托福阅读真题+题目+答案：Brick Technology in Mesopotamia

托福阅读真题+题目+答案：Brick Technology in Mesopotamia

One of the earliest civilizations was that of Mesopotamia (part of the present-day Middle East), including Sumer and Assyria. Some of its buildings survive to this day. Sun-dried bricks made of mud and straw were its main building materials, as river mud was found in abundance along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. ⬛ Here the scarcity of stone may have been an incentive to develop the technology of making oven-fired bricks to use as an alternative. ⬛ To Strengthen walls made from sun-dried bricks, fired bricks began to be used as an outer protective skin for more important buildings like temples, palaces, and city walls and gates. ⬛ Making fired bricks is an advanced pottery technique. ⬛ I Fired bricks are solid masses of clay heated in ovens to temperatures of between 950 and 1,150 degrees Celsius, and a well-made fired brick is an extremely durable object.  Like sun-dried bricks they were made in wooden molds, but for bricks with decorations special molds had to be made. Unlike the river mud used for sun-dried bricks, the clay for proper bricks needed to be carefully prepared, and the building of an oven, finding suitable fuel, and controlling oven temperatures required a professional level of skill and know-how. This is perhaps the reason why the use of fired bricks came in gradually over time.

1.The word “suitable” in the passage is closest in meaning to

O enough

O easy

O reliable

O appropriate

2.In paragraph 1, the author suggests that the Mesopotamians may have developed the technology of making oven-fired bricks because

O sunlight was not always hot enough for drying bricks

O there were not enough stones to use as building materials

O the mud found along the Tigris and Euphrates did not dry out easily

O they sometimes had difficult finding the straw needed for sun-dried bricks

3.According to paragraph 1, fired bricks and sun-dried bricks were different in all of the following ways EXCEPT:

O Fired bricks were made in plain wooden molds while sun-dried bricks were made in specially decorated molds.

O Fired bricks required the clay to be carefully prepared while sun-dried bricks did not.

O Fired bricks were made entirely of clay, while sun-dried bricks contained other materials.

O Fired bricks required more advanced skills to make than sun-dried bricks did.

The technical complexities involved in making fired bricks may explain why one of the first recorded instances of pieces of fired clay, used as a protective covering for mud-brick walls at the Sumerian city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia in 3600- 3200 B.C., did not involve bricks but small clay cones. Uruk was one of Mesopotamia's first cities and had an important temple complex at its center known as the Eanna precinct. Here was found the Limestone Temple, which was connected to a second temple via a courtyard. In this courtyard was a terrace with massive pillars made of mud and bundled reeds. To protect them from weathering, thousands of nail-shaped ceramic cones were pushed into an outer bed of clay. The cones have flat tops and were painted red, white, or black and arranged in such a way that they formed geometric patterns. What is so significant about this is that here we find, perhaps for the first time, fired clay as a practical protection against the environmental effects of rain and wind, safeguarding the columns from deterioration as well as creating an ornamental surface decoration.

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