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Engramme: Your Daily English Programme #63: History of the Spanish Empire (Listening B2-C1) |
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Think Before You Listen |
Do you know which country is represented in the picture below? What do you know about this country & its history?
On October 19, 1469, Ferdinand II of Aragon married Isabella I of Castile: a marriage that paved the way for the unification of Aragon and Castile into a single country, Spain1.
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Watch and Listen |
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Let's Practice |
Some structures in language keep recurring time and again, making many language researchers, such as Michael Lewis, believe that language is no more than recurring patterns of lexical chunks. The activity below is meant to give more advanced learners of English a view into a few of these chunks of language.
Watch & Listen Again: A few commonly used patterns of words in English historical texts have been highlighted in the following transcript. Listen & find the missing word in each group:
(mouse over the colored words to see their meaning)
With the help
of Christopher Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, Spain went on
to establish one of the largest empires the world ____ ____ seen.
Hi! I'm Rebecca Braden and welcome to watchmojo.com. And today
we'll be _______ the rise, dominance, and fall of this one-time world
empire.
After the Union of Castile and Aragon effectively created Spain, the
________ new kingdom quickly began to commission overseas explorations.
Under the Spanish flag, it was Christopher Columbus who accidentally
discovered the Americas while attempting to ______ Asia via the Atlantic.
This began Spain's colonization of the Americas, with countries like Portugal,
England, France and others not ____
______.
In 1510, Spain was finally successful in creating the first permanent
European settlement in what is now Colombia. The Year 1513 saw Spain's Vasco
Núñez de Balboa become the first European to _____ an expedition to
the Pacific Ocean when he crossed present-day Panama. Groups of warrior
explorers called conquistadors began colonizing the Caribbean islands and
areas of South America.
Despite resistance by the indigenous population, the conquistadors
used rival native tribes against each other in order to _____ an advantage.
Spain's expansion did not stop at the Americas. After finding the westward
route to the Far East that Columbus had been searching for years earlier,
Spain established colonies in Guam, the Philippines, and other nearby islands.
At the ______ of the Spanish Empire in the 17th century, the kingdom controlled
much of the Americas, territories in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and large
portions of Europe. In _____, they controlled approximately 13% of the
world's total land area.
Continuing war with various countries throughout Europe meant trouble
for Spain's economy. By the end of the 17th century, France had emerged as
Europe's superpower marking the beginning of the _____ for Spain's Empire.
In the 19th century, the Spanish American wars of independence and the Spanish-American
war saw Spain lose all of its territories throughout the Americas and Asia.
Even after its fall as a dominant world power, Spain's ______ remains
evident. The Spanish dollar was the world's first global currency because of
the country's role in the foundations of global trade. This trade would see
the ________ of things like horses, apples and even wheat to the new
world from Europe. The Spanish language and Roman Catholic faith were also spread
________ the world, both still dominant in most of its former colonies
even centuries later.
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(turn on the video subtitles to compare your answers)
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Over to You |
What is the history of your country like? Was it a big empire sometime in its history? How did it evolve into what it is today? (let us know in the comments below)
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Practice the (Underlined/Colored) Vocabulary from this post at this link
Teachers can Download a Copy (pdf) of this lesson HERE
1 Taken from www.onthisday.com↩
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