History and Civilization

The unit opens with a famous kind of picture: five figures walking in a line from left to right, each a little more upright than the one before. They are labelled Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. The first is hairy, stooped and ape-like; the last is a modern person, standing straight.

These are scientific names: the first word is the genus (Homo means “human” in Latin), the second the species. Habilis means “handy”, because this species was thought to have made the first stone tools; erectus means “upright”; sapiens means “wise”: that is us.

Before you read

The reading starts with a photo of a huge round stone, carved all over in rings of signs and pictures, with a face in its middle.

What kind of text it is

The Maya Empire is a history text: it gives facts about a people of the past, mostly in the past simple (The Maya excelled at…, Most of the great cities were abandoned…). It is in eight short paragraphs, numbered I to VIII, each about one topic. That is why task D asks you to match each paragraph to its topic: in a well-written text, every paragraph has one main idea, usually given in its first sentence.

The text, part by part

I. The Maya at their height

The Maya lived in the tropical lowlands (hot, low, forest land) of what is now Guatemala, in Central America. Their power and influence reached their peak around the sixth century AD. They excelled at (were very good at) farming, pottery, hieroglyph writing (writing in picture signs), making calendars and mathematics, and they left an astonishing number of buildings and works of art. Yet most of their great stone cities were abandoned (left empty) by 900 AD.

II. Where they lived

The Maya were one of the most dominant (powerful and important) indigenous (native) peoples of Mesoamerica, the region of today’s Mexico and Central America. Other peoples there were scattered; the Maya lived together in one block of land: the whole Yucatán Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, parts of the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas, and the west of Honduras and El Salvador. Living close together, in one area, kept them relatively safe from invasion by other Mesoamerican peoples.

III. Three regions

Their land had three sub-areas, each with its own environment and culture:

1. the northern lowlands, on the Yucatán Peninsula;
2. the southern lowlands, in the Petén district of northern Guatemala and the nearby parts of Mexico, Belize and western Honduras;
3. the southern highlands, in the mountains of southern Guatemala.

The Maya of the southern lowlands are the most famous. They reached their peak in the Classic Period (250 to 900 AD) and built the great stone cities and monuments that have fascinated explorers and scholars ever since.

IV. The beginnings

The first Maya villages date from about 1800 BC. The earliest Maya were farmers, growing corn (maize), beans, squash (a kind of pumpkin) and cassava. From about 300 BC they spread through the highlands and the lowlands. In the same early period rose the first great civilization of Mesoamerica, the Olmecs, and the Maya took from them many religious and cultural ideas, including their number system and their famous calendar. Already in this Pre-classic time the Maya were building pyramids and cities and carving words into stone monuments.

V. The golden age

The Classic Period, from about 250 AD, was the Maya’s golden age. There were about 40 cities, each with 5,000 to 50,000 people; at its peak the whole population may have reached 2 million. Excavations (digging carefully to find old buried things) have uncovered plazas (open squares), palaces, temples, pyramids and courts for a ball game, which mattered in Maya religion and politics. Around every city lived a large population of farmers who fed it.

VI. Religion, kings and learning

The Maya were deeply religious. They worshipped many gods of nature: of the Sun, the Moon, rain and corn. At the top of society were kings, who claimed to be related to the gods, and the throne passed from father to son (hereditary succession). The kings were thought to be mediators (go-betweens) between the gods and the people, and they led the elaborate (detailed and complicated) ceremonies of Maya religion.

The Maya built temples and palaces as stepped pyramids, decorated with carved pictures (reliefs) and writing (inscriptions), which made them famous as the great artists of Mesoamerica. Their religion also drove their science: they made great advances in mathematics and astronomy, used the zero, and kept a calendar of 365 days.

Early researchers thought the Maya were a peaceful people of priests and writers. But a thorough (careful and complete) study of their carvings showed a less peaceful side: the city-states fought each other, and torture and human sacrifice were part of their religion.

VII. The mystery of the fall

From the late eighth to the end of the ninth century, something unknown shook Maya civilization to its foundations. One by one, the Classic cities of the southern lowlands were abandoned, and by 900 AD civilization there had collapsed. Nobody knows exactly why, but scholars have several competing theories. The first: by the ninth century the Maya had exhausted (used up) their environment so badly that it could no longer feed so many people.

