EP6 Brunelleschi's Dome

Brunelleschi's Dome | 短故事＋5个词＋was/were + adjectives＋小练习

Listening Text
P1: Imagine this: It is the early 1400s in Florence, Italy. The city is building a great cathedral called Santa Maria del Fiore. The walls are high, the towers are ready, but one important part is still missing – the dome. A dome is a round roof, like half of a ball. At that time, most domes were semi-circles. But the new dome in Florence was different. It had to stand on eight sides, like an eight-cornered shape. This meant it needed to be very tall and very strong. The bottom of the dome was an octagon with no clear center point, which made the design even more difficult. The people of Florence want an even larger dome than any other, but nobody knows how to build it safely. The dome must be very wide and very high, and it cannot fall down. The city asks a man named Filippo Brunelleschi to solve this problem. He is a clockmaker, not a famous architect, but he loves buildings. For him, this is the job of a lifetime. He thinks carefully and begins to plan a new kind of dome.

P2: Brunelleschi studies the problem for a long time. Then he has a bold idea. He will not build just one dome. He will build two domes, one inside the other. The inner dome will be made of heavy stone. The outer dome will be made of lighter bricks. Together, the two domes will support each other. To keep the structure strong, he adds rings of stone, wood, and iron, like belts around the dome. These rings stop the walls from moving or breaking. There is another problem: how to lift heavy materials high into the air. Brunelleschi designs new lifting machines that no one has seen before. They can pull stone and bricks up to the top of the cathedral. His machines and his plan are so new that many people do not understand them, but the work begins.

P3: Building the dome takes many years. Workers slowly lay bricks and stones, high above the city. There is no wooden support under the dome, so the pattern of the bricks is extremely important. Brunelleschi asks the workers to place the bricks in a special way, like a net or a spiral. Each brick helps to hold the others in place. They also wait for the sticky material between the bricks to dry before they add more. Because of this, the dome grows only a little each month, but it grows safely. In total, it takes about sixteen years to finish the dome. When Brunelleschi dies in 1446, he leaves no detailed drawings of his design. Even today, experts still study the dome and try to understand exactly how he did it. More than five hundred years later, Brunelleschi’s dome still stands over Florence – strong, beautiful, and full of mystery.

Words
- dome: a round roof, shaped like half of a ball.
- cathedral: a very large, important church.
- brick: a small hard block used for building walls and houses.
- pattern: the way things are arranged or repeated.
- inner: on the inside or closer to the center of something.

Practice
Q1: The dome ___ very tall and very strong.
A) was
B) were

Q2: The workers ___ careful when they built the dome.
A) was
B) were

Q3: Make one sentence about the past with was / were + adjective, and one sentence about now with am / is / are + adjective.