46 L5-Materials To Products

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Oxford Read and Discover level 5 Materials To Products by Alex Raynham

Introduction Products are things that people make or use, like this book, your clothes, and the television in your home. People make products from different materials, like wood, metal, and plastic. What products can you see here? What products can you see around you? What materials are they made of? Discover! Now read and discover more about the materials that people use to make products!

Chapter 1 The First Materials A very long time ago, people didn't build homes. They slept in forests and caves, hunted animals, and collected fruit. They also made things from materials that they found around them. What did they make, and what materials did they use? Flint and Fur People made the first tools from a stone called flint. They used the flints in their hands or they fixed them to pieces of wood or animal bones. People used flint tools to cut wood and to hunt animals. In cold countries, they used animal fur to make clothes and shoes. Wood and Plants People used wood and plants to make shelters simple places to sleep in. They cut wood from trees to make the shape of the shelter. Then they used other plants to make the roof and the walls. Some people still make homes like this today. People used grass to make threads. They pushed threads over and under other threads to make clothes and beds. This is called weaving. They also made baskets by weaving thin sticks. Baskets are great for carrying food and catching fish. Discover! People make lots of things from grass and sticks, like this basket boat from Vietnam.

Clay About 10,000 years ago, people mixed sand and grass with a type of soil called clay to make a material called adobe. They put the adobe into molds and left it to dry. Adobe becomes very hard in the sun. People used adobe bricks to build the first houses. In many hot countries, people still build adobe houses today. People also learned how to make shapes from clay. They put the clay shapes into a fire to make pottery. Pottery can hold water so it's great for cooking and keeping food. Bronze and Iron Some rocks have metals in them. About 8,500 years ago, people discovered how to use a process called smelting to get metals out of rocks. The first metals, like gold, were very soft. Then people mixed two metals together to make a hard metal called bronze. They used bronze to make tools and weapons. Later, they used another metal called iron. Stone About 5,000 years ago, people started to live in big towns. They built stone walls around their towns. They also used stone to make buildings like temples and palaces. Stone is waterproof, and much stronger than adobe. Discover! The Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt is about 4,500 years old. To build it, people used about 5 million metric tons of stone.

Chapter 2 Rocks and Minerals The ground is made of rocks. In rocks there are chemicals called minerals that make the rocks different colors. What do people use rocks and minerals for? Stone Stone comes from rocks. About 600 years ago, the Inca people built their cities from stone. They used triangles of wood called wedges to break rocks into huge pieces of stone. Hundreds of people used long, round pieces of wood to move the stone. Discover! To build the Inca city of Sacsahuaman, people moved huge pieces of stone to the top of a hill. Some pieces were more than 50 metric tons! Gems For thousands of years people have collected pretty stones called gems. Gems are minerals, and they can be many different colors— rubies are red, and emeralds are green. Some gems, like diamonds, are transparent they don't have any color. The prettiest gems are very expensive. People make beautiful jewelry from gems and metals. In the past, artists used some gems to make colors for paints. Crystals Some gems, like diamonds, are also crystals. Crystals are made of stones that always have a regular shape. Some crystals are transparent. Some are very big, like these huge crystals in Mexico.