Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 36 to 42.
Writing is arguably the most important invention in human history. The opportunity for human knowledge to build on other knowledge is severely limited without the medium of writing. Not only does writing allow a permanence to human thought but also a complexity and scope to human expression that seem barely possible without it.
The earliest known artifacts that could be considered writing by the loosest definition are the famous and extraordinarily beautiful 20,000-year-old "cave paintings" in southern France and northern Spain. The pictures, mostly of animals but with some human figures, possibly tell some sort of story or may merely be pictures with expressive, magical, or religious purpose. Other assorted pictures have been found antedating the rise of the great civilizations of the Near East, but the earliest artifacts that are clearly writing date from about only 5,500 years ago inMesopotamia.
The earliest system of writing is usually attributed to the Sumerians of Mesopotamia during the end of the fourth millennium b.c. There, officials of such Sumerian city-states as Uruk had developed a system of recording numerals, pictographs, and ideographs on specially prepared clay surfaces.
Although the clay blanks used by the Uruk scribes are universally referred to as tablets, a word with the connotation of flatness, they are actually convex. Individual characters were inscribed in the clay by means of a stylus made of wood, bone, or ivory, with one end blunt and the other pointed. The characters were basically of two kinds. Numerical signs were impressed into the clay; all other signs, pictographs, and ideographs alike, were incised with the pointed end of the stylus. The repertory of characters used by the Uruk scribes was large; it is estimated at no fewer than 1,500 separate signs.
The word "incised" in is closest in meaning to.........................
A.painted
B.cut
C.erased
D.embroidered
Writing is arguably the most important invention in human history. The opportunity for human knowledge to build on other knowledge is severely limited without the medium of writing. Not only does writing allow a permanence to human thought but also a complexity and scope to human expression that seem barely possible without it.
The earliest known artifacts that could be considered writing by the loosest definition are the famous and extraordinarily beautiful 20,000-year-old "cave paintings" in southern France and northern Spain. The pictures, mostly of animals but with some human figures, possibly tell some sort of story or may merely be pictures with expressive, magical, or religious purpose. Other assorted pictures have been found antedating the rise of the great civilizations of the Near East, but the earliest artifacts that are clearly writing date from about only 5,500 years ago inMesopotamia.
The earliest system of writing is usually attributed to the Sumerians of Mesopotamia during the end of the fourth millennium b.c. There, officials of such Sumerian city-states as Uruk had developed a system of recording numerals, pictographs, and ideographs on specially prepared clay surfaces.
Although the clay blanks used by the Uruk scribes are universally referred to as tablets, a word with the connotation of flatness, they are actually convex. Individual characters were inscribed in the clay by means of a stylus made of wood, bone, or ivory, with one end blunt and the other pointed. The characters were basically of two kinds. Numerical signs were impressed into the clay; all other signs, pictographs, and ideographs alike, were incised with the pointed end of the stylus. The repertory of characters used by the Uruk scribes was large; it is estimated at no fewer than 1,500 separate signs.
The word "incised" in is closest in meaning to.........................
A.painted
B.cut
C.erased
D.embroidered
Loga
Hóa Học lớp 12
