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  3. The Mystery of the Mayas The ruins of once-beautiful cities in the forests of Central America tell scientists much about the

The Mystery of the Mayas The ruins of once-beautiful cities in the forests of Central America tell scientists much about the

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问题                               The Mystery of the Mayas
    The ruins of once-beautiful cities in the forests of Central America tell scientists much about the amazing people who built them. But they do not tell why these cities were suddenly abandoned over one thousand years ago. Around A. D. 800, something mysterious happened to the Mayan civilization. Walls and foundations for new buildings were left unfinished. To modern archeologists, it looked as if the cities had been abandoned. What happened? What is the possible explanation of this mystery?
Early Discoveries
    In the late 1700’s, a group of explorers cutting their way through a forest in Central America came upon the ruins of an ancient city. Under a tangle of trees and vines, they found large, well designed stone buildings and handsome stone monuments. Some of the stones were covered with a strange kind of writing. Carvings on other stones showed that at least some of the people who lived in the area long before were highly advanced.
Questions Raised
    In the next 150 years, more cities were discovered. They seemed to be part of a great civilization stretching across 500 miles (about 800 kilometers) of forest. In 1881, an Englishman named Alfred Maudslay led the first big scientific expedition to study the ruins in the forest.  Maudslay was an archeologist, a scientist who studied the remains of ancient communities for clues to how the people lived. Other expeditions followed, but at first they found more questions than answers: Who built the cities, and when the cities were built? How had the people lived here in ’the middle of a rain forest? Most puzzling of all, what happened to them?
Possible Answers
    Gradually, some of the answers have been pieced together. Today, living in parts of Mexico and Guatemala, there are brown skinned Indian people called the Mayas. Scientists believe that the ancestors of these Indians built the cities and carved the stone monuments.
    Dates carved on some monuments show that they were put up between A.D. 300 and 800, but bits
of buried pottery tell us that the Mayas had lived in some of their cities for hundreds of years earlier. At the height of Mayan civilization, there must have been over two million people living in and around hundreds of beautiful towns and cities.
    Archeologists digging in these cities have uncovered roads, a few water reservoirs, and temples built one on top of another. Handsome pictures made of sculptured plaster and painted in bright colors were found on the walls of buildings. Painted pots and pieces of carefully carved jewelry were discovered in tombs under the floors of temples. These pictures and objects showed much about the Mayas’ life. There were scenes of people working, people at war, nobles holding court, priests in fantastic costumes and Mayan gods.
Possible Errors
    For a long time, archeologists worked only on uncovering large Mayan structures, such as temples, palaces, and ball courts. Little effort was made to find the remains of smaller buildings, such as houses. The seeming absence of houses led people to believe that the cities were only the homes of priests and rulers, who lived in the palaces. They thought the ordinary people probably lived in the countryside and came to the cities only for religious ceremonies.
New Evidence
    In recent years, new evidence has been uncovered at a number of Mayan cities by different groups of archeologists. The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has just finished a twelve-year study of Tikal, the biggest of the Mayan cities. More than one hundred small houses varied, too. Some had many remains of finely decorated pottery. Others had fewer and plainer pieces. The houses were very close together, with little space to raise food, except in small gardens.
Change of View
    These new findings changed our picture of Mayan life. Dr. William R. Coe, director of the Tikal project, said that Tikal must have been a real city after all, at least for part of its history. It must have had a big population. The differences in the houses show that there were many different classes of people. Perhaps some were craftsmen--the stonecutters, sculptors, and painters who worked on new temples and monuments.
Mayas’ Impressive Accomplishments
    As archeologists studied the Mayas, they became more and more impressed by how much these people had been able to do. In other parts of the world, people were using metal tools before they began building cities. They also had wheels and carts to help move loads, ’and domesticated animals to push or pull them. The Mayas had none of these things. Their only tools were made of wood or stone. Yet they cut and carved rocks weighing thousands of pounds, and built temples over 200 feet (above sixty meters) tall.
    But the Mayas could do more than just make buildings and works of art. One of the most important things they did was learn to write. When some of the Mayan writing was figured out, archeologists discovered how much the Mayas knew about other things, too.
    In mathematics, they could count up to the millions. They were the first people to figure out how to use the zero with other numerals to make working with large numbers easier.
    In astronomy, too, they were way ahead of other ancient peoples. Records show that the Mayas had observed the skies for centuries, keeping track of what they saw. They knew how long the moon took to go around the earth, and how long the planet Venus took to come back to the same place in the sky. They could predict eclipses, and they worked out a calendar of eighteen twenty day "months" and one five-day "month" that measured the year as accurately as the calendar we use today.
The Mayas are believed as the first people to figure out______.
选项
答案the use of zero with other numerals in counting
解析 在倒数第二段提到"In mathematics，they could count up to the millions．They were the first people to figure out how to use the zero with other numerals to make working with large numbers easier．” (数学方面，他们可以计算到百万位，并且首先将用数字零同其它数字结合以便于大数字的运算。)该段第一句是结论，第二句对第一句进行解释。
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