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3D Printing Script
Hi. Good morning everybody. How are you today? I hope you can hear me. I’m in a different room today and my voice kind of echoes. When I edit, I’ll try and use something to reduce the echo if I can. I hope you can hear it.
Anyway, as usual, don’t forget, after you watch this, if you go to my site, stevenaskew.com, you can download the script for this talk, and all of my other talks, and you can find some listening questions and sample answers as well. Please, try. The more you read, write, listen, and speak, the better your English will get. And, as always, these topics are things that I find interesting, but if you have anything you’d like me to research and talk about, please put it in the comments below here. I love learning about stuff so, anything you want, I’ll research.
OK, today we’re going to talk a little bit about 3D printing. Now, there are two types of 3D printing. Well, there are many types of 3D printing, but there are two basic types of 3D printing on the commercial market. The first one, the very basic type, is the layer system. Now, if I go and print something from a regular printer, a 2D printer, what it does is it puts a layer of ink onto the piece of paper. Now, 3D printing is exactly the same as that except on top of the first layer it puts a second layer. So, if I want to 3D print my head, for example, and who wouldn’t? Then what I basically do is I make a design of my head on a computer, and the design splits it up into thousands of layers, and it just prints layer on top of layer on top of layer. And, in the end, you get my head. I might do that later. Now, that type of printing is called additive manufacturing because it adds. The … of course the regular type of manufacturing, subtractive manufacturing, is what you do in factories where they plastic mold things, and that takes away, of course. We’ll talk about that a bit later. So, the basic type of 3D printing was invented in the 1980s. It’s come a long way since then, of course. Now you can buy a regular 3D printer and have it in your home. Now, the regular printer you use to print on paper uses ink, of course. A 3D printer can’t use ink. What it does is it uses something called a thermosetting polymer. Polymer is plastic. Thermosetting, thermo means heat, thermometer. So, what thermosetting polymers do is they’re liquid under heat and then when they cool down they go hard, and once they’ve hardened they don’t change their shape. So, you can use them very easily to print things. They become a liquid and then when they hit the air they cool, they harden. So, of course, when you want to make my head, that’s the kind of plastic you want. Now, a problem with this is it takes a very long time to print something. If you have ever printed a page … a colored page using a dot matrix printer, the old-style printer, it takes a long time to print one page. Now, imagine multiplying that by thousands. It takes a very long time to print my head.
There is a new style of 3D printing coming out called CLIP. C L I P. CLIP stands for continuous liquid interface production, a mouthful, I know. Now, that doesn’t use thermosetting polymers, that uses photopolymers. Photo means light. It comes from the Greek photos. Photograph, for example, graph means picture in Greek, so photograph is light picture. So, a photo polymer is a plastic that hardens in contact with light. Now, this makes printing very easy … very easy … much easier. What you do in a CLIP machine is, you have a pool at the bottom full of a liquid photopolymer. The bottom of the pool is transparent and underneath that you have a U.V. light. Then, between the polymer … the photopolymer and the U.V. light you have an oxygen permeable membrane. Now, this is where it gets very clever. Very very clever. What they do is they can move the molecules in the oxygen permeable membrane around. Now, an oxygen mole .. an oxygen molecule can stop, can reflect a U.V. light photon. So, what they do is, they have their design and they move the oxygen molecules around and where there is an oxygen molecule the U.V. light cannot penetrate. Where there is no oxygen molecule, where there is a space, the U.V. light comes through. So, by moving the oxygen molecules around, they can make very very complex shapes. And this is much faster, because basically the machine pulls the shape out of the liquid photopolymer pool and the oxygen molecules move around creating the design as it pulls it up, which is much much faster. It’s not just faster, it’s also much much stronger, because your basic 3D printer, your layered 3D printer, if you look at it under a microscope, of course, you have lots of layers. Now, if you look at it with the naked eye you can’t see that, but when you go in close up, these layers are very very visible. And where there is a layer, of course, there is a weakness. If you’re going to break something, it’s usually going to snap at a weak point, and where these layers are are weak points. The CLIP system doesn’t create layers because it prints … it molds continuously, so it’s much much stronger and it’s much much faster.
