托福TPO53阅读原文+译文+答案

小编整理了托福

T PO53

阅读原文

+

译文

+

答案，

希望备考

TPO< /p>

真题的同学一定要认真的看题、

做题，多研究积累才能实现自我提 升，预祝各位考生都取得理想的成绩。

TPO53

最早文字的证据

Evidence Of The Earliest Writing

Although literacy appeared independently in several parts of the

prehistoricworld, the earliest evidence of writing is the cuneiform Sumerian

script on theclay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia, which, archaeological

detective work has revealed, had its origins in the accounting practices of

commercial chers demonstrated that preliterate people, to keep

track of the goods they produced and exchanged, created a system of accounting

using claytokens as symbolic representations of their products. Over many

thousands of years, the symbols evolved through several stages of abstraction

until they became wedge- shaped (cuneiform) signs on clay tablets, recognizable

as writing.

The original tokens (circa 8500 B.C.E.) were three-dimensional solid

shapes

—

tiny spheres, cones, disks, and cylinders. A debt of six units of grain

and eight head of livestock, for example might have been represented by six

conical and eight cylindrical tokens. To keep batches of tokens together, an

innovation was introduced (circa 3250 B. C. E.) whereby they were sealed inside

clay envelopes that could be broken open and counted when it came time for a

debt to be repaid. But because the contents of the envelopes could easily be

forgotten, two-dimensional representations of the three-dimensional tokens were

impressed into the surface of the envelopes before they were sealed. Eventually,

having two sets of equivalent symbols

—

the internal tokens and external