The Silk Road was a network of ancient trade routes,
2 . Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms.
When Mogao Caves was uncovered in 1900, an aging drawing was lifted from a trove of religious manuscripts. The drawing illustrates a mnemonic (助记符号) system, a way of projecting knowledge onto the hands so it can be studied, memorized, and stored in a pocket. Around the same time this mnemonic was made, a monk named Bede halfway around the world was developing a different system of manual knowledge. These two systems are perhaps the earliest examples of manual mnemonics.
Beginning roughly twelve hundred years ago, we started using the hand itself as a portable (便携的) place of knowledge, a place to store whatever tended to slip our mental grasp. The hand became an all-purpose memory machine.
In different times and places, hands provided mnemonic maps of sound. As early as the thirteenth century, Chinese scholars were projecting syllable charts (音节图表) onto the palms and fingers. The so-called “Guidonian hand” owes its name to the eleventh-century Italian music teacher, Guido d’Arezzo. Arranging the different pitches in a scale onto the joints, he developed this technique to help students learn “unheard melody most easily and correctly”. Other thinkers in Europe, perhaps inspired by Guido, developed systems for learning the sounds of language.
Then questions arise. First, what makes the hand so popular as a mnemonic prop? A large part of the answer, surely, involves portability. The hands are always, well, ready to hand. A further advantage stems from how hand mnemonics offer both visual and kinesthetic (动觉的) routes to memory: They are both seen and felt.
It’s also hard to determine when and why hand mnemonics faded out. Hand mnemonics are still used to teach the “right-hand rule” in physics classrooms and remain especially popular in medicine. Today, we increasingly store our “thoughts” in virtual realms (领域), but we sometimes still reach for that original “digital” repository (存储库) in our pockets.
1. What do we learn about the two earliest examples of mnemonics?| A．Bede made a hand mnemonic in Mogao Caves. |
| B．They are the same system of manual knowledge. |
| C．The drawing was uncovered on the fingers and palms. |
| D．The drawing from Mogao Caves illustrates a mnemonic system. |
| A．Human hands mapped sound charts. |
| B．Human hands played a role in sound mnemonics. |
| C．Guido helped his students learn unheard melody. |
| D．Scholars projected syllable charts onto the palms and fingers. |
| A．The hand is always available for use. |
| B．The hand can feel what people memorize. |
| C．Fingers can easily be marked with characters. |
| D．Hand mnemonics help memorize visible things. |
| A．Positive. | B．Pessimistic. | C．Uncertain. | D．Indifferent. |
3 . That dinosaurs ate the mammals (哺乳动物) that ran beneath their feet is not in doubt. Now an extraordinary fossil newly described in Scientific Reports, unearthed by a team led by Gang Han at Hainan Vocational University of Science and Technology in China, shows that sometimes the tables were turned.
The fossil -dated to about 125 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period-was formed when a flow of boiling volcanic mud swallowed two animals seemingly locked in a life-and-death fight. The one on top is a mammal. This animal is a herbivorous species closely related to the Triceratops (三角恐龙). Animal interactions such as this are exceptionally cam e in the fossil record.
One possibility is that the mammal was eating something already dead, other than hunting live prey. These days it is uncommon for small mammals to attack much larger animals. But it is not unheard of. And Dr. Han and his colleagues point out that those mammals which eat dead bodies typically leave tooth marks all over the bones of the animals. The dinosaur’s remains show no such marks. There is also a chance the fossil could be a fake. More and more convincing fake s have emerged, as this one did -though Dr. Han and his colleagues argue that the complexly connected nature of the skeletons (骨骼) makes that unlikely, too.
Assuming it is genuine, the discovery serves as a reminder that not all dinosaurs were enormous during the Cretaceous and not all mammals were tiny. From nose to tail, the dinosaur is just 1.2 meters long. The mammal is a bit under half a meter in length. Despite being half the size, the mammal has one paw firmly wrapped around one of its prey’s limbs, and another pulling on its jaw. It is biting down on the dinosaur’s chest, and has ripped off two of its ribs. Before they were interrupted, it seems that the mammal was winning.
1. Which idiom is closest in meaning to underlined part “the tables were turned” in paragraph 1?| A．The fittest survives. | B．The hunters become hunted. |
| C．Fortune always favors the brave. | D．The truth will always come to light. |
| A．To prove the fossil was fake. | B．To show the forming of the fossil. |
| C．To illustrate the process of hunting. | D．To suggest the dinosaur was hunted alive. |
| A．The size of the fossil. | B．The absence of fake fossils. |
| C．The complexity of the skeletons. | D．The consistency of the opinions. |
| A．It offers a cause. | B．It highlights a solution. |
| C．It justifies the conclusion. | D．It provides a new discovery. |
Harvard is older than the United States. In the early 1630s some settlers (定居者) suggested that a university
Thus (因此), it was established (成立) in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Like many other
In 1638, John Harvard, a pastor of Charlestown, passed away. He left his library and half his estate to the institution,
Like other world -famous universities, Harvard also has many colleges and Harvard Business School is one of them. There is
Hangzhou is recognized as the “City of Well-Being” in China. Hangzhou made its name
The lifestyle, however, was laid down by two historical men of letters. One was Bai Juyi,
Surely, Hangzhou will be even
In AD79, the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, in southern Italy,
Researchers Danilo Campanaro and Giacomo Landeschi, from Lund University in Sweden, used data collected by drones (无人机) flying
During China’s dynastic period, emperors planned the city of Beijing
In the Ming Dynasty, the center was the Forbidden City,
Hutongs represent an important cultural element of the city of Beijing. Thanks to Beijing’s long history
8 . Figure skating, speed skating, and ice hockey can all trace their beginnings to early civilizations that fastened animal bones to their feet to skate on ice, according to A Dictionary of British History. Bone runners found in Switzerland date as far back as 3000 B.C. and there is also evidence of ice skating in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages.
