Listening audioscript

USING THE EXAMPLES OF WOLVES AND ANTS FROM THE LECTURE, 
EXPLAIN HOW LIVING IN GROUPS CAN HELP ANIMALS ACQUIRE FOOD.
WRITING 
 
Page 533
[ mp3 272-273]
Question 1
. Listen to the passage. On a piece of paper, take notes on the main points 
of the listening passage. 
(Professor) 
While everything you just read about the accounts of Marco Polo’s 
supposed journey to China are true, there are some reasonable 
explanations to account for these seemingly incredible omissions. 
Well, it’s really difficult to know how well records were kept in the court of 
Kublai Khan. For instance we know for certain that an Italian diplomat, 
Giovanni de Marignolli, visited the royal court in China about 100 years 
after the time that Polo claimed to have spent in China. Despite traveling 
with a rather large group, there is no record of the later visit by the Italian 
diplomat in the Chinese records either. Perhaps foreign visitors were not 
a very noteworthy occurrence, and therefore did not appear in any official 
records. 
It is true that throughout China’s history tea drinking was common; 
however it lost some of its popularity as China came under the rule of the 
Mongols during the thirteenth century which was when Polo was in 
China. The Mongols were originally nomadic people who did not farm but 
raised herds of horses, camels, and sheep on the open plains. 
Accordingly, Mongols did not have the tradition of drinking tea, but rather 
drank a…a wine-like beverage that was made from the milk of their herd 
animals. China’s new rulers showed no interest in the local drink and 
maintained their own cultural traditions. This could go a long way to 
explain why Polo made no mention of tea in his book. 
Now in regards to the Great Wall, to state it simply, during the time that 
Polo was in China, the Great Wall wasn't really all that great at all, not 
like it is today. Construction on the Great Wall began in the third century 
to protect China from invasions by the Mongols. And after the Mongols 
conquered China, they tore down many of the defensive walls that made 
up the Great Wall, so when Polo was in China most of the Great Wall 
was ruins. When people go to China today almost everything they see 
was built in the sixteenth century, hundreds of years after Polo returned 

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to Italy. The wall we know today was built by the succeeding Ming 
Dynasty, after the Mongol dynasty had collapsed. So what we consider 
to be the Great Wall today did not exist when Polo said he was in China. 
Summarize the points the made in the lecture being sure to explain how they 
challenge the specific points made in the reading passage.