VIII. More theories

The second theory: constant war between the city-states broke down the alliances (friendly agreements) of war, family and trade that held them together, and the old system of royal families with them. As the holy lords lost their stature (importance), their complex rituals fell into chaos. The third: a terrible change in the environment, such as a very long, severe drought. Cities like Tikal, which needed rainwater both for drinking and for watering crops, would have been hit hardest. The text ends by saying that all three may have played a part in the downfall of the southern Maya.

Words from the text

Words linked here open in English Vocabulary, where you can see an example and practice them in the word game. The meanings below are the ones the words have in this text.

Word	Meaning here
excel	to be very good at doing something
hieroglyph	a picture or sign that stands for a word, a syllable or a sound
abandon	to leave a place for good
dominant	more powerful or important than the others
indigenous	belonging to a place from the earliest times; native
concentration	a lot of something in one place
invasion	an army or a large group entering a place by force
excavation	digging the ground to find old buried buildings or objects
hereditary	passed from parent to child
succession	people or things that follow one another in order; the passing of a title (such as king) to the next person
elaborate	very detailed and complicated
thorough	careful and complete, missing nothing
sacrifice	killing an animal or a person as a gift to a god
exhaust	to use something up completely
alliance	an agreement between groups to work together for their good
stature	the importance and respect a person has
chaos	complete disorder and confusion
catastrophic	causing terrible damage
drought	a long time with little or no rain
downfall	the loss of power, wealth or importance; a fall from a high position

A. Match the words

B. Crossword

C. Choose the correct answer

D. Match the paragraphs

E. Why study history?

In every English word of two or more syllables, one syllable is said louder, longer and higher: it is stressed. Dictionaries mark it with a small raised mark ˈ before the stressed syllable. Here, the stressed syllable is in capitals.

Word	Syllables	Stress on
succession	suc-CES-sion /səkˈseʃn/	the 2nd
excavation	ex-ca-VA-tion /ˌekskəˈveɪʃn/	the 3rd
inscription	in-SCRIP-tion /ɪnˈskrɪpʃn/	the 2nd
concentration	con-cen-TRA-tion /ˌkɑːnsnˈtreɪʃn/	the 3rd
excel	ex-CEL /ɪkˈsel/	the 2nd
architecture	AR-chi-tec-ture /ˈɑːrkɪtektʃər/	the 1st
cultural	CUL-tur-al /ˈkʌltʃərəl/	the 1st
exhausted	ex-HAUST-ed /ɪɡˈzɔːstɪd/	the 2nd

Two patterns help with thousands of words:

1. Words ending in -tion or -sion are stressed on the syllable just before it: suc-CES-sion, in-SCRIP-tion, ex-ca-VA-tion, con-cen-TRA-tion (and ed-u-CA-tion, in-for-MA-tion).
2. Endings like -al, -ed and -ing don’t move the stress: CUL-ture → CUL-tur-al; ex-HAUST → ex-HAUST-ed.

A. A village, ten years later

The two photos show the same place ten years apart. In the first, a few small white houses stand among hills and green fields, with railway tracks curving through the middle. In the second, the fields are gone: the valley is full of new buildings with grey-tiled roofs, a large red building and a pond, with forested hills behind.

To compare a past state or habit with now, use used to (or didn’t use to) for the past and the present simple for now:

• There used to be fields here, but now there are houses.
• There didn’t use to be a big building, but now there is one.

B. Six pictures, one story

The six pictures are mixed up. All take place on a narrow log bridge over a river, wide enough for only one animal:

• Top left: a white goat with orange patches and a plain white goat walk towards each other from the two ends of the log.
• Top right: a brown goat and a white goat butt heads in the middle of the log, front legs in the air.
• Middle left: the white goat lies down on the log, and the goat with orange patches steps over it.
• Middle right: a brown goat and a white goat start across the log from opposite ends.
• Bottom left: the log is empty; two goats struggle in the water below.
• Bottom right: the two goats walk away from each other at the two ends of the log: the patched goat has crossed to the right, the white one to the left.

