I. Read the article and answer the questions

At a conference last week, an audience of chief executives and other VIPs was lectured on the information revolution and what to do about it. One of its star speakers was the management guru Peter Drucker. The starting point of the conference was familiar: that the changes brought by the personal computer are comparable to the industrial revolution. The Industrial Revolution – the substitution of machinery for human and animal power - was a change so profound that parts of the world have yet to catch up with it. Are personal computers really that fundamental? Drucker’s response to that question was forthright. There is no real comparison with the Industrial Revolution, he said. What is happening now is far more profound. His argument is that a comparison is mistaken. The real analogy is with what he terms "the first information revolution" - Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, and the advent of the printed book.

In Drucker’s view, the first information revolution - like the second - differed from the Industrial Revolution in two crucial respects. First, it spread much faster. Second, it immediately changed not just methods of production, but what was produced. "The Industrial Revolution", he says, "was mechanically very fast and socially very slow. It was not until the railways came in the 1840s that ordinary people became aware of change at all. When I was born in 1909, the revolution had just started to affect the home. People still had oil lamps - electric light had arrived only around 1900".

And, he points out, it was not until after the end of the Napoleonic wars that the revolution moved outside the UK. Contrast, he says, the first information revolution. "Printing took just 50 years to penetrate into the countries. Gutenberg’s invention was in 1455. By 1465, the number of printed books was six to ten times as great as the number of manuscripts. It was that fast. By the end of the century, the handwritten manuscript was as obsolete as the adding machine on which I worked as a young banker in 1930". As for his second point: “The Industrial Revolution did not replace a single commodity. It made existing commodities available and plentiful, and it made them as like the hand-made version as possible. Factory-made shoes were so close to hand-made ones that only the expert could tell the difference.”

"The steam ship was as like the sailing ship as possible: it followed the same routes. The first new product of the Industrial Revolution was the railroad. Not so with the information revolution: 50 years before it, literature meant the Bible and the Greek and Roman classics. Not long after, it meant Shakespeare and Cervantes. Or take the huge growth in printed maps. Without those, you could not have had the age of discovery".

True or false, according to the writer?

1) The Industrial Revolution caused goods to be much cheaper, but there were no totally new goods.

2) Changes in book and map production due to the invention of printing were much more profound.

3) The steam ship was not that different from the sailing ship.

4) The first truly new product of the Industrial Revolution was the steam ship.

5) After the invention of printing, the literature that people read was not the same.

6) The great discoveries could have been made without the invention of printing.

Read the text again and choose the correct alternative in Drucker's view:

7) The differences between the first information revolution and the industrial revolution were

a) not big or important

b) quite big and important

c) very big and important