20 câu trắc nghiệm Tiếng Anh 11 Unit 8. Cities - Reading and Writing - Friends Global có đáp án

Read the passage carefully and choose the correct answers.

The growth of cities, the construction of hundreds of new factories, and the spread of railroads in the United States before 1850 had increased the need for better illumination. But the lighting in American homes had improved very little over that of ancient times. Through the colonial period, homes were lit with tallow candles or with a lamp of the kind used in ancient Rome – a dish of fish oil or other animal or vegetable oil in which a twisted rag served as a wick. Some people used lard, but they had to heat charcoal underneath to keep it soft and burnable. The sperm whale provided superior burning oil, but this was expensive. In 1830 a new substance called “camphene” was patented, and it proved to be an excellent illuminant. But while camphene gave a bright light it too remained expensive, had an unpleasant odor, and also was dangerously explosive.

Between 1830 and 1850, it seemed that the only hope for cheaper illumination in the United States was the wider use of gas. In the 1840s, American gas manufacturers adopted improved British techniques for producing illuminating gas from coal. But the expense of piping gas to the consumer remained so high that until the mid–nineteenth century gas lighting was feasible only in urban areas, and only for public buildings for the wealthy. In 1854, a Canadian doctor, Abraham Gesner, patented a process for distilling a pitch like mineral found in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia that produced illuminating gas and an oil that he called “kerosene” (from “keros”, the Greek word for wax, and “ene” because it resembled camphene). Kerosene, though cheaper than camphene, had an unpleasant odor, and Gesner never made his fortune from it. But Gesner had aroused a new hope for making illuminating oil from a product coming out of North American mines.

Read the passage carefully and choose the correct answers.

A leading question among anthropologists is: what exactly led to the development of human cities? Basically, modern humans have existed on earth for over 100,000 years. Yet it is only in the last 8,000 years that they have begun to gather in significant numbers and form cities. Prior to that period, humans existed in small family or tribal groups, generally consisting of fewer than 100 individuals. What, then, led humans to make the dramatic shift from living in small groups to living in large, organized cities? It seems that the development of cities required a particular set of circumstances.

First, it required a minimum population density. For much of their early history, humans existed only in small numbers. This is due to the fact that early humans relied on hunting and gathering wild foods for their survival. Even the most fertile land would only support a relatively small number of predators, so it was not until humans began to practice agriculture that they were able to gather in large enough numbers to form cities.

Furthermore, the development of a city could only be possible if a large number of people shared a common language, culture and religion. Without such unifying factors, a cooperative, peaceful existence among large numbers of people would have been impossible.

Finally, it seems that early humans needed to be faced with a large problem, which one small group of individuals could not solve on its own. Only when large-scale cooperation was needed to overcome a problem would humans come together to form cities.