Used to + the base verb talks about a habit or a state in the past that is no longer true:

• I used to play the piano. (I played it regularly then; I don’t now.)
• There used to be a forest around the village. (It was there then; it isn’t now.)

	Form	Example
Positive	subject + used to + base verb	She used to travel a lot.
Negative	subject + didn’t use to + base verb	She didn’t use to drink tea.
Negative (stronger)	subject + never used to + base verb	She never used to read newspapers.
Question	Did + subject + use to + base verb?	Did you use to swim in the river?
Wh-question	Wh-word + did + subject + use to + base verb?	What did you use to do after school?

So used to has the -d in a positive sentence; after did or didn’t it is use to, without the d, because did already shows the past (just as did you go?, not ✗ did you went?).

Used to has no present form: for a habit now, use the present simple (I usually walk to school), never ✗ I use to walk to school.

A. Samita, then and now

Here is what Samita said five years ago and what she says today:

Five years ago: “I travel a lot.” “I play the piano.” “I’m very lazy.” “I don’t like cheese.” “I’ve got a dog.” “I’m a hotel receptionist.” “I’ve got lots of friends.” “I never read newspapers.” “I don’t drink tea.” “I go to a lot of parties.”

Today: “I eat a lot of cheese.” “I work very hard these days.” “I work in a bookshop now.” “I don’t know many people these days.” “I don’t go away much these days.” “My dog died two years ago.” “I read a newspaper every day.” “I haven’t been to a party for ages.” “I haven’t played the piano for years.” “Tea’s great! I like it now.”

B. Rewrite with used to

A. The Fox and the Stork

A fable is a short story, usually with animals that talk, that teaches a lesson, its moral. This one is told in Aesop’s fables, from ancient Greece.

The story, in short. A fox who always laughed at a stork’s looks invites him to dinner, planning a trick. He serves soup in a shallow (not deep) dish: the stork can only wet the tip of his long bill, while the fox laps it all up and makes a show of enjoying it. The stork is hurt but stays calm. Not long after, he invites the fox to dinner and serves a fish dinner that smells delicious, in a tall jar with a narrow neck. The stork eats easily with his long bill; the fox can only lick the outside of the jar. When the fox loses his temper, the stork calmly tells him not to play tricks on his neighbors unless he can stand the same treatment himself.

Like every good story, it has these parts:

Part	In The Fox and the Stork
Title	names the story (to be given in task A)
Characters	the fox, the stork
Setting	a forest; two dinners
Beginning	the fox plans a trick and invites the stork
Problem	the soup in a shallow dish: the stork goes hungry
Turning point	the stork invites the fox back
Ending	the fish in a narrow jar: the fox goes hungry
Moral	do not play tricks on others unless you can bear the same yourself

B. Stories from outlines

An outline gives only the bones of a story. To write it, keep every point in order, add names, a place and a time, join the points with time words (one day, then, after that, at last), add what people said and felt, and finish with the moral.

Before you read

The three pictures are a Nepali one-thousand-rupee note with elephants on it, a gold-colored Nepali coin with a farmer ploughing, and a United States hundred-dollar note with the face of Benjamin Franklin.

What kind of text it is

The History of Money is an informative article that follows one thing, money, through time, from the oldest form to the newest. So it is full of dates, given as BCE (Before the Common Era, the same years as BC) and CE (the Common Era, the same as AD), and of time words: before, subsequently, eventually, by the 1970s.

The article, part by part

Money is a means of exchange

The use of money is as old as civilization. Money is a means of exchange: something everyone accepts in return for goods, so coins and notes are only items of exchange. Its form has changed many times, and it is still changing.

Barter, cattle and grain

Before money, commerce (buying and selling) was barter: direct exchange of one product for another. Subsequently (later), livestock, especially cattle, and plant products such as grain came to be used as money in many societies. Cattle are probably the oldest money of all, because people domesticated animals before they cultivated crops (the article’s reason; in fact, farming and herding began at roughly the same time). The earliest evidence of banking is in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), between 3000 and 2000 BCE, where temples stored grain and other valuables used in trade.

