Unit 2 Week 2 Skills Test

1       People need to communicate. The earliest human beings most likely communicated with sounds and gestures. Eventually, groups of people developed languages, which can express long or complicated messages that people cannot get across by just making sounds or by pointing. With language, people can have dialogues in which they communicate back and forth.

 

2       As cultures grew in different parts of the world, a new kind of problem arose as human interactions became more sophisticated. Because people were trading goods with each other, spoken language was not enough to answer every question or settle every dispute. People needed to communicate in a different way. So, people began to write.

 

The Earliest Writing

3       Some of the earliest known writing was found in Egypt. It was a list of items delivered to a temple, written on bone and ivory using Egyptian hieroglyphs, or symbols that represented consonants. This list dates to about 3200 B.C.

 

4       At about the same time, the ancient Sumerians were drawing pictures of animals on wet clay in Mesopotamia. These symbols represented syllables. The clay, left to bake in the sun, would then become a permanent record of the temple’s goods.

 

5       For thousands of years, people continued to draw pictures on stone and make marks in clay. Eventually, the heavy clay and stone tablets became a nuisance, so people developed ways to make writing more portable. They began writing on papyrus (made using plant material) or parchment (made using dried animal skin) so that records could be easily transported. Historians believe that people did all of this so that they could better communicate with one another and to pass their history down to future generations.

 

6       As cultures became more complex, people began trading over longer and longer distances. The Phoenicians, for example, navigated long distances overseas to trade ivory and cedar. They developed a new way of writing around 1500 B.C. It was based on something similar to words rather than pictures. Our modern phonics and phonetics have roots in this method of writing.

 

Changing—and Dying Out?

7       Linguists are people who study language. They can tell you that languages change. If you looked at something written in English 700 years ago, you would be surprised at how difficult it is to read. The structure of the language was different. Some of the words look familiar, but many seem strange. The shapes of some Old English letters are very different from the way you learned to write them.

 

8       Languages can also disappear. A language or a form of writing dies out when there are no longer enough people who understand and use it. This happened to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Egyptians covered the walls of their immense temples and tombs with stories about their gods, goddesses, and pharaohs. But by the fifth century A.D., hardly anyone could read these hieroglyphs.

 

9       Most scholars believed that hieroglyphs were just pictures. They thought each symbol stood for an idea or a thing. But when the Rosetta Stone was found in 1799, clues started to fall into place. The Rosetta Stone is a tablet on which information was written in three different forms: in hieroglyphs, in an Egyptian script called Demotic, and in Greek. By studying the tablet, experts could begin to solve the problem of deciphering hieroglyphs. In 1822, a young Frenchman named Jean François Champollion figured out that almost all the hieroglyphs stood for sounds, not ideas or things. And that discovery solved the “riddle” of the Stone.

 

Language Today

10     Language is still changing. As people experience new things, new words are invented, and meanings of old words shift. Much of our writing is done on computers or other electronic devices. Some people predicted that our use of paper would die out as computers took over. They imagined a paperless world. But that prediction has not yet come true. We still put a lot of our writing on paper. Even though electronic books, magazines, and newspapers may now be available, paper will be with us for a long, long time to come.

• I read the text

• I didn't read the text yet

Tags

CCSS.RI.5.1

CCSS.RI.5.2

CCSS.RI.5.4

What does dispute mean as it is used in paragraph 2?

2       As cultures grew in different parts of the world, a new kind of problem arose as human interactions became more sophisticated. Because people were trading goods with each other, spoken language was not enough to answer every question or settle every dispute. People needed to communicate in a different way. So, people began to write.

• disagreement

• explanation

• idea

• solution

Tags

CCSS.L.5.4A

CCSS.RI.5.4

Match each peice of information with the section of the passage in which it appears.

1       People need to communicate. The earliest human beings most likely communicated with sounds and gestures. Eventually, groups of people developed languages, which can express long or complicated messages that people cannot get across by just making sounds or by pointing. With language, people can have dialogues in which they communicate back and forth.

 

2       As cultures grew in different parts of the world, a new kind of problem arose as human interactions became more sophisticated. Because people were trading goods with each other, spoken language was not enough to answer every question or settle every dispute. People needed to communicate in a different way. So, people began to write.

 

The Earliest Writing

3       Some of the earliest known writing was found in Egypt. It was a list of items delivered to a temple, written on bone and ivory using Egyptian hieroglyphs, or symbols that represented consonants. This list dates to about 3200 B.C.

 

4       At about the same time, the ancient Sumerians were drawing pictures of animals on wet clay in Mesopotamia. These symbols represented syllables. The clay, left to bake in the sun, would then become a permanent record of the temple’s goods.

