Stone Tools and Pottery Fragments Paragraph 1：Aside from ancient buildings, in sheer bulk the largest part of the archaeological record is made up of stone tools and pottery fragments (shards). Stone tools are the earliest known artifacts, having been first used more than two million years ago, and they have remained in use to the present day. When a chunk of fine-grain stone is struck with sufficient force at the proper angle with another rock or with a wood or bone baton, a shock wave will pass through the stone and detach a flake of the desired size and shape. In analyzing ancient stone tools, many archaeologists have mastered the skills needed to make stone tools themselves. Few things are sharper than a fragment struck from fine-grain flint or from obsidian (volcanic glass). Obsidian is so fine grained that flakes of it can have edges only about twenty molecules thick — hundreds of times thinner than steel tools. 1. The word “detach” in the passage is closest in meaning to O separate O sharpen O loosen O produce Paragraph 2：Through experimentation, some archaeologists are able to produce copies of almost every stone tool type used in antiquity. A common research strategy is to make flint tools, use them to cut up meat, saw wood, clean hides, bore holes, etc, and then compare the resulting wear traces with the marks found on ancient artifacts. Sometimes electron-scanning microscopes are used to study minute variations in these use marks. Some rough correspondence can be found between the types of uses and the characteristics of wear marks, but there are many ambiguities. 2. According to paragraph 2, archaeologists make and use their own stone tools in order to O find out how strong different types of stone tools are O find out what kinds of tasks such tools were used for in ancient times O study the copies under electron microscopes and to avoid damaging the originals O show that ancient multipurpose tools were practical and easy to use Paragraph 3：Ethnographic data from people who still use these tools, like one study of how the IKung hunter-gatherers use different styles of stone spear points to identify their different social groupings, indicate that even crude-looking stone tools may reflect a great deal of the social and economic structure. 3. Which of the following questions about the IKung is answered in paragraph 3? O Are the IKung rare among today’s hunter-gatherers in using stone tools? O Is the social structure of the IKung more complex than that of most hunter-gatherer societies? O Does the IKung’s use of several styles of stone tools have a social function? O Do the IKung use stone tools other than spear points? Paragraph 4：Ceramics were in use much later than the first stone tools (appearing in quantity in many places about 10,000 years ago), but they were used in such mass...
