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LISTENING FLUENCY LIBRARY

#5

Deep English
LISTENING FLUENCY LIBRARY
Railroad Time

These lessons are designed to improve your listening and pronunciation.


Shadow along with the audio and match the speakers intonation and stress.

w ww .de e pe ng lish .co m


#5 Railroad Time

The word time is the most common word in the


no wonder: no English language. And its no wonder that there
surprise are so many idioms related to time. Keeping
time is an idiom that means measuring time.
keep time: to
measure or track
time The history of keeping time, dates back to
ancient Egypt. They used tall standing beams
called obelisks to measure the time it took the
sun to move across the sky. Watching the moving
shadow of an obelisk was used by cultures all
over the world to tell time. Later, people used
burning incense or candles, sand in an hour
glass and even water to keep time. In 1685, a
man named Christiaan Huygens invented the
worlds first pendulum clock, that used a
swinging weight to measure time. Until the early
1900s, pendulum clocks were the most accurate
time technology used all over the world.

While using pendulums to measure time was


accurate, before the late 1800s, there were no
time zones or an accepted system for converting
times around the world. Many towns set their
own time, according to the time when the sun
was at the highest point in the sky. When it was
noon in Washington D.C., it was 12:12 in NYC.
Other towns set their time, according to sunrise
or sunset.

In the 1800s there were 300 different times in


different towns across the United States. This all
changed as the power of railroad companies
grew in the US. These railroad companies
needed a simple way to keep track of arrivals
and departures of their trains, so they created 4
time zones in the US.

Deep English, 2011-2016 | www.deepenglish.com 02


#5 Railroad Time

Many people were not happy about a company


coming in and changing the way they kept time.
At first, many towns tried to rebel against the new
railroad time, and many places kept two clocks on
the wall, one showing the local time and another
showing railroad time.

Eventually the railroads and other business


interests won in the US, as well as in other
countries and standard time zones were set
around the world. While time zones are now
clearly set, peoples relationship with time is very
different across cultures.

Photos / Credits:
Photo #1 (cover) by Fe Ilya:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/renneville/2908748583/
Photo #2 https://www.flickr.com/photos/90162419@N07/9538652873
(CC BY 4.0)

Deep English, 2011-2016 | www.deepenglish.com 03

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