1 . People all around the world have enjoyed noodles for thousands of years.     1     People first started growing wheat and making flour in the Middle East around 10,000 years ago. But no one had ever found a prehistoric noodle —until 2002.

Archaeologists discovered an upside-down clay bowl in the ruins of an ancient Chinese village.     2     This “mummy” noodle was made from millet. Traders brought wheat to China about the time this ancient noodle was cooked.

Some people claim that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy. The tale says that when he visited China, he tried noodles for the first time and liked them so much that he took the recipe home.     3     In fact, it was likely made up by an American magazine to try to get Americans to eat more pasta.

    4     The oldest written mention of pasta outside China comes from the Middle East, about 1,600 years ago. The text describes how to eat dried noodles, a popular travel food in the Middle East and Central Asia. Dried noodles were perfect for long trips.     5     Some historians believe that dried noodles spread out from the Middle East or Central Asia. Traders packed their noodles and travelled to other parts of the world. Wherever they got the recipe, Italians were eating pasta long before Marco Polo.

So who REALLY invented noodles? We may never know—the history of noodles is as twisted as a bowl of spaghetti. But whoever invented them, we’re sure glad they did!

A great number of artifacts from eight tombs    1     (unearth) from an archaeological site in Hunan province several months ago. According to the provincial institute of heritage and archaeology, these artifacts, including pottery pieces and bronze    2     (knife), are believed    3     (date) back as early as the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220).

Six Eastern Han Dynasty tombs are brick tombs, three of    4     might have had owners from the same family, said Chen Bin,     5     member of the archaeological team of the tomb complex under the institute.

It is also the first time that archaeologists    6    (discover)a trench(战壕)4.5meters west of the back chamber of the largest tomb,     7     (measure) about 0.9 meters in width,     8     (approximate)15 meters in length and about 0.1 meters in depth.

“This excavation(挖掘)is    9     great significance to further understanding the funeral customs of people in southern Hunan, as well as the levels of    10     (economy)development and cultural exchanges during the period,” Chen said.

URUMQI-After packing some naan bread and    1     dented water bottle, Shan Zhizheng and his wife start up their motorcycle and head off to a cultural relic site,     2     (break) the silence that envelops the valley.

It’s a round trip of around 150 kilometers and    3     (they) starting point is the pastoral and farming landscape of Wenquan county in Bortala,Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region(维吾尔自治区).

    4     (know) as “a museum without walls”, Wenquan county is home to nearly 260 cultural relic sites under    5     (variety) levels of protection, including tombs, cliff paintings and    6     (ruin),    7     provide materials for researching the history of ancient northern nomads and tribes, according to the county cultural relic protection bureau.

Shan and his wife, Yuan Qin, are responsible for protecting one particular relic site that    8     (cover) about eight square kilometers. Once a week, the couple patrols more than 200 ancient tombs dating back     9     between the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) and the Han Dynasty (202 BC-AD 220).

Their relic protection routine usually includes walking around the site to look for footprints and motorcycle tracks, keeping records of the tombs,     10     updating the local cultural relic authorities in a timely manner.

5 . A city in the jungle

In the summer of 1848, in Guatemala, a man called Ambrosio Tut went out into the jungle (丛林), as he did almost every day. Tut was a gum (树胶) collector, looking for gum in the jungle.     1     One day, he got to the top of one tree and something caught his eyes. He looked out across the trees and saw the tops of some old buildings.

    2     He ran to tell the local governor excitedly, and together they walked into the jungle. There they found Tikal, the city that the Mayans had built, many hundreds of years before. The two men saw pyramids (金字塔), squares and houses.

For a long time before that day, local people had known that somewhere in the jungle there was an old Mayan city.     3     Between 200 and 900 AD, the city of Tikal had been the centre of Mayan civilisation (文明) in the area, but then the Mayans left it—nobody knows why! After 1000 AD, the jungle began to cover it.     4    

Seven years before Tut found Tikal, two British explorers had gone to Guatemala and had written a report about Mayan treasures in the jungle—but they hadn’t mentioned Tikal. Even earlier than this, local Indians had told people about a great city hidden in the trees, but no one had listened to them.     5     Now the lost city had been found again, and people went there immediately to see it.

Archaeologists have excavated (挖掘) the ruins of a house       1    (date) back more than 5,000 years in the Yangshao village site in Henan Province.

The house       2    (be) once a large building that might have covered more than 130 square meters.     3     is believed that it belongs to the late Yangshao Culture period, says Li Shiwei from Henan Provincial Institute of Archaeology.

“This is the first time that large house ruins       4    (discover) since the excavation of the Yangshao village site in 1921.” Li said.

Archaeologists also unearthed a large number of       5    (culture) relics at the site. It is of great       6    (significant) for studying the development of civilization in the Yellow River basin during the prehistoric period.

In 1921, the first excavation on the Yangshao village site,     7     is in Mianchi County, Henan Province, marked the birth of modern-Chinese archaeology.

Originating from the Yellow River, the Yangshao Culture is considered as       8     important stream of Chinese civilization and is       9    (wide) known for its advanced pottery-making technology. The fourth archaeological excavation on the Yangshao village site began       10     Aug 22, 2020, and is still in progress.

7 . Imagine this: You’re digging a well, and instead of hitting water, you unearth a headless human body made of pottery. This actually happened to farmers in Shanxi province in central China in 1974. Local archaeologists heard of the find and biked over to investigate. They realized that the figure had come from a tomb built over 2,000 years ago for China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang. Archaeologists finally discovered three separate pits (穴) filled with 8,000 life-sized statues, all made from terracotta — a type of fired clay.

About a mile away from these pits, there’s a large mound (山丘). Archaeologists know that this is the main part of Qin Shihuang’s tomb, but they have never looked inside. They have left it alone out of respect for the first emperor and to protect the tomb as it is.

“Many people wish to see the treasures and mysteries inside, but we cannot,” says Xiuzhen Li, an archaeologist. Opening the tomb could damage its contents. Someday, Li hopes, we’ll have technology that will let us see inside the main part of the tomb without opening and disturbing it.

“Probably in the near future we’ll have some new technology that can see inside like an x-ray,” she says. Scientists are working on techniques that make it possible to see underground. Another idea is that a tiny robot could enter through a small hole and capture videos of what it sees. Even if this robotic exploration is done very carefully, however, it would still damage the tomb. For now, the Chinese government prefers to wait to do anything until they have even better technology.