part 5

40 Why do people work? Do they work only for their private needs—because of their need for homes and food and clothing for themselves and their families? Why do some people work when they have enough of all these things? Do they work for pleasure, because making things, for example, gives them pleasure? Do some of them work for the public good? Why are some people happier when they are working? Isn't work one of their needs? Why do you work? Do you need to work to be happy? Do we know one another's needs? Aren't we in the dark about some of them?

41 If all the people alive on the earth today were hand in hand like this, the line they would make would go much more than fifty times round the earth. The line of people would go out to the moon and back five times. It would be long enough to do that. But there isn't a line of people which goes out to the moon and back. And the people of the earth aren't hand in hand; far from it! That is why we said "were" (not "are") and "They would go" (not "they go"). We say: If the angles in this triangle are equal, then the sides will be equal. But we say: If the angles in this triangle were equal, the sides would be equal.

42 People are not hand in hand, but their minds today are being put increasingly into touch with one another through reading and writing and in many other ways. We are in touch with other people everywhere through pictures of them. Newspapers and television give us photographs of almost everything. The faces of important people can be seen by the public everywhere. Before 1800 nobody could take photographs. Nobody had had the idea of using the knowledge of how light is bent by glass (See EP 2, pp. 103-106) to make pictures. Here is a camera which is taking a picture of a man. You will see that the picture inside the camera is upside down.

43 Another way in which people are getting to know more about one another is through the radio. Words were first sent from one place to another by telephone more than a hundred years ago. A word can now go by telephone from the Atlantic to the Pacific in one-twelfth (1.12) of a second. A telephone needs wires, but the radio, which came into use almost one hundred years ago, can send sounds any distance without wires. Television (TV), which is one of the great new powers— for good or bad—of our time, lets a public person talk to millions while they sit in their private homes seeing the person as if standing right there in front of them.

44 But people can't know what any person is saying if they don't know the language. Up to a hundred years ago few people needed to learn foreign languages because not many people went into foreign countries. Now, the need to learn other people's languages is becoming greater every day.

45 Today millions of people, young and old, go into foreign countries every year on business or for pleasure. One can see babies in baskets being taken about by air every day. That is a quicker way to get about than on one's mother's back. Here is a woman who is carrying her baby on her back. She carries the child with her wherever she goes. In the last hundred years people have learnt to go over land and sea through the air as almost all birds and many insects can. People are carried through the air in airplanes.