The history of cakes at weddings

In Western cultures, since antiquity. Weddings customarily have been celebrated with a
special cake. Ancient Roman wedding ceremonies were finalized by breaking a cake of wheat
or barley over the bride’s head as n symbol of good fortune. The newly married couple then
ate some of the crumbs together. Afterward, the wedding guests gathered up the
remaining crumbs as tokens of good luck. Wedding guests were also supplied with
sweetmeats called confetti, a sweet mixture of nuts, dried fruit and honeyed almonds.
Handfuls of confetti were showered over the bride and groom; indeed, it seems to have
been the custom to throw confetti about enthusiastically. Eventually, confetti in the form
of sweets and nuts was replaced with rice, flower petals, or colored paper, and these new
types of confetti continue to be thrown over newly married couples in many countries around
the world.

When the Romans invaded Britain in 43 AD, many of their customs and traditions became
part of British life. These customs included their wedding customs, and when the Normans
invaded Britain in 1066 they brought many French traditions. Other changes came about
due to increased trade and contact with Europe, but present-day British wedding traditions
remain firmly rooted in the past. In medieval Britain, small spiced buns, which were common
everyday fare, were often eaten at weddings. These were stacked in a towering pile, as
high as possible. If the bride and groom were able to kiss over the tall stack, it augured a
lifetime of riches. The earliest British recipe exclusively for eating at weddings is Bride
Pie, which was recorded in 1685. This was a large round pie with an elaborately decorated
pastry crust that concealed a filling of oysters, pine nuts lamb and spices. Each guest had
to eat a small piece of the pier not to do so was considered extremely impolite. A ring was
traditionally placed in the pie, and the lady who found it would be next to marry.

In the 17th century, Bride Pie was changed into Bride Cake, the predecessor of the modern
British wedding cake. Cakes containing dried fruit and sugar, symbols of prosperity,
gradually became the centerpieces for weddings. Some people made Bride Cake in the
cheaper form of two large rounds of pastry sandwiched together with currants and
sprinkled with sugar. Very few homes at the time could boast of having ovens, but this type
of pastry cake could be cooked on a baking stone on the hearth.

Later in the 17th century, there was a new development when wedding cakes began to be
made in pairs, one for the bride and another for the groom. Both cakes were dark, heavy
fruitcakes; the groom’s cake was smaller than the bride’s cake, and was cut up into little
squares that were placed in boxes for the guests to take home as a wedding memento.
Groom’s cakes gradually died out and are no longer part of British weddings. However, the
tradition has undergone a revival in the United States, where for many years the groom’s
cake has served as a wedding gift for guests. Modern groom’s cakes are often formed and
decorated to depict the groom’s hobby, for example a golf bag, a camera, a chess board.

Groom’s cakes were never covered with icing, but Bride Cake covered with white icing first
appeared sometime in the 17th century. After the cake was baked, it was covered with a
pure white, smooth icing made with double refined sugar, egg whites, and orange-flower
water. The mixture was beaten for two hours, then spread over the cake and dried in the
oven until hard. A pure white color was much sought after for wedding cake icing because
white icing meant that only the finest refined sugar had been used. Thus a pure white cake
was a status symbol, as it displayed the family’s wealth.

The late 1800s in Britain saw the introduction of a new tradition, with the first multi-
tiered wedding cakes. These were impressive cakes: they were heavy because they were
made with so much dried fruit, and highly decorated with icing and embellished with sugar
flowers, doves, horseshoes and bells. The first multi-tiered cakes comprised iced cakes
stacked on top of each other rather like a succession of boxes gradually decreasing in size.
The cakes from the upper tiers did not sink into the lower tiers because they were a bit
put on top of each other until the icing between each cake had had time to harden. It was
not until the beginning of the 20th century that the cake tiers were separated and
supported by columns.

Twenty-first-century weddings are big business for Britain’s wedding industry. Over
300,000 people get married each year and a wedding can cost thousands of pounds. The
cost of the all-important wedding cake can be hundreds of pounds, depending on the
dimension and design. It will be interesting to see whether wedding cakes continue to be
popular at weddings.