Money from nature

Some of the first currencies came from nature. Cowrie shells were first used as money about 1200 BCE. They may seem a strange choice, but they had real advantages: they were similar in size, small and durable (they last a long time). The mollusks (soft-bodied sea animals) that make them live in the warm coastal waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, yet trade carried them so far that even some European countries accepted them. Other money from nature: wampum (strings of shell beads) among Native Americans, whale teeth in Fiji, and huge limestone disks on Yap Island in the Pacific, which are still part of the island’s culture.

The first coins

Metal was used as money in Babylon before 2000 BCE, but standardized coins (all of a fixed weight, certified, that is, guaranteed by a ruler) probably came only in the 7th century BCE. Many historians say the first regulated coins were made in the kingdom of Lydia, in present-day Turkey, under King Alyattes (610–560 BCE). They were of electrum, a natural mix of gold and silver, roughly shaped like beans, and stamped with the royal symbol, a lion. His son, Croesus, reformed the money, making separate coins of pure gold and pure silver. Soon coins appeared elsewhere.

Leather money

From about the 6th century BCE, leather and animal hide were made into money. Early Rome is said to have used it, and it was also found in Carthage, in what is now France, and in Russia, which is believed to have used leather money until the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725 CE). The Chinese emperor Wudi (141–87 BCE) made money from the skins of the white stags (male deer) in his own park, fringed (with a border of hanging threads) and decorated with elaborate designs. Leather money is no longer used, but it may have left a lasting legacy: the idea of money that is worth something only because a ruler says so, like our paper notes.

Paper money

Paper was invented in China, so it is fitting that China also introduced paper money, probably during the reign of Emperor Zhenzong (997–1022 CE). It was made from the bark of mulberry trees: “so, in a sense, money really did grow on trees!”, the article jokes. By the late 18th and early 19th centuries paper money had spread round the world. But most of it was not money in the old sense: it was a set of promissory notes, written promises to pay a fixed amount of gold or silver, and these were key to the growth of banks.

Fiat money and the gold standard

Money brings problems. One is fiat money: currency issued on the order of a sovereign government (fiat is Latin for “let it be done”), which, unlike a gold or silver coin, has no intrinsic value (nothing valuable in itself: a note is only paper). A country can print as much as it likes, and some did, until their money was almost worthless. So in 1821 the United Kingdom, then the leader of world finance, adopted the gold standard: each unit of money was kept equal to a fixed amount of gold, so a government couldn’t print too much, and countries trusted each other’s money in trade. Germany, France and the United States followed. But the system had drawbacks: it tied every country to the others, so a depression (a long period when business is very bad) or inflation (prices rising) abroad spread at home. After the Great Depression (1929–1939 CE), countries rethought it, and by the 1970s no country’s money was tied to gold any longer.

Money today

The 21st century has brought new forms: digital payment and virtual currency such as bitcoin. The article ends with a question: will paper notes and coins soon disappear?

Words from the text

Word	Meaning here
barter	trading by exchanging goods, not money
subsequently	later; afterwards
precede	to happen before something
domestication	taming animals (or plants) to live with and serve people
durable	lasting a long time without breaking
mollusk	a soft-bodied animal, usually with a shell, such as a snail or a clam
regulate	to control something by means of rules
reign	the time during which a king, queen or emperor rules
crudely	simply, without much skill or detail
fringe	to form a border around something
legacy	something handed down from the past
promissory note	a written promise to pay a sum of money
fiat	an official order from someone in authority
sovereign	free to govern itself; completely independent
intrinsic	belonging to a thing itself; essential
inflation	a general rise in prices, so money buys less
depression	a long time when business is very bad and many people have no work

A. Find the words

B. The timeline of money

C. Answer the questions

D. Money in twenty years

A. Before you listen

The recording

You will hear a famous poem, I Remember, I Remember, by the English poet Thomas Hood (1799–1845). A man remembers the house where he was born and the garden around it: the window where the morning sun came in, the flowers, a tree his brother planted, a swing, and tall fir trees. Then, in the last lines of each stanza, he compares that happy boy with the sad man he is now. Read the questions in B and C first, then listen, as many times as you need.

