『新东方在线托福听力』为托福考生准备了ETS托福TPO/【学术讲座】#4听力练习：What is the main topic of the talk?原文题目答案解析，TPO/【学术讲座】#4听力原文范文音频翻译。

托福TPO/【学术讲座】#4听力原文What is the main topic of the talk?【新东方在线】

What does the teacher suggest about the early mail carriers who rode on horses?

What happened to the Roman mail system when the Roman Empire ended?

What led to the establishment of private postal system during the Renaissance?

Listen to a talk in a history class.If you think about it, thanks to e-mail and computers we hardly write letters on paper anymore. Most people don’t even pay bills through the mail anymore, or mail informs to schools or to the government. It seems almost everything can be done online now. Keep in mind though that e-mail is a very recent development, but postal services systems for delivering physical paper letters and documents and other items, well, they have been around for a long time. For example, we know that in ancient times, documents were transported by riders on horseback. They usually used a relay system, which means that one mail carrier would travel a certain distance with the mail and then pass it on to someone else, whose job was to take it the next part of the way. In ancient China, for example, the government set up a large network of stations, where fresh horses were kept. So mail carriers could deliver official documents to far away parts of the kingdom more quickly. Now during the Roman Empire, almost two thousand years ago, Roman rulers established their own system of roads and stations for mail delivery across the Empire’s vast lands. Interestingly, even after the Roman Empire ended, its postal system remained intact; in other words, even though there was no official Roman Empire to govern the territories, the people living in the area found the postal system created by the Empire so useful that they continued to use it. Then about five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance in Europe, different countries began to travel farther and farther, when they started trading goods. This led to a need for commercial documents to be delivered quickly and safely. That’s when private business got involved and started their own postal systems. So now it wasn’t only government that were delivering mail, and that’s pretty much what it is like in the world today. Most governments operate their own postal services, but there are also many private companies that deliver letters and documents. Of course, with today’s technology, there may soon be no need for any of them.

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