News Exercise #66

Christmas crackers are an important part of the traditional British Christmas dinner. Before eating, everyone holds one end of a cracker in each hand, in a ring around the table, and pulls the cracker open. Inside there is a small gift, a paper party hat, and a piece of paper with a joke written on it. Everyone takes turns in reading the joke before dinner starts.

Questions:
1) When did people start using Christmas crackers?
In the Vicrotian times, about 150 years ago.
2) How does the man whose house is visited describe himself?
He is perhaps the world’s only Christmas cracker historian.
3) At 0:54 the reporter explains the difference between modern crackers and these vintage crackers. What is the difference (my introduction above will give you a hint)?
At first, they contained brief love poems or sayings, but now they contain ‘corny’ jokes.
4) at 1:00 he mentions ‘eye-rolling’. What does it mean, and why is it part of the  modern Christmas cracker experience?
He said that the corny jokes are the subject of so much eye-rolling at the Christmas dinner table now. By this he means that because the jokes are ‘corny’, people raise their eyes as a sign of how the jokes are corny, rather than funny.
5) How many crackers does International Greetings produce?
They make more than seventy million (70,000,000) crackers a year.
6) Why are the crackers that the lady is describing so special?
Those crackers are supplied to The Queen.