Read more about the origins of the storytelling tradition and decide the best title for each paragraph.

Once Upon a Time ...

1   It's how all good stories start - "Once upon a time ...", and then we're off into a world of witches, wizards, princesses, castles, stepmothers and fairies.  It's something that's familiar to people all over the world - storytelling is one of the oldest of human activities, and one that is shared by all cultures across the globe.  In many cultures, one person in a village is often recognised as being the 'storyteller'.  But why do people tell stories, and where do they start?

2   Anthropologists say that telling stories is a way of both interpreting and explaining the world around us, a view that is shared by many psychologists.  Indeed, psychologists from Freud to Jung have tried to interpret the symbols in stories.  Other experts talk about stories in terms of the value of play:  In the same way as children will play with any object they find, stories are about playing with language and reality.  Many modern theorists have tried to look at the social reality of fairytales - in the early modern age, for example, death in childbirth was quite common, so many men remarried, and therefore stepmothers like Cinderella's (often not friendly towards someone else's children!) were a very common social phenomenon.

3   For many centuries, stories belonged to an entirely oral tradition; they were told to children by parents, changing slightly from generation to generation, but they were never written down or recorded.  Most of the traditional stories we know in the West today were collected either by the Italian Gianbattista Basile (who wrote down the earliest versions of 'Cinderella' and 'Rapunzel'), Charles Perrault (who published the first book called 'Mother Goose' in France in 1697) or the Brothers Grimm from Germany (responsible for 'Snow White' - although their version is much more cruel and violent than the Disney film!)

4   So why have these stories apparently now become something just for children?  Some say that our need to tell and listen to stories has not disappeared, but changed.  Modern versions of myths, legends and folktales live on in the success of superheroes like Batman, Spiderman or the Incredible Hulk, while storytelling has moved over into 'urban legends', jokes and emails that now circulate in the way that oral stories used to, being passed from one person to another - making it clear that the internet really is the new global village.

Now practise using some of the words you have seen.