Listening Part 8: Summarize Spoken Text
PTE Listening Part 8- Sample 5: Summarize The Spoken Text
Draisienne or Laufmaschine invented by Baron Karl von Drais from Germany, also known as the dandy-horse or the hobby-horse in spite of being just two wheels in tandem without any pedals, is considered to be the first bicycle. The rider in it had to sit astride a frame made of wood which was supported by two wheels on each side while using his feet to push and move the bicycle. It was introduced publically by Drais in the years 1817 and 1818 in Mannheim and Paris respectively. Years after discovery by Drais, in the early 1860s two Frenchmen: Pierre Lallement and Pierre Michaux made a bicycle which was the first to be mass produced. They added a mechanical crank drive with pedals on an enlarged front wheel while the one on the back was small. This invention followed several others, out of which many were unsuccessful, with the best known being the velocipede driven by rod which was designed by Scotsman Thomas McCall in the year 1869. Wheels with spokes were patented in the same year by Paris’s Eugene Meyer. The period of 1890s was said to be the Golden Age of Bicycles as this was the time when most of the models designed became universal like the practical pneumatic tire prepared in 1888 by John Boyd Dunlop. It was also during this year only that the world’s biggest bicycle manufacturing company selling over two million bicycles annually - Raleigh Bicycle Company was established in the city of Nottingham in England. Among other models which got popular during the beginning of the twenty-first century, the most popular one is the Chinese Flying Pigeon, the number of whose sold bikes is over 500 million.