【名师指津】2017高考英语一轮总复习 第一部分 教材知识梳理 Unit 1 Art练习 新人教版选修6.doc

Unit 1　Art (60分钟　　81分) Part A 一、阅读理解(共8小题;每小题2分,满分16分) A People have been painting pictures for at least 30,000 years.The earliest pictures were painted by people who hunted animals.They used to paint pictures of the animals they wanted to catch and kill.Pictures of this kind have been found on the walls of caves in France and Spain.No one knows why they were painted there.Perhaps the painters thought that their pictures would help them to catch these animals.Or perhaps human beings have always wanted to tell stories in pictures. About 5,000 years ago the Egyptians and other people in the Near East began to use pictures as a kind of writing.They drew simple pictures or signs to represent things and ideas,and also to 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(连环漫画)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 letter of the Greek alphabet.The Romans copied the idea,and 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:drawings,photographs,signs and diagrams.We find them everywhere:in books and ne