2020수능특강 영어 20강 본문

20강

1

For over a million years humans lived in small, mobile groups gathering their food from the wild and hunting animals. When resources permitted, they came together in larger groups and occasionally, when they could rely on particularly rich sources of food, they became semi‑sedentary. Then, in a relatively short period of time after the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 BCE, this stable and well‑balanced way of life began to change. Across the world humans slowly began to settle in one location and replace gathered plants with ones grown on special plots of land while a few animals were also domesticated. In less than ten thousand years this new, agricultural way of life had spread around the globe. Hunting and gathering groups survived but they were increasingly pushed into more marginal areas and those that the farmers could not utilize. By the twentieth century only a few groups of such people survived to be studied by anthropologists. The adoption of farming was the most fundamental change in human history and led on to all that we call civilization and recorded human history.

 

2

Most historians and philosophers agree that it was the teachings of the seventeenth‑century French philosopher René Descartes that ushered in the thinking of the modern age and began the unraveling of the ancient link between emotions and health. In his reaction to the religious wars and the resulting chaos that spread across Europe for most of his adult life, Descartes formulated the concepts of rationalism and the necessity of visible proof that were to become the founding principles of modern science. In that era, emotions seemed to be a thing of magic, fleeting and undefinable in the framework of the science of the day. In Descartes's orderly division of the world into rational and irrational―provable and unprovable―emotions and their relationship to health and disease clearly fell into the latter domain. And there they remained until scientific tools powerful enough to challenge the categorization could rescue them.

 

3

Fashions and social pressures shift. Throughout almost the first three‑quarters of the 20th century, log houses in the United States, as in Norway, were considered to be rough, primitive, and low‑class housing. As a consequence, weatherboards were widely used to mask earlier log construction. However, in the prosperous 1960s, when many individuals were seeking a challenge to the status quo, fashions changed and social pressure relaxed. These changes encouraged persons who wished to ride the crest of changing fashion, to seek out hidden log buildings, to remove the siding, and to enjoy the glow of their visual confirmation of society's rediscovery of its heritage. Needless to say, this was not a widely pursued innovation, but enough affluent people did do so in their quest to maintain their position as societal leaders. As a result, the log house reasserted its position as an American icon, regardless of the ethnic background of its original builders.

 

4

A suitable way to describe how geologists perceive rocks and landscapes is the metaphor of a palimpsest—the term used by medieval scholars to describe a parchment that was used more than once, with old ink scraped off to allow a new document to be inscribed. Invariably, the erasure was imperfect, and traces of the earlier text survived. These remnants can be read using X‑rays and various illumination techniques, and in some cases are the only sources of very ancient documents (including several of the most important writings of Archimedes). In the same way, everywhere on Earth, traces of earlier eras persist in the contours of landforms and the rocks beneath, even as new chapters are being written. The discipline of geology is similar to an optical device for seeing the Earth text in all its dimensions. To think geologically is to hold in the mind's eye what is not only visible at the surface but also present in the subsurface, what has been and will be.