Directions: You are expected to study this section in class. Don’t preview.

Word Pretest

For each italicized word or expression, choose the best meaning below.

1. These statues are the only traces of a once great civilization.
A. trails B. investigations C. evidence
2. Such speculations no longer belong to the realm of science.
A. transactions B. observations C. guesses
3. The police deduced that the murder had been committed by a woman.
A. concluded by reasoning
B. concluded by investigation
C. concluded by guessing
4. Though we disagreed with her conclusion, we admired the coherences of her argument.
A. confusion
B. consistence
C. eloquence
5. Though nearly twenty he is barely literate.
A. able to speak
B. able to look after himself
C. able to read and write
6. How do you reconcile your political princles with your religious beliefs?
A. combine B. compromise C. connect
7. A spiral staircase takes up less space than a normal one.
A. round B. spiritual C. winding
8. He wanted to leave the country in order to get a better perspective on things.
A. impression B. view C. focus
9. The forest ranger is an advocate of environmental protection laws.
A. lawyer B. supporter C. attacker
10. The government has repeatedly asserted that it will not change its policy.
A. declared B. agreed C. denied

Key：1. C 2. C 3. A 4. B 5. C 6. B 7. C 8. B 9. B 10. A

Text A

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Some Theories of History

　　 How much of man’s history do we know? We really known very little. Written records exist for only a fraction of what we suppose to have been man’s time as a unique species. Furthermore, the accuracy of these records is often suspect, and the scope and selection of significant detail in them often needs improvement. At times there is no more than a collection of a few songs, myths and legends. Even in recent times, the not uncommon lack of truly factual historical data makes it difficult to reconstruct an accurate picture of what actually did happen in history.
　　It is worse when we try to reconstruct man’s history before the development of writing, and this is unfortunate because the history of the early development of human society are lost to us. The most that we can do is to use traces, deduction, speculation and the knowledge we have of the habits of those animals which have some elementary social order to help us make a partial reconstruction. This is hardly a satisfactory substitute for precise information.
　　With our knowledge of human history, which is only fragmentary at best, it is therefore nearly impossible to reconstruct the beginning, and to deduce the end, of the story of man. Thus, there have developed many schools of thought on the subject, each of which attempts to give coherence to the human past by fitting it into the framework of a theory of history.
　　In one of these theories, it is assumed that man continually progress. He has evolved from a lower to a higher form of being, and he continues to evolve. This evolution takes place both in terms of his potentials and his abilities to actualize these potentials.
　　If one holds this theory, one feels that modern man must be more intelligent and civilized today than his ancestors, as well as physically and morally superior to them. One further assumes that this progress will continue into an ever more glorious future. Here deduction often ends and dreams of utopia begin, for it seems that most of us find it hard to think of the human race developing into a race of angels. All in all, as a theory of history, the above view has had many eminent supporters.
　　It might be well to mention here a low condition to a Golden Age at some time in the remote past, and that things have gone straight downhill ever since. Many eminent men have found a sort of gloomy comfort in this idea, but science has now opened up possibilities for the future which make this theory less defendable. Perhaps for this reason the theory has little modern support.
　　A second theory of history is held by those men who see man’s history as something quite different from a simple progression from a lower to a higher state. They see it as a cycle of stages of development which are predictable in their broad outlines and main features. As surely as a civilization rises and comes into being, so also must it decline and fall. The chief pattern one sees in history is the rise and fall of civilization.
　　Man, according to this theory, is warlike in one stage of his history and humane in another. This is not due to individual human beings or to general progress, but rather to determining socioeconomic patterns that are not, as yet, understood. To holders of this theory, modern man is not looked upon as the most superior social being yet produced. He is simply the typical product of the current stage in the cycle of our civilization. In fact he may actually be inferior to members of past civilizations. It all depends upon what stage of civilization we happen to be living in. Indeed, it has been said that the average modern literate city dweller is comparatively more ignorant of his era’s fund of knowledge than other literate city dwellers of the past. While the staggering fund of knowledge in our technologically advanced world is undoubtedly greater than that of any past civilization, it is probably true that the average modern man, relying on such repetitive forms of entertainment as television and working in a narrowly specialized job, knows a great deal less sheer information about his world than did earlier people.
　　In a third theory of history, the two above theories are to some degree reconciled. According to this theory, which is often termed the spiral view of history, human societies do repeat a cycle a stages, but overall progress observable in the long historical perspective. Civilizations do rise and fall, as the advocates of the second theory maintain, but the new civilization which replaces the first, usually by conquest, contains superior qualities which enable it to rise to a higher stage of development until it, too, declines and is replaced by yet a third civilization.
　　The above theories interpret history in term as if the overall progress of mankind in general without respect to differentiations within the social order. It is also possible to view human history in terms of the interaction of socioeconomic groups. Human history, according to this theory, is most clearly interpreted as the disappearance of class struggle. Most people who hold this theory assume an eventual resolution of the struggle through the disappearance of class differences, although it would be just as correct to assume that the struggle could continue unresolved. Those who assume that the struggle can eventually be resolved hold that history has a goal and that progress can be measured in terms of how quickly mankind is reaching that goal.
　　Those who assume that class struggle is a fact of life and probably can never be resolved are those who tend to believe that history has no goal and therefore, there can be no meaningful idea of progress. Indeed there is also quite a large school which holds this idea of history, but rather a denial that history can be fit into any rigid theory. To these people, history is simply all that we know about man’s past. It is true that our historical knowledge is very limited, but this is the reason, so they argue, that we should be very cautious about trying to fit it into an overall theory. There is a strong tendency, they assert, for men to make the facts fit their favorite theory instead of allowing their interpretations to arise from the facts. To adopt a particular theory of history, they say, is to lose the ability to perceive history accurately.

