北师大初中英语九年级Expansion 7（MP3+LRC）

[00:01.29]Unit 7 Storytelling

[00:05.13]Expansion 7

[00:10.58]Exercise 1

[00:13.13]Many of the fairy tales that children still

[00:15.82]enjoy today are very old.

[00:18.46]In fact ,they are so old that nobody knows

[00:22.02]who first told them.

[00:23.92]For centuries,

[00:25.66]these stories were passed down orally and,

[00:28.90]as very few people knew how to read or write,

[00:32.50]nobody wrote them down.

[00:35.06]It wasn't until the 17th century that

[00:37.66]writers like the Italian Giambattista Basile

[00:40.44]and the French Charles Perrault published

[00:44.51]collections of fairy tales.

[00:46.39]People enjoyed these tales,

[00:48.09]especially those of Perrault,

[00:50.49]which were more famous.

[00:52.50]However,nobody studied this type of story

[00:55.46]in a serious way.

[00:57.65]Then,in the early 19th century,

[01:01.10]Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published their

[01:03.11]collections of fairy tales.

[01:05.33]The two brothers studied fairy tales carefully.

[01:08.71]They noticed that many German fairy tales

[01:11.64]were very similar to fairy tales

[01:13.73]from other European countries.

[01:16.02]People began to study fairy tales

[01:17.93]and try to explain the similarities

[01:20.87]between stories from different countries.

[01:23.54]At that time, people still did not know

[01:26.54]about the large number of stories

[01:28.45]that existed in Africa, in the Americas,

[01:30.94]in Asia, and in other parts of the world.

[01:34.83]In recent times,

[01:36.00]it has been possible to compare fairy stories

[01:39.04]from all around the world

[01:41.14]Although some countries are very different

[01:43.41]from each other,like Egypt and Iceland,

[01:46.52]their fairy tales are very similar.

[01:49.17]Both Egypt and Iceland have Cinderella stories,

[01:52.45]for example.

[01:53.92]There are also very similar stories in China,

[01:56.81]in England, in Korea, in Siberia, in France,

[02:01.15]and in many other countries.

[02:03.68]Experts now believe that there may be about

[02:06.13]a thousand versions of the Cinderella story.

[02:06.95]