雅思阅读 169: From Green Rock to Bronze Blade（从绿石到青铜刃）

改编自 AD/BC History / Journal of Archaeological Science。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.adbchistory.com/blogs/library/ancient-metalworking

Reading Passage

A. Sometime around 8000 BC, in what is now eastern Turkey, someone picked up a lump of greenish rock and struck it with another stone. The rock bent instead of shattering. That small moment of confusion set in motion everything that followed: the first copper beads, then smelted ore, then bronze swords and the trade routes that supplied them. The first metal humans ever touched was not won by fire but simply lying on the ground. Native copper — copper in its pure, metallic form, not locked inside stony ore — surfaces naturally in riverbeds and cliff faces across Anatolia, the Balkans and parts of Iran. It is soft enough to shape with a stone tool, and unlike every other rock in the landscape, it does not fracture when hit; it deforms. The earliest known copper objects are tiny hammered beads from the site of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, dated to about 8000 BC. They were made by repeated cold blows that flattened the metal into thin sheets, then rolled or folded into pins and ornaments. No heat was involved at all. The conceptual leap was not the use of fire but the recognition that this strange material obeyed rules entirely different from stone.

B. Copper was not, in any practical sense, a better material than flint. A skilfully knapped stone blade held an edge that soft copper simply could not match, and for three millennia the new metal produced little more than beads, pins and awls. Its importance lay in a single unprecedented property: it could be reshaped after its initial forming. A broken copper ornament could be hammered back together; a broken stone tool could not. That property transformed human society in two slow but decisive ways. It created the first specialist craft, because working copper required knowledge that could not be picked up in an afternoon — which rocks to seek, how hard to strike, how to anneal the metal by gentle heating to restore its malleability after repeated blows — and such skill demanded apprenticeship. It also created long-distance trade, because surface copper was geographically concentrated. Beads made from Anatolian copper have turned up hundreds of kilometres from their source, carried along exchange networks that predated the wheel.

C. For three thousand years, cold-hammered native copper remained the only metal in human hands, limited by where geology had dropped lumps on the surface. The transformation into something powerful required a second leap: the discovery that fire could pull metal out of rock itself. The earliest secure evidence of this smelting comes not from the Near East but from the Balkan site of Belovode, in modern Serbia, dated to about 5000 BC. Excavations led by Miljana Radivojević uncovered fragments of slag and tiny droplets of copper — called prills — trapped in pottery that had clearly been heated above a thousand degrees Celsius. A chance campfire could never reach those temperatures or produce those residues; the Belovode smiths had built purpose-designed furnaces, selected their ore and learned to separate the metal from the stony waste. That deliberate chemistry marked the birth of extractive metallurgy, and cultures on several continents eventually arrived at similar methods independently. The distinction is sharper than it sounds. Hammering native copper merely reshaped metal that nature had already refined; smelting tore the metal out of ore, where it was locked in chemical combination with rock. Reaching the required temperature meant building a furnace that could concentrate fire beyond what an ordinary hearth achieved, and recognising that a green-blue stone could, under the right conditions, weep red metal.

D. Even smelted copper, though, was soft, and the alloy that would name an age came only later, around 3300 BC. Somewhere in what is now Turkey or Iran, a smith added a small amount of crushed tin ore to molten copper and found the result superior to either metal alone. Bronze cast more fluidly into moulds, hardened to a sharper edge, and kept that edge longer — properties that turned it from an ornamental material into one capable of tools, armour and weapons. Tin, however, was rarely found near copper, so bronze's invention immediately demanded long-distance supply lines: smiths in the Near East imported tin from sources as distant as Britain and Afghanistan. In this way metallurgy did not merely produce objects; it knitted together the trading networks through which ideas, not just goods, travelled.

E. The transition to iron, often imagined as a neat ladder upward, was in reality slow, reluctant and sometimes backwards. Good bronze held an edge better than the early, imperfect iron that first replaced it, and communities switched over only as iron technology improved and copper-tin supplies grew uncertain. The Chinese were casting liquid iron into moulds some fifteen centuries before Europeans managed the same feat, and African smiths in Tanzania produced a form of carbon steel by methods that modern engineers could replicate only with laboratory control. The larger lesson is that the ages named after metals conceal a far messier reality: discoveries were made, forgotten, relearned and adapted in different places at different speeds. No single hearth lit the whole world; many fires, in many valleys, were lit independently, and some went out again. What began, eight thousand years ago, as a rock that curiously bent rather than broke ended by reshaping warfare, agriculture, trade and the very idea of a skilled craft — all before anyone understood why green rock, in a hot enough fire, could become a blade. The smith himself, meanwhile, was credited with near-magical powers in nearly every culture that discovered him, and the gods of metallurgy — Hephaestus in Greece, wayland in the Germanic north — were among the most respected figures in the pantheon. Fire, it turned out, was the first machine humans learned to master.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. Why a soft, useless metal nonetheless changed everything ii. How flint tools were knapped iii. The deliberate chemistry of pulling metal from rock iv. The geology of tin deposits in Britain v. An alloy that demanded long-distance trade vi. The religious rituals of ancient smiths vii. Why the "metal ages" were anything but a steady ladder

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. How were the earliest known copper objects made? A. By smelting ore in a furnace. B. By cold hammering native copper with no heat. C. By casting molten copper in moulds. D. By mixing copper with tin.

6. Why was native copper socially significant even though it was soft? A. It could be reshaped after forming, creating specialists and long-distance trade. B. It was harder than flint. C. It occurred everywhere on Earth. D. It did not require any skill to work.

7. What evidence from Belovode shows deliberate smelting? A. A written tablet explaining the process. B. Slag fragments and copper prills heated above 1,000°C. C. Golden ornaments buried with kings. D. Wooden models of furnaces.

8. Why did bronze encourage long-distance trade? A. Copper and tin were rarely found together in the same place. B. Bronze was too heavy to carry locally. C. Smiths refused to sell nearby. D. Moulds were imported from China.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The earliest copper beads from Çatalhöyük were made with heat from a furnace.
10. A well-made flint blade held an edge better than soft copper.
11. Smelting was invented only once, in one place, and spread from there.
12. Early iron was sometimes less effective than good bronze.
13. The Chinese were casting liquid iron before Europeans were.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Unlike stone, native copper could be (14) __________ after its initial forming. The first secure evidence of deliberate ore smelting, with slag and copper prills, comes from the Balkan site of (15) __________.

答案与解析

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