All right. 3D printing. What are the advantages of 3D printing over regular molding, for example? Well, the most obvious advantage is, of course, if you can draw it, you can print it. 3D printers can print almost any shape. Not almost, they can print any shape at all. So, if you can design it, a 3D printer can make it. And, of course, they can even create bone. If you C.T. scan a bone, let’s say you’ve got a missing part of your skull, if you can C.T. scan the skull you can print a piece that fits into that skull exactly. With regular molding you’re going to be close but not exact. With 3D printing and a C.T. scan you can actually make a piece that fits in exactly. So, if you can draw it, you can print it.
Of course, now, the second advantage is you don’t have to change the mold. If you want to make something, say, for example, this stapler. If you want to plastic mold a stapler what you do is you make a mold of it. You have your mold made of wood or resin or metal or whatever it is, and you stick it to your machine. Then, you have a piece of plastic across the top. You heat the plastic so it becomes soft and then you suck it down by creating a vacuum. That of course, makes this shape. If you want to make more pieces you have more molds, of course. Now, let’s say you want to go from making this stapler to this stick of glue, what do you do? Well, you have to, of course, change the mold. You have to stop the machine, you have to take the mold off, you have to put your new mold on and start again. With a 3D printer, what do you do? Well, you just change the design. You can print this and then you can print this. So, it’s much much easier. And of course there is less waste. When you’re making something like this, because it’s subtractive, which we talked about at the start, when you suck down your plastic, of course, if you have ten molds, you’re going to have spaces between the mold where the plastic is continuing. So, after you’ve finished you have to cut that plastic off, which is waste. I mean you could melt it and use it again but you’re always going to have some waste. With a 3D printer you don’t have that. It only prints plastic where the shape is, so there is no waste.
Now, of course, the biggest advantage with 3D printing is you can have a printer at home. You can print your own models and the price of printers is coming down day by day. Now, you can buy a printer for about a hundred dollars.
And the last advantage, well, really good advantage of course, is you can print things in space. How awesome is that? So, let’s say you’re an astronaut on the space station and suddenly there’s a problem. Your oxygen regenerator has stopped working. What do you do? You have to replace the part, you don’t have the part! Oh no! What do you do? Well, NASA sends you the designs, the blueprints, you plug them into your 3D printer. ZZZ ZZZ ZZZ You print the part. And you fix your oxygen machine. So, you can print things anywhere, which is extremely useful because now you can travel into space without carrying lots of spare parts, lots of replacements. All you need are the designs, the 3D printer and the inks, the plastics.
So, how do we use 3D printers these days? Well, they were invented in the 1980s of course. They became more common after about 2000. So, what do we have now? You can have 3D printed clothes, 3D printed shoes, you can 3D print parts of engines, you can 3D print whole cars. Airbus 3D printed an entire airplane. You can 3D print casts for your arm. If you break your arm, you don’t have to have the whole plaster cast, of course. You just need supports here and you can 3D print that. You can 3D print food, you can 3D print chocolate, you can 3D print bone parts, which I talked about earlier, a piece of your skull. You can 3D print human organs. There is a girl in America, I think, who was born without a nose and what they did is they 3D printed a layer of cells to put on, and the cells slowly grew and became a nose. They’ve 3D printed ears. They’ve actually 3D printed a human liver. In 2013, they made a human liver. I mean, it’s not ready to go into a human yet, but they can use it for drug trials and things like that. Human organs became possible in about 2003. And how it works is, this is really interesting, basically the same as with plastics except instead of printing ink it prints cells. So, it has a 3D matrix and it puts cells into that matrix. And of course, how are you made up? You’re just made up of basically cells, lots and lots of cells together. So, you can recreate something by recreating those cells. Now, the amazing thing is the possibilities of this are endless because, if you can 3D print human body parts, you can do it with that person’s cells. For example, they can take cells from me, they can clone them, and they could print me a liver. Well, in the near future, they will be able to print me a liver. Now, what is the good thing about that? Right now, if you have a liver transplant, or a heart transplant, or any kind of transplant, your body tries to reject it. Our bodies are set up so that we try and reject any foreign body inside them. That’s why when you get the influenza virus inside you, you get really sick, it’s your body trying to burn off that virus, kill that virus. When you have a liver inside you, your body is going into overdrive trying to get that liver, that foreign body, out of you. So, to stop that, for the rest of your life you have to take immunosuppressants. Those are drugs that suppress your immune system. The immune system is the part of you that tries to get rid of foreign bodies. If the new liver is made from your cells, you don’t need those, because your body doesn’t recognize it as a foreign object. It’s part of you. Isn’t that awesome? And of course, if we can print body parts, we don’t need donors. Right now, there is a huge shortage of kidney donors, liver donors, heart donors. There are more people waiting for them than there are people supplying them. And of course, if you want to supply a kidney you have two, you have one to spare, but if you want to supply, if you want to donate a liver, or a heart, you have to be dead. Which is quite sad. Obviously. So, if we can print body parts, if we can print human organs, the possibilities are incredible. Although, of course, we have to be careful that it doesn’t become body parts for the rich, because we have to make it fair, we have to make it affordable for everybody. Because if only rich people can afford these new human organs then that’s not a fair system.
