新概念英语必背优秀文章精读第8篇Thefirstcalender.docx

新概念英语必背优秀文章精读 第 8 篇 The firstcalender 请根据中文翻译，看一下下面两个句子能否顺利地填写出来。 原文： Future historians will be in a unique position when they come to record the history of our own times. They will hardly know which facts to select from the great mass of evidence that steadily accumulates. What is more, they will not have to rely solely on the written word. Films, videos, CDs and CD-ROMS are just some of the bewildering amount of information they will have. They will be able, as it were, to see and hear us in action. But the historian attempting to reconstruct the distant past is always faced with a difficult task. He has to deduce what he can from the few scanty clues available. 1 Up to now, historians have assumed that calendars came into being with the advent of agriculture, for then man was faced with a real need to understand something about the seasons. 2 Historians have long been puzzled by dots, lines and symbols which have been engraved on walls, bones, and the ivory tusks of mammoths. The nomads who made these markings lived by hunting and fishing during the last Ice Age which began about 35,000 B.C. and ended about 10,000 B.C. By correlating markings made in various parts of the world, historians have been able to read this difficult code. They have found that it is connected with the passage of days and the phases of the moon. It is, in fact, a primitive type of calendar. It has long been known that the hunting scenes depicted on walls were not simply a form of artistic expression. They had a definite meaning, for they were as near as early man could get to writing. It is possible that there is a definite relation between these paintings and the markings that sometimes accompany them. It seems that man was making a real effort to understand the seasons 20,000 years earlier than has been supposed. 翻译： 未来的历史学家在写我们这个段历史的时候会别具一格。对于逐 渐积累起来的庞大材料，他们几乎不知道选择哪些好，而且，也不必 完全依赖文字材料。电影、录像、光盘和光盘驱动器仅仅能为他们提 供令人眼花缭乱的大量信息的几种手段。他们能够身临其境般地观看 我们做事，倾听我们讲话。但是，历史学家企图重现遥远的过去不过 一项艰巨的任务，他们必须根据