About 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians and other people in the Near East began to use pictures as kind of writing. They drew simple pictures or signs to represent things and ideas, and also to
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竞赛试题英语试题
竞赛试题
represent the sounds of their language. The signs these people used became a kind of alphabet.
The Egyptians used to record information and to tell stories by putting picture writing and pictures together. When an important person died, scenes and stories from his life were painted and carved on the walls of the place where he was buried. Some of these pictures are like modern comic strip stories. It has been said that Egypt is the home of the comic strip. But, for the Egyptians, pictures still had magic power. So they did not try to make their way of writing simple. The ordinary people could not understand it.
By the year 1,000 BC, people who lived in the area around the Mediterranean Sea had developed a simpler system of writing. The signs they used were very easy to write, and there were fewer of them than in the Egyptian system. This was because each sign, or letter, represented only one sound in their language. The Greeks developed this system and formed the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Romans copied the idea, and the Roman alphabet is now used all over the world.
These days, we can write down a story, or record information, without using pictures. But we still need pictures of all kinds: drawing, photographs, signs and diagrams. We find them everywhere: in books and newspapers, in the street, and on the walls of the places where we live and work. Pictures help us to understand and remember things more easily, and they can make a story much more interesting.
60. Pictures of animals were painted on the walls of caves in France and Spain because______.
A. the hunters wanted to see the pictures
B. the painters were animal lovers
C. the painters wanted to show imagination
D. the pictures were thought to be helpful
61. The Greek alphabet was simpler than the Egyptian system for all the following reasons EXCEPT
that______.
A. the former was easy to write
B. there were fewer signs in the former
C. the former was easy to pronounce
D. each sign stood for only one sound
62. Which of the following statements is TRUE?
A. The Egyptian signs later became a particular alphabet.
B. The Egyptians liked to write comic strip stories.
C. The Roman alphabet was developed from the Egyptian one.
D. The Greeks copied their writing system from the Egyptians.
63. In the last paragraph, the author thinks that pictures ______.
A. should be made comprehensible
B. should be made interesting
C. are of much use in our life
D. have disappeared from our life
C
Taste is such a subjective matter that we don’t usually conduct preference tests for food. The most you can say about anyone’s preference is that it’s one person’s opinion. But because the two big cola companies—Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola are mark eted so aggressively, we’ve wondered
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竞赛试题英语试题
竞赛试题
how big a role taste preference actually plays in brand loyalty. We set up a taste test that challenged people who identified themselves as either Coca-Cola or Pepsi fans: Find your brand in a blind tasting.
We invited staff volunteers who had a strong liking for either Coca-Cola Classic (传统型) or Pepsi, Diet (低糖的) Coke, or Diet Pepsi. These were people who thought they’d have no trouble telling their brand from the other brand.
We eventually located 19 regular cola drinkers and 27 diet cola drinkers. Then we fed them four unidentified samples of cola one at a time, regular colas for the one group, diet versions for the other. We asked them to tell us whether each sample was Coke or Pepsi; then we analyzed the records stat istically to compare the participants’ choices with what mere guess-work could have accomplished.
Getting all four samples right was a tough test, but not too tough, we thought, for people who believed they could recognize their brand. In the end, only 7 out of 19 regular cola drinkers correctly identified their brand of choice in all four trials. The diet-cola drinkers did a little worse----only 7 of 27 identified all four samples correctly.
While both groups did better than chance would predict, nearly half the participants in each group made the wrong choice two or more times. Two people got all four samples wrong. Overall, half the participants did about as well on the last round of tasting as on the first, so tiredness, or taste burnout, was not a factor. Our preference test results suggest that only a few Pepsi participants and Coke fans may really be able to tell their favorite brand by taste and price.
64. According to the passage the preference test was conducted in order to ________.
A. show t hat a person’s opinion about taste is mere guess-work
B. compare the ability of the participants in choosing their drinks