[originaltext]Technology can bring lasting change to society, and one change it

Technology can bring lasting change to society, and one change it brought in the 19th century was the widespread use of color in art and commerce. A printing process began in Germany and then spread to America, where brightly-colored printing transformed popular culture. An exhibition called The Color Explosion at the Huntington Library illustrates the changes. The 19th century is often remembered through stiffly posed, black and white photographs of people dressed in shades of gray. Much of the century, however, was excess in color, especially in America, where brightly-colored prints found a place on boxes, cans as well as calendars and posters. David Smith, curator of the Huntington exhibition, says the mass production of color was enabled by a groundbreaking process called lithography. “It had a tremendous visual impact on people who, up to this time, really had not seen much color before. So lithography, one of its major impacts, was to colorize America and bring color to every community and every home, affordable.” Lithographic artists used grease crayons to sketch images on a block of limestone. The printer applied water and ink, and the ink adhered to the greasy image. The stone block was then used to mass-produce printed copies. Black and white lithography was invented in Germany in the 1790s, and it spread to France and England, and then made its way to America with German immigrants. Smith says that after a few decades, printers started using colored ink, as the process expanded from city to city in the country’s westward expansion.
Questions 16 to 18 are based on the passage you have just heard.
16. What change did technology bring in the 19th century?
17. What’s the great impact of lithography?
18.How did black and white lithography appear in America?