专四英语阅读练习.doc

People have been painting pictures for at least30,000 years. The earl iest pictures were painted bypeople who hunted animals. They used to paintpictures of the animals they wanted to catch and of this ki nd have been found on the walls ofcaves in France and Spain. No on e knows why theywere painted there. Perhaps the painters thoughtthat their pictures would help them to catch theseanimals. Or perhaps huma n beings have always wanted to tell stories in pictures. About 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians and other people in the Near E ast began to use picturesas kind of writing. They drew simple pictur es or signs to represent things and ideas, and also torepresent the sounds of their language. The signs these people used became a kin d Egyptians used to record information and to tell stories by putt ing picture writingand pictures together. When an important person die d, scenes and stories from his life werepainted and carved on the w alls of the place where he was buried. Some of these pictures areli ke modern comic strip stories. It has been said that Egypt is the home of the comic , for the Egyptians, pictures still had magic pow er. So they did not try to make their way ofwriting simple. The or dinary people could not understand it. By the year 1,000 BC, people who lived in the area around the Medi terranean Sea haddeveloped a simpler system of writing. The signs the y used were very easy to write, and therewere fewer of them than i n the Egyptian system. This was because each sign, or letter,represen ted only one sound in their language. The Greeks developed this syst em and formedthe letters of the Greek alphabet . The Romans copied th e idea, and the Roman alphabet isnow used all over the world. These days, we can write down a story, or record information, withou t using pictures. But westill need pictures of all kinds: drawing, p hotographs, signs and diagrams. We find themeverywhere: in books and newspapers, in the street, and on the walls of the places wh