上海大学2007年攻读硕士学位研究生入学考试 综合英语.docVIP

上海大学2007年攻读硕士学位研究生入学考试 综合英语试题 Section 1: Reading Comprehension (36 points) Directions: In this section, you will find two passages each of which is followed by some questions. Read the passages carefully and then answer the questions in our own words on the answer sheet. Remember that each answer should be limited to less than ten words in order to be valid. Question1-9 Perhaps the earliest forerunner of writing is a system of clay counting tokens used in the ancient Middle East. The tokens date from 8000 to 3000BC and are shaped like disks, cones, spheres, and other shapes. They were stored in clay containers marked with a nearly version of cuneiform writing, to indicate what tokens were inside. Cuneiform was one of the first forms of writing and was pictographic, which symbols representing objects. It developed as a written language in Assyria from 3000 to 1000BC. Cuneiform eventually acquired ideographic elements associated with it. The oldest known examples of script-style writing date from 3000BC; papyrus sheets from 2700 to 2500BC have been found in the Nile Delta in Egypt bearing written hieroglyphs, another pictographic-ideographic form of writing. Chinese began as a pictographic-ideographic written language perhaps as early as the 15th century BC. Today, written Chinese includes some phonetic elements as well. The Chinese writing system is called logographic because each of the full symbols or characters represents a word. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs eventually incorporated phonetic elements. In syllabic systems, such as Japanese and Korean, written symbols stand for spoken syllable. The alphabet, invented in the Middle East, was carried by the Phoenicians to Greece, where vowel sounds were added to it. Alphabet characters stand for phonetic sounds and can be combined in an almost infinite variety of words. Many modern languages, such as English, German, French, and Russian, are alphabetic languages. When and where did the earliest form of writing pr