.
Effects
(A) eat too much and migrate in advance.
(B) would not like to sing songs at night.
(C) is attracted by the light and then a crash happens.
(D) suffers from food shortages because of competitors.
(E) have become easier targets for predators.
(F) be active at unusual times.
(G) have trouble inbreeding.
Animals
- Songbirds 36
- Horseshoe bat 37
- Nightingales 38
- Bewick’s swans 39
- Sea turtles 40