雅思阅读 · How Writing Began

历史主题。题型：段落信息匹配 + 填空。难度：中等偏上（P2-3）。

正文 Passage

A. The first information technology

Writing is so much a part of daily life that it is hard to imagine a world without it. Yet for most of human history, people lived and died without ever seeing a written word. The earliest known writing systems emerged independently in at least three places: Mesopotamia around 3400 BCE, Egypt shortly after, and China by 1200 BCE. Each was invented not for literature or law, but for something far more practical: keeping accounts.

B. Clay tokens in Mesopotamia

The Sumerians of Mesopotamia — modern-day Iraq — began with a system of small clay tokens representing goods. A cone stood for a measure of grain, an egg-shaped token for a jar of oil. Over centuries, these tokens were sealed into clay envelopes, and eventually people began pressing the tokens into the wet clay to leave their mark on the outside. This was the first step toward symbols that stood for quantities rather than the objects themselves.

C. From counting to language

The breakthrough came when scribes realised that the same symbol could represent not just a count of sheep but the sound of the word "sheep". This shift — from logograms (symbols for things) to phonograms (symbols for sounds) — was as revolutionary as the move from pictures to alphabet. Once a symbol could stand for a sound, any word could be written down, and writing became a tool for law, literature and history, not merely for accounting.

D. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters

Egyptian hieroglyphs, developed around 3200 BCE, combined both approaches: some symbols represented objects, others represented sounds. Chinese characters, which evolved from oracle-bone inscriptions around 1200 BCE, followed a different path, remaining largely logographic to this day. Despite their differences, all three systems shared a common feature: they were jealously guarded by a small class of scribes, for whom the ability to read and write was a source of enormous power.

E. The spread of alphabetic writing

The alphabet — in which a single symbol stands for a single sound, and a relatively small set of letters can write any word — was invented in the eastern Mediterranean around 1000 BCE. Unlike the hundreds or thousands of symbols required by Egyptian or Chinese systems, an alphabet needs only around 20-30 characters. This made writing accessible to merchants, soldiers and traders, not just priests and bureaucrats. The Greek and Roman alphabets, derived from this Semitic ancestor, went on to spread across Europe and, through colonialism, across the world.

F. Writing as a mirror of society

Every writing system tells us something about the society that created it. The complex, layered symbols of ancient Egypt reflected a civilisation obsessed with eternity and the afterlife. The efficiency and simplicity of the alphabet mirrored a commercial, outward-looking culture. Understanding how writing began helps us understand not just our past, but the extraordinary tool — invisible, silent, yet the foundation of everything we call civilisation — that we still use every day.

题目 Questions

Questions 1-5: Which paragraph mentions the following?

1. the shift from symbols representing objects to symbols representing sounds

2. an alphabet that required only 20-30 characters

3. clay tokens used to count goods

4. writing systems guarded by a small group of scribes

5. Chinese characters that remain largely logographic

Questions 6-10: Complete the notes. NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS.

• The earliest writing was used for keeping (6) ____________.
• Sumerian egg-shaped tokens represented a jar of (7) ____________.
• The Greek and Roman alphabets came from a (8) ____________ ancestor.
• Egyptian hieroglyphs combined logograms and (9) ____________.
• Writing is described as the (10) ____________ of civilisation.

答案 Answers

核心词汇

writing system / Mesopotamia / Sumerian / clay token / logogram / phonogram / hieroglyph / alphabet / scribe / oracle bone / Semitic / bureaucracy / civilisation