Let’s look at a couple of problems associated with 3D printing. Well, of course forgery is a big one. Right now, you have a lot of cases of forgery in the world. People can forge paintings, you can paint paintings, but an expert can tell it’s not the real thing. But, if you can scan, let’s say Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, if I can get access to it and if I can scan it using a 3D scanner, then I can recreate that picture exactly. Down to the splinters in the wooden frame, the labels on the back, the brush strokes. I can create that … I can recreate that almost exactly. And if that becomes possible, what happens then? How do we protect copyright?
And of course, the second thing’s in the news a lot recently. You can 3D Print guns of course. If you google it, you can find the blueprints for a 3D printed gun online. If you can make your own guns, how do we control them? Well, America doesn’t really try and control its guns anyway, so that doesn’t really matter but, if you can print a gun at will, what’s going to happen? So, there’s a couple of problems. However, the potential for 3D printing far outweighs the problems, in my mind. For example, we talked about human organs. That could be a huge lifesaver. But, what about being able to create food? If we can put human cells in a matrix, then of course, we can put animal cells in the same way. We can create our own meat. Just think about what that will do to the world. Right now, growing cows, what harm does it have to the Earth? Well, deforestation. We cut down the Brazilian rain forests to make pasture land. Global warming. The methane released from the cows, the cut down trees. The water waste. How much water does it cost to raise cows? And of course, the cruelty to animals. We raise these animals and then we kill them. If you can 3D print food, all that is gone.
And then of course, accessibility. Amazon has made shopping much more accessible. You now don’t have to leave your home. You can order, buy, and receive stuff without even leaving your home. Once you have a 3D printer, we may not even need shops anymore. You don’t have to go to the supermarket to buy your food, you print it. You don’t have to go out to town to buy your clothes, you just print them. And they would fit your body exactly because they would be made from scans of your body. They wouldn’t be rough, they wouldn’t give you blisters, your shoes wouldn’t hurt you, they would be exactly printed to your specifications. So, what would happen to shops? That’s an interesting question. Possibly shops would end up being online places that sell designs, that sell blueprints, and sell the inks, the plastics, the materials that are needed to do these things. That’s going to be very very interesting. Anyway, because technology is speeding up, because advances are coming much much faster, this 3D printing is going to take off big time very very soon. It’s very exciting and a little bit scary. I wonder what will happen. Anyway, thanks for watching. As always, don’t forget, go to my site. You can find the script for this and you can find some listening questions, you can practice writing, things like that. And if you like listening to English, if you like learning something in English, if you want to practice your listening skills more, if you want to improve your listening skills, then please don’t forget to subscribe. Anyway, thanks for listening. Talk to you next time. Bye.
3D Printing Questions
- What is the main difference between additive and subtractive manufacturing?
A: Subtractive manufacturing is a way of designing for 3D printers.
B: Additive manufacturing is only ever used in factories.
C: Subtractive manufacturing is where you add plastic to shapes.
D: Additive manufacturing only puts material where it is needed.
- Which words go in these spaces? Thermo means ___ and photo means ___.
A: plastic – ink
B: heat – light
C: light – picture
D: Greek – English
- Why is a CLIP 3D printed object stronger than a layer printed one?
A: It doesn’t have weak points.
B: It prints much faster.
C: It uses a different kind of plastic.
D: It is more expensive.
- Which of these materials are factory molds not made of?
A: Ink
B: Resin
C: Wood
D: Metal
- What sucks the soft plastic down onto the mold in a regular factory manufacturing process?
A: A 3D printer
B: A stapler
C: A wooden mold
D: A vacuum
- What is the main advantage of having a 3D printer on a spaceship?
A: NASA can send you spare parts.
B: You can fix the oxygen regenerator if it breaks.
