TOEFL
Academic Talk: How coffee spread around the world
Listen to an Academic Talk. Read the questions first, then play the recording. The transcript appears after you submit.
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Today, a quick case study in how a product travels: coffee.
The coffee plant is native to Ethiopia, but the drink as we know it developed across the Red Sea in Yemen, by the fifteenth century. It was popular among people who wanted to stay awake for night-time prayers.
From Yemen, coffee spread through the Middle East. Coffee houses appeared in cities like Cairo and Istanbul, and they became important social spaces — places to talk, hear news and play games.
For a long time, the trade was centred on the Yemeni port of Mocha, and that’s where the name of the drink you may know comes from.
In the seventeenth century, European traders managed to obtain coffee plants and began growing them in their colonies, which broke the monopoly and eventually moved the centre of production to places like Java and, later, Latin America.
So the drink’s history is also a history of trade, religion and colonial power — not just taste.
1.What is the talk mainly about?
2.Where is the coffee plant native to?
3.Why was coffee popular in Yemen at first?
4.Why does the professor mention Mocha?
5.What ended the early trade monopoly?
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