Тема Problems of city and country life - Английский язык

The saga of discovery and settlement of the New Worid, begun by European's in the late 15th century, lasted more than 200 years. Snccessive transatlantic crossings, first into the Caribbean and then to the coast of Canada and along the coast of South America, describe the general pattern of exploration by the Spanish, Portuguese, falians, French, and English. Several factors made the Age of Exploration possible. Medieval cartographers placed Jerusalem at the center of the earth. But in the 15th century. Western scholars rediscovered Ptolemy's "Geography", with its maps of a semispheric earth that accurately located all distant places. Improvements in

equipment enabled the construction of larger, more manoeuvrable ships.In-the East Europeans were cut off from land routes to India and China. The need for new avenues of trade with the Far East led to theseafaring explorations of the Age of Discovery.

In 1492 the Italian Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in a Spanish-backed attempt to find a new trading route to the Far East. While that objective went unfulfilled, subsequent voyages by explorers did much to reveal both the complexities of transatlantic navigation and the nature of the New World. Simultaneously, Portuguese seafarers led by Bartolomeu Dias had pushed southward to the Cape of Good Hope, mapping the entire western coast of Africa in the process and proving the existence of a sea route between Europe and India. In 1497 John Cabot, a Venetian sea captain, completed the first recorded transatlantic voyage by an English vessel, while attempting to find a north-west passage to Asia. Cabot died during the second attempt to find a direct route to Cathay in 1498. Although Sebastian Cabot ... остальная часть текста, формулы, таблицы, изображения скрыты