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OFFICIAL46 Look at the four squares [■] that indicate where the following sentence could be added to the passage.Where would the sentence best fit? Click on a square [■] to add the sentence to the passage.

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The Origins of Writing
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It was in Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) that civilization arose, and it is there that we find the earliest examples of that key feature of civilization, writing. These examples, in the form of inscribed clay tablets that date to shortly before 3000 B.C.E., have been discovered among the archaeological remains of the Sumerians, a gifted people settled in southern Mesopotamia.

The Egyptians were not far behind in developing writing, but we cannot follow the history of their writing in detail because they used a perishable writing material. In ancient times the banks of the Nile were lined with papyrus plants, and from the papyrus reeds the Egyptians made a form of paper; it was excellent in quality but, like any paper, fragile. Mesopotamia’s rivers boasted no such useful reeds, but its land did provide good clay, and as a consequence the clay tablet became the standard material. Though clumsy and bulky it has a virtue dear to archaeologists: it is durable. Fire, for example, which is death to papyrus paper or other writing materials such as leather and wood, simply bakes it hard, thereby making it even more durable. So when a conqueror set a Mesopotamian palace ablaze, he helped ensure the survival of any clay tablets in it. Clay, moreover, is cheap, and forming it into tablets is easy, factors that helped the clay tablet become the preferred writing material not only throughout Mesopotamia but far outside it as well, in Syria, Asia Minor, Persia, and even for a while in Crete and Greece. Excavators have unearthed clay tablets in all these lands. In the Near East they remained in use for more than two and a half millennia, and in certain areas they lasted down to the beginning of the common era until finally yielding, once and for all, to more convenient alternatives.

The Sumerians perfected a style of writing suited to clay. This script consists of simple shapes, basically just wedge shapes and lines that could easily be incised in soft clay with a reed or wooden stylus; scholars have dubbed it cuneiform from the wedge-shaped marks (cunei in Latin) that are its hallmark. Although the ingredients are merely wedges and lines, there are hundreds of combinations of these basic forms that stand for different sounds or words. Learning these complex signs required long training and much practice; inevitably, literacy was largely limited to a small professional class, the scribes.

The Akkadians conquered the Sumerians around the middle of the third millennium B.C.E., and they took over the various cuneiform signs used for writing Sumerian and gave them sound and word values that fit their own language. [■]The Babylonians and Assyrians did the same, and so did peoples in Syria and Asia Minor. [■]The literature of the Sumerians was treasured throughout the Near East, and long after Sumerian ceased to be spoken, the Babylonians and Assyrians and others kept it alive as a literary language, the way Europeans kept Latin alive after the fall of Rome. [■]For the scribes of these non-Sumerian languages, training was doubly demanding since they had to know the values of the various cuneiform signs for Sumerian as well as for their own language.  [■]

The contents of the earliest clay tablets are simple notations of numbers of commodities—animals, jars, baskets, etc. Writing, it would appear, started as a primitive form of bookkeeping. Its use soon widened to document the multitudinous things and acts that are involved in daily life, from simple inventories of commodities to complicated governmental rules and regulations.

Archaeologists frequently find clay tablets in batches. The batches, some of which contain thousands of tablets, consist for the most part of documents of the types just mentioned: bills, deliveries, receipts, inventories, loans, marriage contracts, divorce settlements, court judgments, and so on. These records of factual matters were kept in storage to be available for reference-they were, in effect, files, or, to use the term preferred by specialists in the ancient Near East, archives. Now and then these files include pieces of writing that are of a distinctly different order, writings that do not merely record some matter of fact but involve creative intellectual activity. They range from simple textbook material to literature-and they make an appearance very early, even from the third millennium B C E.

13.Look at the four squares [■] that indicate where the following sentence could be added to the passage.Where would the sentence best fit? Click on a square [■] to add the sentence to the passage.

However, the Sumerian language did not entirely disappear..

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正确答案:B
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【题目翻译】看四个正方形[■],它们表示下列句子可以加到文章中的哪个地方。句子最适合哪儿? A:但是,苏美尔语并没有完全消失。 【判定题型】:根据题目问法,题目要求将句子插入到文中最恰当的空格处,故判断本题为句子插入题。 【待插入句分析】插入的句子中however说明其后面的句子内容与上文需要构成转折关系。 【原文分析】在公元前3000年,阿卡德人攻克了苏美尔,他们沿用了书写苏美尔语的楔形文字写法,并赋予了这些文字适合自己语言的声调和意义。巴比伦人、亚述人、叙利亚人和小亚细亚人也是如此。■整个近东地区都很重视苏美尔人的文字,即使是在没有人说苏美尔语之后很久一段时间内,巴比伦人和亚述人依然把它当作一种文学语言,就像欧洲人在罗马沦陷后,依然把拉丁语作为文学语言一样。■对于那些不说苏美尔语的写字匠,需要加倍的刻苦训练,因为他们需要知道楔形文字在苏美尔语中以及他们自己的语言中的不同意义。■ 这个段落主要说了别的地区的人使用苏美尔人的文字。 【选项分析】 B:not entirely disappear说明上文提到了Sumerian language 部分消失或者后文提到了Sumerian language没有disappear的事实。插入口B后面的句子说明了Sumerian literature仍然被treasure,也就是Sumerian language没有disappear,故应插入B处。

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