Words you will hear: morn (morning, in poems); a wink (a very short moment); borne … away (carried away; to bear); lily-cups (lily flowers, shaped like cups); lilac (a bush with sweet-smelling purple or white flowers); robin (a small brown bird with a red breast); laburnum (a small tree with hanging yellow flowers); swallow (a small, fast bird with a forked tail); fir (a tall, cone-shaped evergreen tree); brow (forehead); ’tis (it is); heav’n (heaven).

B. Complete the sentences

C. Choose the correct answers

D. Your favorite memory

The poem, stanza by stanza

Here is what each of its four stanzas says.

Stanza 1. The poet remembers the little window where the morning sun looked in, never too early and never making the day too long: as a child, every day was just right. But now, he often wishes he had died in the night (the night had borne my breath away). The sudden turn from a happy picture to a wish to die shows how unhappy his grown-up life is.

Stanza 2. He remembers the garden’s flowers, so bright that they seemed made of light, the lilacs where a robin built its nest, and the laburnum his brother planted on his birthday. That tree is still alive: the things of his childhood go on, though the child he was is gone.

Stanza 3. He remembers his swing: flying through the air, he felt as free as a swallow, and his spirit was as light as feathers. Now it is heavy, and he has a fever (from worry, or real illness: Hood was often sick) that even summer pools could hardly cool.

Stanza 4. As a child, he thought the tops of the tall fir trees touched the sky. Now he knows that was childish ignorance (a child’s not knowing). But knowing more brings him little joy: he feels farther from heaven now than when he was a boy, both further from the sky and further from the innocence and happiness of childhood.

To tell what happened in the past, English has three main tenses. Each tells the reader when an action happened compared with the others.

Tense	Form	Use	Example
Past simple	verb in the past (V2): phoned, began	a finished action; actions one after another	Karen phoned me three times.
Past continuous	was/were + -ing	an action in progress at a past moment; often interrupted	While I was studying, Karen phoned me.
Past perfect	had + past participle (V3)	an action finished before another past action or time	When we got to the party, most people had already left.

Put them on one line of time:

• The past continuous is the long background: They were playing football…
• The past simple is the event that happens in it: …when the storm started.
• The past perfect is something already over before that: I had finished the shopping when I met Manoj. (First the shopping, then the meeting.)

Words that go with each:

• while usually goes with the longer action, in the past continuous: While she was working in India, she began to learn Hindi.
• when usually goes with the short action, in the past simple: I was doing my homework when the telephone rang.
• already, just, ever, never, by the time and before often go with the past perfect: It was the best movie I’d ever seen. (I’d here is I had.)
• since with the past perfect counts from an even earlier time: She had known him since they were children.

A. Study the sentences

B. Complete the sentences

C. Correct the story

An essay gives your ideas on one topic in organized paragraphs:

1. an introduction: what the topic is, and your main idea (history is worth learning, because…);
2. body paragraphs, one reason each, with an example;
3. a conclusion: your main idea again in new words, and a final thought.

Use linking words (firstly, moreover, for example, however, in conclusion), the present simple for general truths (history teaches…) and the past for examples (the Maya cut down…).

A semicolon (;) is stronger than a comma and weaker than a full stop. It has two main jobs.

1. Joining two complete sentences that are closely linked, without and, but or so:

• The participants in the first batch were paid; those in the second were unpaid.
• The southern cities were abandoned; the northern ones went on for centuries.

Each side must be a complete sentence (an independent clause: a subject and a verb that could stand alone). The semicolon shows that the two ideas belong together, often as a contrast.

2. Separating items in a list when the items already have commas inside them:

• The color order was red, yellow, blue; blue, yellow, red; or yellow, red, blue.
• The team visited Bhaktapur, Nepal; Tikal, Guatemala; and Sardis, Turkey.

Here commas alone would make a muddle (Bhaktapur, Nepal, Tikal, Guatemala…: how many places?); the semicolons mark where each item ends.

Practice on this unit in the style of the final exam. Try each one as in the exam, then open the answer.