Listening for ielts 7 Unit 1

Unit 6
: Listening Activity No. 9 
Riverdance is not just an expression of self-confidence, a kind of culturally interesting Pop Kong. It tells 
the story of a people through song and dance. It tells the story of the people whose spirit was broken by 
an event which occurred in the middle of the last century but continued to affect the society until 1961, 
the Great Famine. 
What is a famine? 
In 1840 the official population of Ireland was 8,000,000. They were largely poor and living in the 
countryside. They were beginning to have an interest in independence and perhaps had things been 
different Ireland might have been independent much earlier but there was a serious problem in the 
agricultural system. All crops were grown to pay the rent of the land and all that was grown to eat was 
the potato. This was fine until the potato crop failed as it did from 1845 to 1848. The stories of what 
happened in those times live on in the popular culture of Ireland and I won't tell them here but the 
result was that 2 million people died or left the country by 1851. When you realize that the population 
continued to go down until 1961 you can realize what a disastrous effect this famine had on the people. 
Compared with China, imagine if the famine of 1960 reduced the population by 1/4 and it kept falling 
to less than half of its pre-famine figure. 
Anybody with ideas left and went to England, America or Australia. The people left behind were 
broken by their experiences and, in effect, the famine and its consequences put an end to all serious 
development in the country until well into this century. The Irish in Ireland lost all hope and self-
confidence and much of our modem culture is about the sadness of that time and the sorrow of saying 
goodbye to those who left and left well into this century. Ireland has the highest emigration rate of any 
country in Europe for the last two centuries. We even have an expression for this saying goodbye. It is 
called the "American Wake". It means the ceremony, like that of a funeral for someone going to 
America, because you will never see him or her again.
Do you know why there is Irish music on the film Titanic? It is because most of the people killed were 
Irish.

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