Modern skating likely got its start in the Netherlands, where it was considered a national recreation in the early 17th century, when nobles skated on frozen canals for fun. Wealthy Europeans picked up the sport while visiting the Netherlands, and British royals soon brought skating back to England in the late 1600s. When the Thames froze over in 1683, skating was among the many recreations at London’s famous winter fair on the ice, which King Charles II attended.
At the end of the 18th century, American ballet dancer Jackson Haines transformed the sport into what is now known as figure skating by introducing elements of ballet to the ice. According to the Dictionary of American History, Haines skated in bear and ballet costumes and toured with exhibitions across Europe, where he was most admired in Vienna, Austria.
Ice skating evolved into other sports, including speed skating and ice hockey. Speed skating has been around as early as Dutch people dared to race on their skates, but hockey developed in 19th century Canada as an icy version of field hockey. Both were well-established by the 1900s, so they were on the list in the first Winter Olympics.
Since the 1900s, different ice skating clubs have been founded around the Western world. As interest grew, the clubs’ membership increased over the next 50 years. By the end of 20thcentury, ice skating was so widespread that it was one of the few recreations enjoyed by almost every westerner.
1. Which of the following is the oldest sport according to the text?| A．Ice hockey. | B．Speed skating. | C．Bone running. | D．Figure skating. |
| A．British royals. | B．Jackson Haines. | C．Dutch people. | D．King Charles II. |
| A．In order of importance. | B．In order of place. |
| C．In order of time. | D．In order of frequency. |
| A．How ice skating came into spotlight. |
| B．How ice skating became well-received. |
| C．Why ice skating is famous in the world. |
| D．Why ice skating enters Winter Olympics. |
9 . Imagine an albatross (信天翁) with a hacksaw for a mouth. Set that strange creature about 50 million years in the past and you’ve got the image of a pelagornithid, a group of ancient birds that included some of the largest flying birds of all time.
Now paleontologists (古生物学家) have uncovered in that group what may be the largest known flying birds ever, with wingspans of roughly six meters. By comparing a pair of polar fossils ( 化 石 ) to the remains of related birds, paleontologists have been able to identify the early history of huge fliers that were some of the first birds capable of flying across seas.
During the 1980s, University of California Berkeley paleontologist Peter Kloess says, scientists searching for Antarctic fossils found some delicate bird bones — a jaw and part of a foot from an ancient bird. Those bones made a long journey to California, and Kloess and his colleagues have researched them recently
The bird jaw, which came from a rock formation laid down over 37 million years ago, looks almost like a woodcutting tool rather than a bone. The jaw has a series of large and small spikes (尖刺), outgrowths of the beak (鸟喙) that are similar to teeth. Because of that feature, the paleontologists immediately identified the jaw as belonging to a pelagornithid, also known as bony-toothed birds that have a very long fossil record. The oldest pelagornithids evolved about 56 million years ago, and the most recent flew through the skies about two million years ago.
The foot bone came from another large Antarctic pelagornithid, but its real importance was in its age. The fossil was found in a rock layer in the La Meseta Formation, about 50 million years old. This falls within a time called the Eocene, when life had recovered from the asteroid-induced mass extinction and was thriving again. Together, the foot bone and the jaw indicate that large bony-toothed birds thrived in the Antarctic for millions of years.
Paleontologists have found bony-toothed birds from places all over the world, from New Zealand to South Carolina. The newly-described Antarctic fossils, though, are the oldest known and hint that these birds quickly diversified into a range of sizes within six million years of their origin. Previous studies have calculated that the largest of the bony-toothed birds could be near the limit of how big a bird could get and still fly, meaning these birds are the strongest competitors for the largest flying birds to ever fly.
Matched with the new data on the age of the fossils, Kloess says, “we can say that giant pelagornithids appeared earlier than previously known and that Antarctica saw a range of pelagornithid sizes from the early to late Eocene.” Small to large, bony-toothed birds were an important part of ancient Antarctic ecosystems.
Those impressive wings would have allowed the pelagornithids to range far and wide, flying long distances on outstretched wings. That helps explain why fossils from various species of pelagornithids have been found all over the world during their extended evolutionary period.
1. Why does the author mention the albatross in Paragraph 1?| A．To show its long evolutionary process. |
| B．To help readers imagine an ancient bird. |
| C．To compare it with a strange ancient bird. |
| D．To show its relationship with an ancient bird. |
| A．Its special location. | B．Its unique appearance. |
| C．Its living environment. | D．Its extremely large size. |
| A．They all had a very short lifespan. |
| B．They all faced considerable threats. |
| C．They developed many survival skills. |
| D．They evolved into various bird species. |
| A．A recent research into Antarctic fossils. |
| B．A brief introduction to rare bird species. |
| C．The discovery of the largest flying birds. |
| D．The origin of ancient bony-toothed birds. |
More than 500 pieces of relics (遗物)
The relics, discovered at the six new sacrificial pits of the ruins, include golden masks, jade and ivory artifacts and bronze wares
The new finds bring the total number of items discovered at Sanxingdui to nearly 2,000
“The new discoveries demonstrate once again that imagination and
Tang added that the excavation of the new pits has entered a critical stage,
Originally discovered in the late 1920s, the Sanxingdui Ruins have been referred to as one of the world’s greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century.
Located in the city of Guanghan, around 60 km from the provincial capital Chengdu, the ruins covering
