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Buzzwords S1
BUZZ: Music and New Media
Vocabulary 2
Grammar Points 3
18
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Vocabulary
English Definition Class
media ways of delivering noun
communication
file a collection of computer noun
information stored as a single unit
capacity maximum amount that can be noun
held
audio relating to sound adjective
portable easy to carry adjective
to store to put away for later use, to place verb
information in a person or
computer's memory
compress to make smaller, to squeeze in an verb
effort to make smaller
transferable able to be moved from one place adjective
or situation to another
log on to sign on to a computer or verb
website with a user name and
password
prototype an original or first model after noun
which other forms are copied or
developed
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Vocabulary Sample Sentences
In what kind of media will the speech be available
to buy?
Music can be listened to on several different media
devices.
I keep my files backed up on a separate hard drive.
When his computer crashed, he lost all of his files.
What is the seating capacity of that restaurant?
What's the capacity of your hard drive?
The audio on old movies doesn't always sound
good.
I don't hear any audio when I try to play this DVD.
The Sony Walkman was one of the first portable
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tape players.
Long ago, there were no portable computers.
How many photos do you have stored on your hard
drive?
Can I store this food in your refrigerator?
This essay compresses one hundred years of
history into three pages.
There are many different programs you can use to
compress files.
Working at that company helped her gain
transferable skills for her career.
Digital information is easily transferable.
Please log in to the school website to begin the
lesson.
I've forgotten my password, so I can't log on to the
Internet.
We sat in the cool prototype car at the car show.
The prototype of Kane Kramer's digital audio
player looks like a first-generation iPod.
Grammar Points
The Focus of This Lesson is MP3 and Digital Audio Players.
3
Are you listening to this EnglishClass101.com lesson on an iPod? If not, do you have an iPod?
Millions of people do, and thousands-possibly hundreds of thousands-more use some other digital
audio player (DAP) also known as an MP3 player. Some DAPs are referred to as portable media
players for their ability to store and display video or images. This lesson focuses on music and the
MP3 file format.
Today, the MP3 is a common format for music. The MP3 format was introduced in 1994. It was
celebrated for its ability to compress a typically large music file into a smaller, more portable, and
easily transferrable file. The arrival of MP3 has slowly but irrevocably changed the way we buy and
listen to music. No longer do we have to go to the record shops-many of which have gone out of
business-we can very simply log on to the Internet and have, literally, a world of music at our
fingertips. This wasn't true as recently as five to ten years ago when the CD (Compact Disc) was king.
DAPs were not widely available, even though one of the earliest digital audio players was introduced
in 1979! That's right, the first prototype of a portable, digital music player, the IXI, was developed by
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British inventor and businessman Kane Kramer in 1979. For those of you not good at math, that's
thirty long years ago! Apple, maker of the now ubiquitous iPod, later hired Kramer, who never
produced his player for the consumer market, to consult for them. In fact, the design of the original
iPod is not very different from Kramer's IXI, which had the capacity for about three hours and fifty
minutes of audio, nothing by today's standards, but quite a feat in the late 70s and early 80s.
As you know, the iPod, which actually uses the MP4 format, is everywhere. And now, with the recent
introduction of the iPhone, the portability of music and other media such as video and still images is
closer to becoming viewed as a necessity. Companies that produce other devices, such as the
Blackberry, realize that the only way to keep up with Apple is to make their products capable of
storing and displaying or playing back media. Even so, Apple products reign supreme in the portable
media player market with nearly two-hundred-million iPods sold since the introduction of the device
on October 23, 2001.
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