Reflect on how human beings have enhanced their capabilities by using tools, machines, or instruments. Answer the questions.
What is technology?
- Technology is the set of knowledge, techniques, and artifacts created to satisfy human needs.
- It includes both the objects (tools, machines) and the processes or methods used to make them.
- It is not only modern devices: it begins with the first stone tools.
Technology is the knowledge, techniques and artifacts that humans design to solve problems and satisfy needs, from a stone axe to a satellite.
How was food preserved before refrigeration processes were invented?
- Drying or dehydration: removing water prevents microorganisms from growing.
- Salting and smoking: salt and smoke stop decomposition (e.g., salted fish, smoked meat).
- Fermentation: milk became cheese or yogurt, cabbage became sauerkraut.
- Other methods: burying in cold ground, storing in caves, using ice and snow, or keeping food in honey or oil.
By drying, salting, smoking, fermenting, and storing in cold places such as caves or with ice and snow.
How was water heated before metal containers existed?
- Water was heated in clay or ceramic pots placed over fire.
- Hot stones were dropped into water held in wooden or leather containers.
- In some places, water was heated in hollowed stone or in animal-skin bags.
In clay or ceramic pots over fire, or by dropping heated stones into water inside wood, leather or stone containers.
How were large buildings, such as pyramids, built with no heavy machinery like cranes?
- Ramps of earth or sand were built to drag stone blocks upward.
- Wooden sleds, rollers and levers moved the blocks.
- Thousands of workers used ropes, pulleys and coordinated physical force.
- Water or sand was used to reduce friction under the sleds.
With ramps, sleds, rollers, levers, ropes and the coordinated work of many people, using only human and animal strength.
How has it been possible to explore space?
- Rockets use chemical fuel to overcome Earth's gravity.
- Telescopes and satellites observe space from Earth's orbit.
- Spacecraft, probes and robots travel to other planets.
- Life-support systems allow astronauts to survive in space.
Thanks to rockets, satellites, telescopes, probes and life-support systems that let humans and robots travel and work outside Earth.
How have the ways of communicating changed?
- From oral language and signals to writing.
- From handwritten letters carried by messengers to the printing press.
- From telegraph and telephone to radio, television, internet and smartphones.
- Today communication is instant, global and multimedia.
From oral language and writing to printing, telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, internet and instant mobile communication.