QUESTIONS 1-3
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. 
Wedding cakes 

17th century- Britain Bride Cake:

- expensive ingredients were a sign of wealth

- less expensive round cakes were made of 1   with currants in between and
sugar on top

- they were baked on a hearth stone because not all homes

had 2 

Now- United States - Groom’s cake:

- guest receive pieces of the groom’s cake

- cakes may represent the 3  of the

groom
QUESTIONS 4-7
Label the diagram below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

4 Examples of wedding cakes with several   .

 5 In the early 1900s,    were used to keep individual cakes apart.

 6. The size of these cakes as well as their    affects pricing.

 7 Hardened   between cakes stopped higher cakes sinking into tower cakes.

Making Copier
At first, nobody bought Chester Carlson’s strange idea. But trillions of documents later, his
invention is the biggest thing in printing since Gutenberg
A

Copying is the engine of civilization: culture is behavior duplicated. The oldest copier
invented by people is language, by which an idea of yours becomes an idea of mine. The
second great copying machine was writing. When the Sumerians transposed spoken words
into stylus marks on clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago, the hugely extended the
human network that language had created. Writing freed copying from the chain of living
contact. It made ideas permanent, portable and endlessly reproducible.

Until Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s, producing a book in
an edition of more than one generally meant writing it out again. Printing with moveable
type was not copying, however. Gutenberg couldn’t take a document that already existed,
feed it into his printing press and run off facsimiles. The first true mechanical copier was
manufactured in 1780, when James Watt, who is better known as the inventor of the
modern steam engine, created the copying press. Few people today know what a copying
press was, but you may have seen one in an antique store, where it was perhaps called a
book press. A user took a document freshly written in special ink, placed a moistened sheet
of translucent paper against the inked surface and squeezed the two sheets together in the
press, causing some of the ink from the original to penetrate the second sheet, which could
then be read by turning it over and looking through its back. The high cost prohibits the
widespread use of this copier.

Among the first modem copying machines, introduced in 1950 by 3M, was the Thermo-Fax,
and it made a copy by shining infrared light through an original document and a sheet of
paper that had been coated with heat-sensitive chemicals. Competing manufacturers soon
introduced other copying technologies and marketed machines called Dupliton, Dial-A-Matic
Autostat, Verifax, Copease and Copymation. These machines and their successors were
welcomed by secretaries, who had no other means of reproducing documents in hand, but
each had serious drawbacks. All required expensive chemically treated papers. And all made
copies that smelled bad, were hard to read, didn’t last long and tended to curl up into
tubes. The machines were displaced, beginning in the late 1800s, by a combination of two
19th century inventions: the typewriter and carbon paper. For those reasons, copying
presses were standard equipment in offices for nearly a century and a half.

None of those machines is still manufactured today. They were all made obsolete by a
radically different machine, which had been developed by an obscure photographic-supply
company. That company had been founded in 1906 as the Haloid Company and is known
today as the Xerox Corporation. In 1959, it introduced an office copier called the Haloid
Xerox 914, a machine that, unlike its numerous competitors, made sharp, permanent copies
on ordinary paper-a huge breakthrough. The process, which Haloid called xerography (based
on Greek words meaning “dry” and “writing”), was so unusual and nonnutritive that physicists
who visited the drafty warehouses where the first machines were built sometimes
expressed doubt that it was even theoretically feasible.

Remarkably, xerography was conceived by one person- Chester Carlson, a shy, soft-spoken
patent attorney, who grew up in almost unspeakable poverty and worked his way through
junior college and the California Institute of Technology. Chester Carlson was born in
Seattle in 1906. His parents-Olof Adolph Carlson and Ellen Josephine Hawkins—had grown
up on neighboring farms in Grove City, Minnesota, a tiny Swedish farming community about
75 miles west of Minneapolis. Compare with competitors, Carlson was not a normal inventor
in 20-century. He made his discovery in solitude in 1937 and offered it to more than 20
major corporations, among them IBM, General Electric, Eastman Kodak and RCA. All of
them turned him down, expressing what he later called “an enthusiastic lack of interest”
and thereby passing up the opportunity to manufacture what Fortune magazine would
describe as “the most successful product ever marketed in America.”
F

Carlson’s invention was indeed a commercial triumph. Essentially overnight, people began
making copies at a rate that was orders of magnitude higher than anyone had believed
possible. And the rate is still growing. In fact, most documents handled by a typical
American office worker today are produced xerographically, either on copiers manufactured
by Xerox and its competitors or on laser printers, which employ the same process (and were
invented, in the 1970s, by a Xerox researcher). This year, the world will produce more
than three trillion xerographic copies and laser-printed pages—about 500 for every human
on earth.

