托福阅读真题Official 46 Passage 1（六）

托福阅读真题Official 46 Passage 1（六）

The Origin of Writing

It was in Egypt and Mesopotamia(modern-day Iraq)that civilization arose,and it is there that we find the earliest examples of that key feature of civilization,writing.These examples,in the form of inscribed clay tablets that date to shortly before 3000 B.C.E.,have been discovered among the archaeological remains of the Sumerians,a gifted people settled in southern Mesopotamia.

The Egyptians were not far behind in developing writing,but we cannot follow the history of their writing in detail because they used a perishable writing material.In ancient times the banks of the Nile were lined with papyrus plants,and from the papyrus reeds the Egyptians made a form of paper;it was excellent in quality but,like any paper,fragile.Mesopotamia’s rivers boasted no such useful reeds,but its land did provide good clay,and as a consequence the clay tablet became the standard material.Though clumsy and bulky it has a virtue dear to archaeologists:it is durable.Fire,for example,which is death to papyrus paper or other writing materials such as leather and wood,simply bakes it hard,thereby making it even more durable.So when a conqueror set a Mesopotamian palace ablaze,he helped ensure the survival of any clay tablets in it.Clay,moreover,is cheap,and forming it into tablets is easy,factors that helped the clay tablet become the preferred writing material not only throughout Mesopotamia but far outside it as well,in Syria,Asia Minor,Persia,and even for a while in Crete and Greece.Excavators have unearthed clay tablets in all these lands.In the Near East they remained in use for more than two and a half millennia,and in certain areas they lasted down to the beginning of the common era until finally yielding,once and for all,to more convenient alternatives.

The Sumerians perfected a style of writing suited to clay.This script consists of simple shapes,basically just wedge shapes and lines that could easily be incised in soft clay with a reed or wooden stylus;scholars have dubbed it cuneiform from the wedge-shaped marks(cunei in Latin)that are its hallmark.Although the ingredients are merely wedges and lines,there are hundreds of combinations of these basic forms that stand for different sounds or words.Learning these complex signs required long training and much practice;inevitably,literacy was largely limited to a small professional class,the scribes.

The Akkadians conquered the Sumerians around the middle of the third millennium B.C.E.,and they took over the various cuneiform signs used for writing Sumerian and gave them sound and word values that fit their own language.The Babylonians and Assyrians did the same,and so did peoples in Syria and Asia Minor.The literature of the Sumerians was treasured throughout the Near East,and long after Sumerian ceased to be spoken,the Babylonians and Assyrians and others kept it alive as a literary language,the way Europeans kept Latin alive after the fall of Rome.For the scribes of these non-Sumerian languages,training was doubly demanding since they had to know the values of the various cuneiform signs for Sumerian as well as for their own language.

The contents of the earliest clay tablets are simple notations of numbers of commodities—animals,jars,baskets,etc.Writing,it would appear,started as a primitive form of bookkeeping.Its use soon widened to document the multitudinous things and acts that are involved in daily life,from simple inventories of commodities to complicated governmental rules and regulations.

Archaeologists frequently find clay tablets in batches.The batches,some of which contain thousands of tablets,consist for the most part of documents of the types just mentioned:bills,deliveries,receipts,inventories,loans,marriage contracts,divorce settlements,court judgments,and so on.These records of factual matters were kept in storage to be available for reference—they were,in effect,files,or,to use the term preferred by specialists in the ancient Near East,archives.Now and then these files include pieces of writing that are of a distinctly different order,writings that do not merely record some matter of fact but involve creative intellectual activity.They range from simple textbook material to literature—and they make an appearance very early,even from the third millennium B.C.E.

Question 11 of 14

The phrase“Now and then”in the passage is closest in meaning to

A.always

B.occasionally

C.sooner or later

D.first and last

正确答案：B

题目详解

题型分类：词汇题

选项分析：

题干所考察的短语Now and then在原文充当状语成分来修饰include这个谓语动词，根据语境的含义Now and then these files include pieces of writing that are of a distinctly different order，即“在这些文件中，有时会出现一些顺讯完全不同的文稿”，Now and then在这个语境中的含义即为“有时，偶尔”。只有occasionally具有这个含义，答案为B选项。

A选项：always的意思是“总是”。

C选项：sooner or later的意思是“迟早”。

D选项：first and last的意思是“总的来说”。

Question 12 of 14

According to paragraph 6,large batches of clay writing tablets were stored because the tablets

A.were being produced quickly and in large quantities

B.did not serve any practical purpose for most Mesopotamians

C.contained information that needed to be available for future reference

D.could not be used again once they had been written on

正确答案：C

题目详解

题型分类：事实信息题

原文定位：题干中的largebatches，writing和stored均为关键的定位词，定位到第六段的第3句话。

选项分析：

These records of factual matters...是large batches of clay writing的同义替换，stored的同义替换词在原文中为kept，那么后半句话则为答案to be available for reference...，即“这些事实的记录目的是为日后而参考”。C选项正确，是原文的同义改写。

A选项和D选项均为无中生有，在原文中并没有就tables本身的使用做说明。

B选项则和原文中的表述相矛盾，这些tables是有很多实际意义的用途的。