C: You don’t need to carry lots of replacement parts.
D: NASA can fix things that break for you.
- Why do people who have had a transplant have to take immunosuppressants?
A: To stop their new liver from bringing viruses into their body
B: To stop them having a fever
C: To stop the foreign bodies inside them attacking the organ
D: To stop their body trying to reject the organ
- Why is protecting copyright a problem?
A: Because it will be possible to make guns downloaded from the Internet
B: Because 3D printers can recreate anything
C: Because only rich people will be able to afford things like this
D: Because there is only one Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the world
- Which of these is not an environmental problem that printing food will fix?
A: Deforestation
B: Water waste
C: Cruelty to animals
D: Methane released into the atmosphere
- Why would clothes in the future be more comfortable?
A: Because you wouldn’t have to go into town to buy them
B: Because they would be available from all kinds of online shops
C: Because they would be made of more expensive materials
D: Because they would be printed to fit your body
- Match the sentences to the CLIP diagram.
- The liquid photopolymer hardens when the UV light hits it.
2. The oxygen molecules stop the UV light.
3. The UV light passes through the spaces between the oxygen molecules.
4. A UV light.
5. A transparent layer.
6. A pool of liquid photopolymer.
7. A layer of permeable oxygen molecules.
- Summarize the advantage of being able to print body parts using a person’s own cells.
- Steven says, “Although, of course, we have to be careful that it doesn’t become body parts for the rich, because we have to make it fair, we have to make it affordable for everybody. Because if only rich people can afford these new human organs then that’s not a fair system.”
i) What does he mean. ii) Do you think it will become a service for rich people? Write your reasons.
- Copyright is an outdated idea that won’t exist in the future. Do you agree or disagree? Write your reasons.
- Steven says that shops will not exist in the future. Do you agree? Write your reasons.
- Steven says that 3D printers will revolutionize the retail industry. Can you think of something else that has revolutionized an industry? Write about it?
3D Printing Answers
- D 2. B 3. A 4. A 5. D 6. C 7. D 8. B 9. C 10. D
- A:6 B:5 C:4 D:7 E:2 F:3 G:1
- Summarize the advantage of being able to print body parts using a person’s own cells.
The advantage will be that your body will not reject the transplanted organ. Currently, if somebody receives a donated organ, they have to take drugs to stop their immune system from rejecting the new organ. The purpose of our immune system is to fight off invading viruses, or things that are not part of our body. The immune system would see the transplanted organ as an invader and would fight it. This would make you very sick and would stop the liver from working. The drugs control your immune system, but they make it very easy for you to catch other diseases, because your immune system isn’t fighting. If an organ can be made of your own cells, your immune system would not see it as an invader and would not fight it. You wouldn’t need to take drugs and it would work.
Steven says, “Although, of course, we have to be careful that it doesn’t become body parts for the rich, because we have to make it fair, we have to make it affordable for everybody. Because if only rich people can afford these new human organs then that’s not a fair system.”
i) What does he mean. ii) Do you think it will become a service for rich people? Write your reasons.
i) Steven means that transplanting cultured organs might become a luxury just for the wealthy. It will (probably) not be a cheap service and health insurance might not cover it. You obviously have the price of growing the organ, but you also have the price of the surgery and the aftercare. If the price is not low enough, then rich people will be able to replace their organs and poor people will not.
ii) I think in the beginning it will be a service for wealthy people but, in a few years, or maybe a few decades, it will become affordable for everyone. In the beginning, when the service is new, it will be expensive. If you look at America, thanks in part to Trump, a large number of people cannot afford health care, or have only the most basic level of care. If you are poor and you get sick or injured, your chance of recovery is much smaller than that of someone who is wealthy. You barely have access to basic care, let alone brand new, expensive, experimental services. Poor people will not be able to afford printed organs. However, the price will come down. As with all technological innovations, in the beginning they are expensive but, over time, the price drops. Think about the vaccinations we take for granted now. Or basic surgery to fix a hernia. These would have been prohibitively expensive when they were first developed. So, in the beginning, yes, it will be a service for the wealthy, but the price will come down and printed organs will be affordable for all. And then, of course, we will have new social problems to deal with. What will we do when we can replace our organs at will? What effects will a much longer lifespan have on population and society?
- Copyright is an outdated idea that won’t exist in the future. Do you agree or disagree? Write your reasons.
