B. Read the text and answer the questions!Alfred Nobel
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born on October 21st, 1833, in Stockholm, Sweden, the fourth
of Immanuel and Caroline Nobel's eight children. Alfred was often sickly as a child, but he was
always lively and curious about the world around him. Although he was a skilled engineer and
ready inventor, Alfred's father struggled to set up a profitable business in Sweden. When Alfred
was 4, his father moved St. Petersburg, Russia, to take a job manufacturing explosives. The family
followed him in 1842. Alfred's newly affluent parents sent him to private tutors in Russia, and he
quickly mastered chemistry and became fluent in English, French, German and Russian as well
as his native language, Swedish.
Alfred left Russia at the age of 18. After spending a year in Paris studying chemistry, he moved
to the United States. After five years, he returned to Russia and began working in his father's
factory making military equipment for the Crimean War. In 1859, at the war's end, the company
went bankrupt. The family moved back to Sweden, and Alfred soon began experimenting with
explosives. In 1864, when Alfred was 29, a huge explosion in the family's Swedish factory killed
five people, including Alfred's younger brother Emil. Dramatically affected by the event, Nobel set
out to develop a safer explosive. In 1867, he patented a mixture of nitroglycerin and an absorbent
substance, producing what he named "Dynamite."