职称英语综合类考试模拟试题.docVIP

＊第二十六篇 Seeing the World Centuries Ago If you enjoy looking through travel books by such familiar authors as Arthur Frommer or Eugene Fodor, it will not surprise you to learn that travel writing has a long and venerable history. Almost from the earliest annals of recorded time individuals have found ready audiences for their accounts of journeys to strange and exotic locales.1 One of the earliest travel writers, a Greek geographer and historian named Strabo, lived around the time of Christ. Though Strabo is known to have traveled from east of the Black Sea west to Italy and as far south as Ethiopia, he also used details gleaned from other writers to extend and enliven his accounts. His multivolumed work Geography provides the only surviving account of the cities, peoples, customs, and geographical peculiarities of the whole known world of his time. Two other classic travel writers, the Italian Marco Polo and the Moroccan Ibn Battutah, lived in roughly the same time period. Marco Polo traveled to China with his father and uncle in about A. D.1275 and remained there 16 or 17 years, visiting several other countries during his travels. When Marco returned to Italy he dictated his memoirs, including stories he had heard from others, to a scribe, with the resulting book Il milione being an instant success. Though difficult to attest to the accuracy of all he says, Marcos book impelled Europeans to begin their great voyages of exploration.2 Ibn Battutahs interest in travel began on his required Muslim journey to Mecca in 1325, and during his lifetime he journeyed through all the countries where Islam held sway.3 His travel book the Rihlah is a personalized account of desert journeys, court intrigues, and even the effect of the Black Death in the various lands he visited. In almost .30 years of traveling it is estimated that Ibn Battutah covered more than 75,000 miles. 练习： venerable /(ven(r(bl/ adj.庄严的，值得尊敬的 enliven /(((((((((/v．使生动 account /(ka(nt/n.记述 v