Dala Horse: The Symbol of Sweden

While    1    (wander) around a Swedish Christmas market, you’ll likely come across booths selling carved wooden horses, typically painted in bright colors and beautiful patterns. These traditional Swedish toys are more than a classic holiday gift    2    a travel souvenir: the Dala horse has become intertwined (交织) with    3    very image of Sweden itself.

The little wooden horses of Sweden were    4    (original) carved by men that worked in the forests during the winter. When they returned    5    their villages, they gave the horses to children as playthings. This was in the 17th century    6    the horses were also sold at market in small towns and villages. The horses were painted in bright colors that    7    (inspire) by the furniture in the region. Finally, even young children learned to carve wooden horses.

The    8    (globe) attention didn’t come until the 20th century in the 1939 New York World’s Fair. That was because an enormous Dala horse was placed outside the Swedish pavilion, which caused excitement throughout the    9    (crowd) of visitors. After this, the Dala horses were regarded as a symbol of Sweden and mass production of the horses    10    (start). Since then, Dala horses have been popular souvenirs.

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.

8 . 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.

10 . For late 19th-century North Americans and Europeans, a display of tableware (餐具)could reveal much about someone’s social position, as the wealthy took great care to get different kinds of forks for everything. Before the 18th century, people of all classes usually ate with a knife and a spoon.

The fork’s path to the table was hard-won and slow. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, forks were used for slicing food into pieces or lifting meat from a pot or fire.

Following a reduction in size, the fork appeared to have entered dining areas in the courts of the Middle East and Byzantine Empire by the eighth and ninth centuries, and became common among wealthy families there by the tenth century. Early in the 11th century, it appeared in various pieces of European art. In the late 11th century, St.Peter Damian from Ostia wrote about a Byzantine princess who used forks and regarded her dying of a disease as punishment for such “luxury”.

The fork’s slow conquest of Europe was carried out from Italy. Motivated by the same concerns for hygiene(卫生)，forks were bought by wealthy Britons，inspired by Queen Victoria, who regarded fork use as a sign of good manners.

The fork’s introduction to North America dates back to 1633, when John Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was gifted a set of forks. The Industrial Revolution strengthened the fork’s presence on dining room tables as production of flatware became less expensive. Writing in 1896 inSocial Eriquere，Maud C. Cooke declared the fork had finally conquered the knife in America and “any attempt to give the knife importance at table is looked upon as an offense(冒犯)against good taste.”