Английский язык на слух по аудиокниге 'The History of the Standard Oil Company'

Первая часть первой главы

Фрагмент текста на английском языке:

ONE of the busiest corners of the globe at the opening of the year 1872 was a strip of Northwestern Pennsylvania,not over fifty miles long, known the world over as the Oil Regions. Twelve years before this strip of land had been but little better than a wilderness; its chief inhabitants the lumbermen, who every season cut great swaths of primeval pine and hemlock from its hills, and in the spring floated them down the Allegheny River to Pittsburg. The great tides of Western emigration had shunned the spot for years as too rugged and unfriendly for settlement, and yet in twelve years this region avoided by men had been transformed into a bustling trade centre, where towns elbowed each other for place, into which three great trunk railroads had built branches, and every foot of whose was fought for by capitalists. It was the discovery and evelopment of a new raw product, petroleum, which had made this change from wilderness to market-place.