 

5       For thousands of years, people continued to draw pictures on stone and make marks in clay. Eventually, the heavy clay and stone tablets became a nuisance, so people developed ways to make writing more portable. They began writing on papyrus (made using plant material) or parchment (made using dried animal skin) so that records could be easily transported. Historians believe that people did all of this so that they could better communicate with one another and to pass their history down to future generations.

 

6       As cultures became more complex, people began trading over longer and longer distances. The Phoenicians, for example, navigated long distances overseas to trade ivory and cedar. They developed a new way of writing around 1500 B.C. It was based on something similar to words rather than pictures. Our modern phonics and phonetics have roots in this method of writing.

 

Changing—and Dying Out?

7       Linguists are people who study language. They can tell you that languages change. If you looked at something written in English 700 years ago, you would be surprised at how difficult it is to read. The structure of the language was different. Some of the words look familiar, but many seem strange. The shapes of some Old English letters are very different from the way you learned to write them.

 

8       Languages can also disappear. A language or a form of writing dies out when there are no longer enough people who understand and use it. This happened to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Egyptians covered the walls of their immense temples and tombs with stories about their gods, goddesses, and pharaohs. But by the fifth century A.D., hardly anyone could read these hieroglyphs.

 

9       Most scholars believed that hieroglyphs were just pictures. They thought each symbol stood for an idea or a thing. But when the Rosetta Stone was found in 1799, clues started to fall into place. The Rosetta Stone is a tablet on which information was written in three different forms: in hieroglyphs, in an Egyptian script called Demotic, and in Greek. By studying the tablet, experts could begin to solve the problem of deciphering hieroglyphs. In 1822, a young Frenchman named Jean François Champollion figured out that almost all the hieroglyphs stood for sounds, not ideas or things. And that discovery solved the “riddle” of the Stone.

 

Language Today

10     Language is still changing. As people experience new things, new words are invented, and meanings of old words shift. Much of our writing is done on computers or other electronic devices. Some people predicted that our use of paper would die out as computers took over. They imagined a paperless world. But that prediction has not yet come true. We still put a lot of our writing on paper. Even though electronic books, magazines, and newspapers may now be available, paper will be with us for a long, long time to come.

• "The Earliest Writitng"

• The Rosetta Stone is discovered.

• "Language Today"

• People communicate using papyrus.

• "The Earliest Writing"

• People communicate using electronic devices.

• “Changing—and Dying Out?”

• The Phonecians develop a writing system.

Tags

CCSS.RI.5.1

CCSS.RI.5.3

What does portable mean as it is used in paragraph 5?

5       For thousands of years, people continued to draw pictures on stone and make marks in clay. Eventually, the heavy clay and stone tablets became a nuisance, so people developed ways to make writing more portable. They began writing on papyrus (made using plant material) or parchment (made using dried animal skin) so that records could be easily transported. Historians believe that people did all of this so that they could better communicate with one another and to pass their history down to future generations.

• easy to read

• easy to deliver

• used to impress people

• displayed in public places

Tags

CCSS.L.5.4A

CCSS.RI.5.4

Which phrase from paragraph 5 hints at the meaning of portable?

5       For thousands of years, people continued to draw pictures on stone and make marks in clay. Eventually, the heavy clay and stone tablets became a nuisance, so people developed ways to make writing more portable. They began writing on papyrus (made using plant material) or parchment (made using dried animal skin) so that records could be easily transported. Historians believe that people did all of this so that they could better communicate with one another and to pass their history down to future generations.

• “make marks on clay”

• “made using plant material”

• “could be easily transported”

• “down to future generations”

Tags

CCSS.L.5.4A

CCSS.RI.5.4

What are two ways in which the timeline supports the passage?

• It explains some of Champollion’s other accomplishments.

• It outlines specific dates of events discussed in the passage.

• It provides more detail about the writing on the Rosetta Stone.

• It shows when English was developed compared to languages discussed in the passage.

• It introduces other languages not discussed in the passage that led to the development of English.

Tags

CCSS.RI.5.2

CCSS.RI.5.8

How does the author use a problem-and-solution text structure to explain why people first started writing?

• by explaining that heavy tablets were causing problems

• by explaining problems that spoken language could not solve

• by explaining how writing prevented languages from dying out

• by explaining that scholars had difficulty understanding early writing

Tags

CCSS.RI.5.5

CCSS.RI.5.8

Which sentence from the passage supports the answer you gave in the last question about why people first started writing?

• “Because people were trading goods with each other, spoken language was not enough to answer every question or settle every dispute.” (paragraph 2)

• “As cultures became more complex, people began trading over longer and longer distances.” (paragraph 6)

• “If you looked at something written in English 700 years ago, you would be surprised at how difficult it is to read.” (paragraph 7)

• “The shapes of some Old English letters are very different from the way you learned to write them.” (paragraph 7)

Tags

CCSS.RI.5.1