Xerography eventually made Carlson a very wealthy man. (His royalties amounted to
something like a 16th of a cent for every Xerox copy made, worldwide, through 1965.)
Nevertheless, he lived simply. He never owned a second home or a second car, and his wife
had to urge him not to buy third-class train tickets when he travelled in Europe. People
who knew him casually seldom suspected that he was rich or even well-to-do; when Carlson
told an acquaintance he worked at Xerox, the man assumed he was a factory worker and
asked if he belonged to a union. “His possessions seemed to be composed of the number of
things he could easily do without,” his second wife said. He spent the last years of his life
quietly giving most of his fortune to charities. When he died in 1968, among the eulogizers
was the secretary-general of the United Nations.

Questions 8-14

Reading Passage.

Write your answers in boxes 8-14 on your answer sheet.

Calson, unlike a 20-century 8  , like to work on his own. In 1937, he unsuccessfully

invited 20 major 9   to make his discovery. However, this action was not welcome

among shareholders at the beginning, all of them 10  . Eventually, Calson’s creation

was undeniably a 11  . Thanks for the discovery of Xerography, Calson became a

very 12   person. Even so, his life remains as simple as before. It looks as if he

can live without his 13   At the same time, he gave lots of his money

to 14  .

Rubik’s Cube - How the puzzle achieved success

Erno Rubik first studied sculpture and then later architecture in Budapest, where he went
on to become a teacher of interior design. It was while he was working as a teacher that
he began the preliminary work on an invention that he called the ‘Magic Cube'.
Rubik was inspired by geometric puzzles such as the Chinese tangram, a puzzle consisting of
various triangles, a square and a parallelogram which can be combined to create different
shapes and figures. However, unlike the tangram, which is two- dimensional, Rubik was
more interested in investigating how three-dimensional forms, such as the cube, could be
moved and combined to produce other forms.

His design consisted of a cube made up of layers of individual smaller cubes, and each
smaller cube could be turned in any direction except diagonally. To ensure that the cubes
could move independently, without falling apart, Rubik first attempted to join them
together using elastic bands. However, this proved to be impossible, so Rubik then solved
the problem by assembling them using a rounded interior. This permitted them to move
smoothly and easily. He experimented with different ways of marking the smaller cubes,
but ended up with the simple solution of giving a different colour to each side. The object
was to twist the layers of small cubes so that each side of the large cube was an identical
colour.

Rubik took out a patent for the Cube in 1977 and started manufacturing it in the same
year. The Cube came to the attention of a Hungarian businessman, Tibor Laczi, who then
demonstrated it at the Nuremberg Toy Fair. When British toy expert Tom Kremer saw it,
he thought it was amazing and he persuaded a manufacturer, Ideal Toys, to produce 1
million of them in 1979. Ideal Toys renamed the Cube after the toy’s inventor, and in
1980, Rubik’s Cube was shown at toy fairs all over the world. It won that year’s prize in
Germany for Best Puzzle. Rubik’s Cube is believed to be the world’s best-selling puzzle;
since its invention, more than 300 million Cubes have been sold worldwide.

Questions 15-

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Rubik’s Cube

Originally named the 15  , Rubik’s Cube consists of a number of smaller cubes

organised in 16  .The smaller cubes can be twisted in almost anyway, though

not 17  . The Cube’s 18   is shaped in a way that allows the smaller

cubes to move smoothly. Each side of the smaller cubes has a different colour, and the aim
of the puzzle is to organise the cubes so that the colours on the sides of the large cube

are 19 .The manufacturers of the puzzle changed the name of the Cube to the

name of its 20   it has now sold more than any other 21   in the world.