Total Word: 1030 words
Total Reading Time ________
________
The text is based on “Some Theories of History”, Advanced Reading and Conversation, by Sandra Constinett, The Institute of Modern Language, Inc.1973.

Detailed Study of Text A

◆ Reading Skill ─ Skimming
Skim the text and then answer the following questions.

1. What is the title of this article?
2. The author’s purpose is to ________.
A. give his own view on human history
B. arouse the reader’s interest in history
C. introduce some theories of history
3. According to the first theory, ________.
A. man continually progress
B. ,am will become angels
C. Utopia will eventually appear
4. The main idea of the second theory is ________.
A. man’s history is a simple progression from a lower to a higher state
B. the chief pattern in history is the rise and fall of civilization
C. modern man is inferior to his ancestors.
5. The third theory holds that ________.
A. the first and second theory should be reconciled
B. human history repeats cycles of stages but at the same time it progresses
C. human history always repeats itself
6. People who believe in the fourth theory think that ________.
A. human history is the history of class struggle
B. class struggle will never disappear
C. human history can be most clearly interpreted as the disappearance of class differences.

Key: 1. Some Theories of History
2. C 3.A 4. B 5. B 6. C

According to the article, decide whether each of the following statements is true or false.
1. ________ Written records of man’s history are only a collection of myths and legends.
2. ________ Our knowledge of the social order of animals gives us a record of man’s early social development.
3. ________ Our knowledge of human history is only fragmentary at best.
4. ________ Now nobody believes in past or future Golden Age any more.
5. ________ According to one theory of history, television may have contributed to the comparative ignorance of modern man.
6. ________ One should try to force historical knowledge into an overall theory.

Key: 1. F 2. F 3. T 4. F 5. T 6. T

Vocabulary Building

I. Give the other parts of speech of each given word.

Key:

II. Fill in the blanks with words that are often confused.
1. historic, historical
a. ________ research has proved that the Trojan war was a real event.
b. The ending of the cold-war is a ________ event.
2. human, humane
a. To err is ________, to forgive divine.
b. ________ efforts to save the victims of the big earthquake are under way now.
3. circle, cycle
a. Use your compasses to draw a ________.
b. Capitalist economy operates in the ________ of booms and slumps.
Key: 1.a. Historical b. historic
2.a. human b. Humane
3. a. circle b.cycle

Ⅲ. Glossary
natural history           human history    　          prehistoric
stone age          　     paleolithic age               neolithic age
Bronze age        　     Babylonian                    Hellene
Byzantine                the Middle Ages               Dark Age
medieval             　  Renaissance                  Old World
New world          　    Elizabethan Age  　　    Industrialization
Victorian Age           modern times              　  cold-war
Post-coldwar            post-industrialization         chronicle
annalist                  antiquity                　　     archaic

4. Cloze
Fill in each blank with one suitable word.

Man first ________ on earth half a million years ago. Then he was little more than an animal; but early man had several big advantages ________ the animals. He had a large ________, he had an upright ________, he had clever hands; and he had in his brain special groups of nerve cells, not ________ in animals, that enabled him to invent a ________ and use it to communicate with his fellow men. This ability to speak was of very great ________ because it allowed men to share ideas, and to plan together, so that tasks impossible for a ________ person could be successfully undertaken by intelligent team-work. Speech also enabled ideas to be________ on from generation to generation so that the stock of human knowledge slowly increased.
It was these special advantages that put men far ________ of all other living creatures in the struggle for ________. They can use their intelligence ________ their difficulties and master them.

Key: 1.appeared  2. over  3. brain  4. body  5. those  6. language
7. importance  8. single  9. passed  10. super  11. life/survival
12. conquer/overcome