2019年12月7日托福阅读真题+题目+答案：Debate about the Earliest Calendars

2019年12月7日托福阅读真题+题目+答案：Debate about the Earliest Calendars

Some researchers believe that we can trace the written calendar back more than 20,000 years to the last ice age. In particular, Alexander Marshack has interpreted cut marks found on bits of bone from central Africa and Paleolithic caves in France to be rudimentary forms of an early lunar calendar. The evidence lies in distinct clusters of cut marks on the bones – marks that could not have been by chance.▋ The marks must have been made by using a sharp cutting tool or by twisting a pointed object to form a hole in the surface of the bones.▋ According to Marshack, each mark represents a day and these marks are grouped in patterns of 14 or 15 days. ▋This interval would correspond to the times between the first sighting of a crescent moon and the full moon, and the interval between a full moon and the beginning a new moon cycle.▋

The word “rudimentary” in the passage is closest in meaning to

A.incomplete

B.reliable

C.functional

D.primitive

Why does the position that “The marks must have been made by using a sharp cutting tool or by twisting a pointed object to form a hole in the surface of the bones” support Marshack’s hypothesis?

A.It implies that the marks on the bones were intentionally made rather than the result of a natural process of wear.

B.It proves that 20,000 years ago, people had already developed tools.

C.It suggests that the pattern of cut marks made by Paleolithic peoples in France may have originated in central Africa.

D.It confirms what other researchers have concluded about the origins of the marks.

According to paragraph 1, how does Marshack interpret the cut marks found on bones that he claims are lunar calendars?

A.He interprets each mark as representing a phase of the moon from crescent to full.

B.He interprets groups of marks as being representations, one mark per day, of half a lunar cycle.

C.He interprets the interval between individual marks as representing the time between the crescent and full moon or the time between the full moon and a new moon.

D.He interprets the marks as representations of the moon’s shape when first sighted each night during a lunar month.

According to Marshack, there would have been several motives for keeping a lunar record. A major portion of the lunar-phase cycle provides extended light for accomplishing many useful activities. Also, it helps to plan if one knows or can anticipate when additional daylight will come. Keeping track of lunar events would offer the Paleolithic inhabitants of western Europe a means of abstractly correlating what Marshack calls “time-factored” events – those that occur sequentially in a predictable manner – through a process that lends itself readily to measurement. These notations could represent the foundation of the associative process – the first step in the evolution of traditional writing, where a mark stands for a thing, in this case, one day. Though the best-known bone calendar stretches only two and a half months, an extended series of such records could have led early hunter-gatherers to deduce that the period from human conception to birth was nine moons; that after two moons, a particular supply of berries would dry up; or that after every 12 or 13 moons, all the nearby streams would swell to capacity.

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