托福阅读常考话题及练习题推荐八：苏美尔和埃及（3）

1 托福常考话题：苏美尔和埃及话题练习题

► Paragraph 5：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.

9. The word "document" in the passage is closest in meaning to

A. include

B. influence

C. organize

D. record

10. According to paragraph 5, writing was first used for

A. simple bookkeeping

B. descriptions of daily events

C. counting the contents of clay tablets

D. government reports

► Paragraph 6：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.

11. 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

12. 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

► Paragraph 4：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. [■]

13. Look at the four squares [■] that indicate where the following sentence could be added to the passage.

However, the Sumerian language did not entirely disappear.

Where would the sentence best fit? Click on a square [■] to add the sentence to the passage

14. Directions: An introductory sentence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by selecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage Some sentences do not belong in the summary because they express ideas that are not presented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points.

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The earliest examples of writing have been found in Mesopotamia and date to shortly before 3000 B.C.E.

Answer Choices

A. Writing was invented in the same areas in which civilization began by the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and the Mediterranean.

B. The development of cuneiform is known because it was written on a long-lasting material and because it was long and widely used throughout the ancient Near East.

C. Cuneiform tablets generally dealt with business and factual matters, but other topics, including literature, were also recorded and valued.

D. Writing was developed first by the Sumerians using wedge shaped marks (cuneiform) on clay tablets and then by the Egyptians using papyrus paper.

E. Scribes using cuneiform in Assyria, Babylon, Syria and Asia Minor had to learn all the languages that used the cuneiform script.

Batches of clay tablets, sometimes with as many as a thousand tablets each, are often found by archaeologists.