Exercise 32. Read and translate the Supplementary text 2 (ST 2)

Exercise 31. Answer the questions.

1. Do you also have to deal with growing freight traffic in your country? 2. How do you think transport systems could be improved? 3. How do you think intermodal transport systems can make freight transport more efficient?

3.

IS DRIVING ON THE RIGHT RIGHT OR WRONG?

Why does half the world drive on the left, and the other half on the right? At last, the answer to this burning question is within reach.

“We do not know which side of the road the Romans drove on. There just isn’t enough evidence either way,” said Catherine Jones, expert on Roman archaeology at the British Museum. But Bryn Walters of the Association for Roman Archaeology says he does know, and his argument is very persuasive. They drove on the left.

Though the straight roads built by the Roman empire still define the routes of many modern roads in Europe and in the Middle East, they have been rebuilt so many times over the past 2000 years that little original material remains. And since Latin literature did not go in for stories about the lives of cart-drivers, which side they drove on was unknown – until the time, when Walters found the track into the old Roman quarry at Blundson Ridge.

The track was only used for bringing stone from the quarry to a major Roman temple being built on the nearby ridge (near Swindon in England), and then fell out of use, so it is very well preserved. And since the carts went in empty and came out laden with stone, the ruts on one side of the road are much deeper than they are on the other. The conclusion: Romans drove on the left.

Why they chose to drive on the left remains a mystery. Perhaps it dated back to earlier times when travellers on horseback preferred to keep to the left when encountering strangers, to that their sword-hand was free in case of a problem. (Most people everywhere are right-handed). But at least as far back as Roman times, it seems clear, wheeled traffic in most of Europe and the Mediterranean world kept to the left.

So why does all of Europe (except the British Isles), all of the Western hemisphere (except some former British possessions in the Caribbean), and all of the Middle East drive on the right?

That seems to be Napoleon’s fault.

In the long Dark Age after the fall of the Roman empire, and even in the Middle Ages, there would not have been much need for the drive-left rule, since what little wheeled traffic there was travelled mostly on narrow tracks. But when you met somebody else on those narrow tracks both parties had to veer either left or right, and in that sense the Roman rule seems to have survived: mostly, people swung out to the left.

In early modern Europe, with the volume of road traffic rising steadily, the old Roman custom of driving on the left was the likelier candidate to become the new legal standard – as it did in Britain, in Sweden, and in various other places that Napoleon never reached. But wherever the French emperor’s armies invaded, they imposed a new rule: driving on the right. Why? Napoleon never said, and subsequent historians have mumbled half-explanations about his need to impose discipline on European road traffic so that his armies could get through. But why did he go against the existing custom, frequently ignored though it undoubtedly was, and impose driving on the right? Probably precisely because driving on the left was the custom.

Napoleon was a product of the French Revolution (however far he was from the ideals of the original revolutionaries), and the whole ethos of the revolution was about the breaking of the old rules and the creation of a new, rational world. The year 1789 became Year One of the new era, and even the months were renamed.

Driving on the right is no more rational than driving on the left, but it is more “revolutionary”. That would have appealed to Napoleon – and since his armies went everywhere from Russia to Spain, almost all of mainland Europe ended up driving on the right. (The Swedes finally gave up and switched a couple of decades ago).

Portugal and Spain, like almost all other countries in Europe accepted driving on the right. That meant that all the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas also ended up driving on the right. So did the infant United States, presumably because it felt closer to fellow revolutionaries in France than to the former British oppressor.

Even British North America (now Canada) eventually switched to the right, because it made no sense to drive on different sides of the road along the world’s longest land frontier. And the Middle East drives on the right because the Ottoman empire, which used to rule most of the region, was heavily influenced by the right-driving French and Germans at the critical time when its army laid down formal traffic rules in the latter half of the 19^th century.

But in most of sub-Saharan Africa, except for former French colonies, people drive on the left because of the British influence. They do the same in almost all the countries from Pakistan and India to Australia and New Zealand; only ex-French Indochina and the Philippines, an ex-U.S. colony, drive on the right.

Even Indonesia (which was briefly occupied by the British two centuries ago) and Thailand (which was never colonized at all) drive on the left. So does Japan, though nobody seems to know whether this is due to the 19^th-century British influence, or whether it is as deeply rooted in Japan as it was in post-Roman Europe.

Korea now drives on the right, but only because it passed directly from Japanese colonial rule to American (and Russian) influence at the end of the Second World War. And I just don’t know why China now drives on the right, or if it ever drove on the left.

The metric system, the other great standardization that we inherited from the French revolution, has become the global norm. Only the United States (and Britain, at least where road signs are concerned) still stick with the old English measures. But by making the “wrong” side his standard, Napoleon has left us a world permanently divided between countries that drive on the right (about 3.5 billion people) and those that drive on the left (about 2.5 billion).

Napoleon was a great admirer of the Roman army. If only he had known which side the Romans drove on, it might all have been different.

Exercise 33. Match the adjectives listed below with the nouns in expressions 1–10, which appeared in the text. Choose five expressions and use them in your own sentences.

rational, old, Middle, Roman, existing, narrow, modern, legal, Dark, wheeled

1. ___________ Age 2. ___________ Ages

3. ___________ tracks 4. ___________ standard

5. ___________ custom 6. ___________ world

7. ___________ empire 8. ___________ traffic

9. ___________ Europe 10. __________ rules

Exercise 34. Match the words from the text with their definitions and complete the crossword. What are the hidden words?

1. the movement of vehicles along a particular route

2. a group of countries or states that are controlled by one ruler or government

3. to enter a country, town, etc. using military force in order to take control of it

4. training people to obey rules and orders

5. an accepted way of behaving or of doing things in a society

6. a period of about 30 days, for example May or June

7. based on reason rather than emotions

8. to attract or interest somebody

9. different

10. (before noun) used to emphasize that something exists or is definitely true

11. to say something in a quiet voice in a way that is not clear

12. the country with their capital in Moscow

13. something that has been produced

14. the main area of land of a country, not including any islands near to it

15. opposite of “broad”, “wide”

16. existing at the beginning of a particular period, process or activity

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2

Exercise 35. List the countries from the text where people drive:

On the right: 1. …………………… Why? ……………………..

2. …………………… ………………………….…

3. …………………… …………………………….

4. …………………… …………………………….

5. …………………… …………………………….

6. …………………… …………………………….

7. …………………… …………………………….

8. …………………… …………………………….

9. …………………… …………………………….

10. ………………….. …………………………….

On the left: 1. …………………… Why?..…………………….

2. …………………… ……………………………..

3. …………………… ……………………………..

4. …………………… ……………………………..

5. …………………… ……………………………..

6. …………………… ……………………………..

7. …………………… ……………………………….

8. …………………… ……………………………….

9. …………………… ……………………………….

Exercise 36. Answer the following questions:

1. Explain the phrase “the infant United States”.

2. What does British North America refer to?

3. Which two countries does the world’s longest land frontier separate?

4. Where in Africa do people drive on the left?

5. Which country in the south-east of Asia was never colonized by Britain?

6. What kind of division should we blame Napoleon for?

Exercise 37. Complete the missing words in the table below.

VERB	NOUN	ADJECTIVE
……………………..	acceptance acceptability	……………..
……………………..	oppression ………………	oppressed ……………..
……………………..	occupation ……………… occupancy	occupational
influence	………………	influential
standardize	……………… standardization	……………..
………………	……………… inheritor	inherited
………………	……………… admirer	admiring

Exercise 38. Use the correct form of the words from the table to complete the sentences. Change the form of the words in capitals.

example:

They introduced ________ tests to be used in all schools. STANDARD

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