Question+6+spt

Listen [|here] Question 6

Listen to the passage. On a piece of paper, take notes on the main points of the listening passage.

(professor) Today we're going to talk about the planet Mars and, in particular, how people got the notion that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. We know today that there are no English-speaking humanlike beings with intelligence superior to ours populating the planet, but for quite some time people believed that there were. Where did this idea come from? Do you know?

As often happens, we'll see that the idea that there might be humanlike inhabitants on Mars at least in part was based on an error; a linguistic error of sorts. This linguistic error has to do with the word canali in Italian.

In 1877 an Italian astronomer was looking through a telescope at Mars, and he saw what looked Iike thin, straight lines on its surface. He called these faint lines canali. In Italian the word canali can refer to either something natural or something man-made. InEnglish, however; a canal is something man-made,

and a channel is something natural; a canal is man-made, as in the Erie Canal, while a channel is a natural depression, as in the English Channel. When the Italian astronomer called the lines on Mars canali, he most likely meant natural geographic features. However; when the word canali was translated into English, it was translated as "canal." From this, it was understood that astronomers were saying that there were features that had been constructed on Mars. If the features had been constructed, then the obvious conclusion would be that there were living beings on Mars who constructed the canals. Unfortunately, that wasn't what the astronomer meant; the astronomer was describing natural features on Mars rather than constructed ones. WHAT POINTS DOES THE PROFESSOR MAKE ABOUT THE PLANET MARS?