Listening for ielts 7 Unit 1

Unit 6
: Listening Activity No. 15 
Good morning, everyone. Today my talk is going to be about chocolate. I'm going to talk a little bit about 
the history of chocolate. But first I'm going to tell you a story about Julia Procter.

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Listening for IELTS
121 
She eats her favorite food; she feels guilty. She knows that chocolate has a lot of fat and sugar. But 
Julia says she is addicted to chocolate. And once she starts eating it, she can't stop. Julia isn't the only 
one who is addicted to chocolate. It is a favorite food for people all over the world. And in a survey of 16 
different countries, people preferred chocolate to ice cream, cakes, and cookies. In the United States, 
chocolate is a £10 billion industry. For Valentine's Day, for example, people spend over £400 million on 
chocolate. The idea of eating chocolate didn't begin until the 19th century. Before that, people drank 
chocolate.
The custom began in Central America, where the Aztecs drank bowls of chocolate to stay alert. When 
the liquid chocolate was brought to Spain in the 1500s, people thought it was medicine because it tasted 
bitter, like other medicines. In fact, the people who made chocolate into drinks were either druggists or 
doctors. Then people discovered that mixing chocolate with sugar made a wonderful drink. King 
Fedinand of Spain loved this drink so much that he put out an order: Anyone who talked about 
chocolate outside the court would be killed. So for about 100 years, chocolate was a secret in Spain.
But finally, people found out about chocolate, and it became a popular drink throughout Europe. In 
the 1800s, a British chocolate maker discovered a way to make chocolate smooth and velvety, then the 
Swiss added milk to the chocolate. Today, most Americans prefer milk chocolate, while most Europeans 
prefer dark chocolate.
Now research shows that chocolate is actually good for us because chocolate has a variety of vitamins 
and minerals. And it has more than 300 different chemicals. One chemical works on the part of the brain 
that feels pleasure. People who feel good when they eat chocolate are actually healthier, because 
feeling pleasure is important for health and can protect against illness. Good chocolate doesn't have 
much fat or sugar. You can enjoy it if you "eat a little at a time". So thinking about Julia Procter who I 
mentioned at the beginning, if you just eat a little at a time, that isn't a big problem. That's the end of 
my talk today on chocolate. 

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