【雅思聽力】紙的介紹(2/3)

Where was paper first made? In China. The Chinese first made paper about 2,000 years ago. China still has pieces of paper which were made as long ago as that. But Chinese paper was not made from the wood of trees. It was made from the hair-like parts of certain plants. In Egypt and the West, paper was not very commonly used before the year 1400. The Egyptians wrote on papyrus, a kind of paper made from the pith or the stems of tall aquatic cyperaceous plants. Europeans used parchment for many hundreds of years. What was parchment? Parchment was made from the skin of certain young animals. They were very strong. We have learnt some of the most important facts of European history from records that were kept on parchment. Oh, I see. How about paper in Europe? Well, paper was not made in southern Europe until about the year 1100. Scandinavia which now makes a great deal of the world's paper but didn't begin to make it until 1500. It was a German named Schaeffer who found out that the best paper could be made from trees. After that Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland and the United States became the most important in paper making. They are forest countries. Today Finland makes the best paper in the world and the paper industry of the country is the biggest in the world. New paper-making machines are very big, and they make paper very fast. The biggest machines can make a piece of paper 300 metres long and six metres wide in one minute. Oh, my goodness. That's amusing.