Copyright exists to protect the interests of artists and designers. If you create something original, it is automatically yours. You can sell it, keep it, or do whatever you like with it. The rights to that thing are yours, and that is copyright. Copyright is incredibly hard to protect and enforce. Currently, a big problem in China is copyright infringement. Because there are no real penalties brought upon them, Chinese businesses produce a whole variety of products that are under copyright and sell them.
So, what happens when anyone can reproduce anything in the comfort of their own home? If I want a Mona Lisa, I can have one. Will artists stop producing? Will the price of things drop? Will the word “original” cease to have any meaning? Will artists become the people who design a blueprint? Let me try and answer each one of those questions.
Artists won’t stop producing. A true artist lives for their work. And, I think there will be ways for them to earn a living at what they do. Right now, you can buy a print of any artists work. You can buy a photo of an installation or of a statue. What if you could buy that installation. If the artists sold their work as downloadable objects that could be printed at home, I think they would find a large market. They would not be able to stop other people from passing the files around and printing them for free but, I think, most people would be honest and would buy from the artist.
Prices would come down. You wouldn’t pay so much for an original because there would no longer be just one of them. However, artists could make money by selling a large number of the same work rather than one original at a high price.
Yes, the word “original” would lose its meaning. There would no longer be only one of a work of art. Or perhaps artists would start working in mediums where there can only be one. Impermanent things. Smoke. Snow. Water.
I think 3D printing will change the way we think about things, but it doesn’t have to have only a negative outcome.
- Steven says that shops will not exist in the future. Do you agree? Write your reasons.
I do agree that we will not have shops in the future, but I don’t think that will be because of 3D printing. We are already moving from a bricks and mortar store to an online shop. If you think about the evolution of shops over the last hundred years, you can see that we are heading that way. In the early part of the 20th century, people would have gone to a local shop. There would have been a specialist for everything. A butcher, baker, grocer and so on. Then, in early 1930, the first supermarket was opened. They quickly too off and by the early 50s, most cities had some kind of supermarket. The supermarket caused the death of the small local store. They could not compete. People wanted low cost, they wanted bulk, and they wanted to be able to do all of their shopping at once. Local shops couldn’t compete. The next stage in the evolution was the move from the city center to out of town. Supermarkets gradually became more popular and they naturally grew bigger. The rent in the town center was too expensive and the obvious solution was to move out of town. This corresponded with a surge in car ownership. Once the supermarkets were out of town, their size was unlimited. They grew and became superstores. And they killed the supermarkets. The lower rent meant they could have lower prices. The larger space meant they could stock more. And so, the supermarkets died, and every city had its Walmarts. And then Amazon appeared. This was a new, totally unforeseen jump in the evolution. Now you could have things delivered to your house. And you could buy almost anything. Amazon doesn’t have buildings, so it has no rent, so its prices are lower than Walmart. It has no walls, so it is not limited in the stock it can carry and has more items than Walmart. And so, the superstores are dying. Well, what is the next step? If we can 3D print anything that we need at home then, yes, there would not be a need for even an Amazon. However, for that to happen, the 3D printing process must become a lot faster, and a lot cheaper. Even then, unless there is a serious improvement in the technology, people are not going to want to print everything. It would take too much time and be too much trouble. There will probably be a site like Amazon that will print anything that you want. They will have industrial 3D printers and materials. You will be able to send them a scan of your feet and they will send you a perfect pair of shoes. So, shops as we know them now will not exist. But, that is largely due to Amazon and not 3D printing.
- Steven says that 3D printers will revolutionize the retail industry. Can you think of something else that has revolutionized an industry? Write about it?
There are so many things to chose from. I would like to talk about the jet engine and the tourist industry. The invention of the train and the invention the car did a lot for tourism. People were able to leave the towns they were born in and have vacations in cites by the sea, or in the countryside. This had been the provision of the rich, but now the working classes could vacation, too. However, travel to another country was still too expensive and took too long for it to be feasible for the regular person. Then, during World War 2, a new type of plane engine was invented. This engine could push a plane at many times the speed of sound. These engines were stronger than propellers and meant planes could be bigger and carry more passengers, they were also faster, which meant people could visit another country in a few hours. The fact that they could carry more people and the fact that they were faster meant more people could fly on more planes and the price came down. This new world of affordable plane travel allowed a new generation of international tourists. Regular people could travel to places that only the wealthy had been able to see before.