Listening Comprehension—The Making of Modern Britain, Episode One
This listening exercise is in two parts.
In the first, you have to answer a series of questions using material you will hear in the programme reel. In the second, you have to fill in word-gaps in a print-out of the programme’s script. Note that, in the programme’s running order, the answers to the first set of questions do not always come before you hear answers for the blank spaces of the second exercise. This is deliberate, and intended to allow less experienced listeners to concentrate on the first exercise, while more skilled listeners attempt both exercises simultaneously.
First exercise: listening comprehension questions
1. For how long had Queen Victoria occupied the throne up to her death? (1)
2. What was the irony in Queen Victoria dying in the way she did? (3)
3. According to the presenter, what four signal changes characterised the years between 1901 and 1945? (4)
4. From where did late Victorian Britain derive much of its wealth? (1)
5. In what way was the franchise limited as Britain left the Victorian age? (2)
6. With whom was Britain fighting a war in the early 1900s? (2) (Total of 12 marks)
Second exercise: fill in the blanks
On the morning of the 23rd January 1901, Britain woke up to hear that the old Queen—the Queen ______, Queen Victoria—was dead. Victoria had reigned for nearly sixty-four years: She was the most famous woman in the world and it felt like a world was over. Victoria died in bed surrounded by her family. She was ______. If it was there to ______evil spirits, it didn’t work, because she died in the arms of her grandson, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, a man who would ______to ensure that the new century was the bloodiest in human history, with Victoria’s British in ______. (8 marks)
From the death of Queen Victoria to the end of the Second World War is a ______space of time—just 44 years—yet during it, this country was shaken from ______. The empire tottered; women won the vote; democracy came of age, and we fought two ______world wars to defend it. Dark, funny, surprising and not so long ago—these are the years in which modern Britain was born. (3 marks)
These people were our grandparents and great-grandparents, and if we could travel through time to meet them, would we feel at home in their Britain? Fabulous wealth was spilling from roaring, ______cities, but millions went hungry—really hungry— ______hungry. ______children could be seen on the streets of every town. We weren’t a democracy; only a quarter of the population had the vote, all of them men. Governments brimmed with aristocrats. The Tory Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was a very clever but darkly pessimistic ______, who privately referred to voters as vermin. Like Queen Victoria, he was above all a figure of empire—Britain still ruled a quarter of the world’s people after all, but for how long? In 1901 Britain’s troops were fighting a brutal war over ______territories of South Africa. The ______War was fought between the largest empire in the history of the world and a small force of untrained Dutch farmers, or ______. (7 marks)