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托福official39阅读第1篇Early Writing Systems题目解析

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Early Writing Systems
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Scholars agree that writing originated somewhere in the Middle East, probably Mesopotamia, around the fourth millennium B.C.E. It is from the great libraries and word-hoards of these ancient lands that the first texts emerged. They were written on damp clay tablets with a wedged (or V-shaped) stick; since the Latin word for wedge is cunea, the texts are called cuneiform. The clay tablets usually were not fired; sun drying was probably reckoned enough to preserve the text for as long as it was being used. Fortunately, however, many tablets survived because they were accidentally fired when the buildings they were stored in burned.

Cuneiform writing lasted for some 3,000 years, in a vast line of succession that ran through Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Nineveh, and Babylon, and preserved for us fifteen languages in an area represented by modern-day Iraq, Syria, and western Iran. The oldest cuneiform texts recorded the transactions of tax collectors and merchants, the receipts and bills of sale of an urban society. They had to do with things like grain, goats, and real estate. Later, Babylonian scribes recorded the laws and kept other kinds of records. Knowledge conferred power. As a result, the scribes were assigned their own goddess, Nisaba, later replaced by the god Nabu of Borsippa, whose symbol is neither weapon nor dragon but something far more fearsome, the cuneiform stick.

Cuneiform texts on science, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics abound, some offering astoundingly precise data. One tablet records the speed of the Moon over 248 days; another documents an early sighting of Halley's Comet, from September 22 to September 28, 164 B.C.E. More esoteric texts attempt to explain old Babylonian customs, such as the procedure for curing someone who is ill, which included rubbing tar and gypsum on the sick person's door and drawing a design at the foot of the person's bed. What is clear from the vast body of texts (some 20,000 tablets were found in King Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh) is that scribes took pride in their writing and knowledge.

The foremost cuneiform text, the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, deals with humankind's attempts to conquer time. In it, Gilgamesh, king and warrior, is crushed by the death of his best friend and so sets out on adventures that prefigure mythical heroes of ancient Greek legends such as Hercules. His goal is not just to survive his ordeals but to make sense of this life. Remarkably, versions of Gilgamesh span 1,500 years, between 2100 B.C.E and 600 B.C.E., making the story the epic of an entire civilization.

The ancient Egyptians invented a different way of writing and a new substance to write on - papyrus, a precursor of paper, made from a wetland plant. The Greeks had a special name for this writing: hieroglyphic, literally "sacred writing". This, they thought, was language fit for the gods, which explains why it was carved on walls of pyramids and other religious structures. Perhaps hieroglyphics are Egypt's great contribution to the history of writing: hieroglyphic wiring, in use from 3100 B.C.E. until 394 C.E., resulted in the creation of texts that were fine art as well as communication. Egypt gave us the tradition of the scribe not just as educated person but as artist and calligrapher.

Scholars have detected some 6,000 separate hieroglyphic characters in use over the history of Egyptian writing, but it appears that never more than a thousand were in use during any one period. It still seems a lot to recall, but what was lost in efficiency was more than made up for in the beauty and richness of the texts. Writing was meant to impress the eye with the vastness of creating itself. Each symbol or glyph - the flowering reed (pronounced like V), the owl ("m"), the quail chick ("w"), etcetera - was a tiny work of art. Manuscripts were compiled with an eye to the overall design. Egyptologists have noticed that the glyphs that constitute individual words were sometimes shuffled to make the text more pleasing to the eye with little regard for sound or sense.

1.Paragraph 1 supports which of the following ideas about the method of preserving cuneiform texts by sun drying them?

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【题目翻译】第1段支持以下关于通过晒干保存楔形文字的方法的哪些观点? A:对于正在使用的文本来说,这是不必要的。 B:是意外发现的。 C:它是用于图书馆的文本,而不是其他文本。 D:它并没有为文本提供足够的保护,使其能够生存到现代。 【判定题型】:题目问的是文章中的具体细节信息,故根据题目问法可以判断本题为事实信息题。 【关键词定位】本题根据题干给出的关键词preserve和sun drying定位到这两句:sun drying was probably reckoned enough to preserve the text for as long as it was being used. 和 Fortunately, however, many tablets survived because they were accidentally fired when the buildings they were stored in burned. 意思是“太阳晒干可能被认为足够长时间保存文字使用。幸运的是,许多平板电脑幸存下来,因为它们被存放在被烧毁的建筑物中时被意外地烧掉了”。 【逻辑分析】这两句的大意是:在当时人们认为仅仅依靠太阳晒干是可以保存楔形文字的泥板的,但是以后的楔形文字之所以会幸存下来,是因为它们无意间随着储存它们的建筑被烧过了。所以仅仅依靠阳光晒干并不足以保存这些文字。 【选项分析】 A.选项A说这种办法不需要。 B.选项B说这种办法是偶然间发现的。 C.选项C说这种办法只被用在图书馆保存的文字上,都没有在原文中找到依据。 D.选项D符合题意。

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