Worksheet (Week 13) SVIP

Choose the word that has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.

Choose the correct answer to complete the sentences.

Read the text and choose the correct answer.

HISTORY OF POTATO CHIPS

As a world food, potatoes are second in human consumption only to rice. And as thin, salted, crisp chips, they are America's favorite snack food. Potato chips originated as the result not of a sudden stroke of the culinary invention but of interest.

In the summer of 1853, native American George Crum was employed as a chef at an elegant resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. On Moon Lake Lodge's restaurant menu were French-fried potatoes, prepared by Crum in the standard, thick-cut French style popularized in 1700s France and enjoyed by Thomas Jefferson as ambassador to France. Ever since Jefferson brought the recipe to America and served French fries to guests at Monticello, the dish was popular.

At Moon Lake Lodge, one dinner guest found chef Crum's French fries too thick for his liking and rejected the order. Crum cut and fried a thinner batch, but these, too, met with disapproval. Exasperated, Crum decided to make the guest angry by producing French fries too thin and crisp to use with a fork. However, the guest was delighted with the fries, and other diners requested Crum's potato chips which began to appear on the menu as Saratoga Chips.

The idea of making them as a food item for sale in grocery stores came to many people at around the same time, but perhaps the first was William Tapperdon of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1895. He began making chips in his kitchen and delivering them to neighborhood stores but later converted a barn behind his house into one of the first potato chip factories in the country.

At that time, potatoes were peeled and sliced by hand. The invention of the mechanical potato peeler in the 1920s paved the way for potato chips to increase from a small item to a top-selling snack food.