2026年教师职称《初中英语》考前点题卷一

No one is sure how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids near Cairo.But a new study suggests they used a little rock’n’roll.Long-ago builders could have attached wooden poles to the stones and rolled them across the sand, the scientists say.
“Technically, I think what they’re proposing is possible,” physicist Daniel Bonn said.
People have long puzzled over how the Egyptians moved such huge rocks.And here’s no answer.On average, each of the two million big stones weighed about as much as a large pickup truck.The Egyptians somehow moved the stone blocks to the pyramid site from about one kilometer away.
The most popular view is that Egyptian workers slid the blocks along smooth paths.Many scientists suspect workers first would have put the blocks on sleds.Then they would have dragged them along paths.To make the work easier, workers may have lubricated the paths either with wet clay or with the fat from cattle.Bonn has now tested this idea by building small sleds and dragging heavy objects over sand.
Evidence from the sand supports this idea.Researchers found small amounts of fat, as well as a large amount of stone and the remains of paths.
However, physicist Joseph West thinks there might have been a simpler way, who led the new study.West said, “I was inspired while watching a television program showing how sleds might have helped with pyramid construction.I thought, ’Why don’t they just try rolling the things？’” A square could be turned into a rough sort of wheel by attaching wooden poles to its sides, he realized.That, he notes, should make a block of stone “a lot easier to roll than a square”.
So he tried it.
He and his students tied some poles to each of four sides of a 30-kilogram stone block.That action turned the block into somewhat a wheel.Then they placed the block on the ground.
They wrapped one end of a rope around the block and pulled.The researchers found they could easily roll the block along different kinds of path.They calculated that rolling the block required about as much force as moving it along a slippery path.
West hasn’t tested his idea on larger blocks but he thinks rolling has clear advantages over sliding.At least, workers wouldn’t have needed to carry cattle fat or water to smooth the paths.

The men and women of Anglo-Saxon England normally bore one name only.Distinguishing epithets were rarely added.These might be patronymic, descriptive or occupational.They were,however, hardly surnames.Heritable names gradually became general in the three centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066.It was not until the 13th and 14th centuries that surnames became fixed, although for many years after that, the degree of stability in family names varied considerably in different parts of the country.
British surnames fall mainly into four broad categories: patronymic, occupational, descriptive and local.A few names, it is true, will remain puzzling: foreign names, perhaps, crudely translated,adapted or abbreviated; or artificial names.
In fact, over fifty per cent of genuine British surnames derive from place names of different kinds, and so they belong to the last of our four main categories.Even such a name as Simpson may belong to this last group, and not to the first, had the family once had its home in the ancient village of that name.Otherwise, Simpson means “the son of Simon” , as might be expected.
Hundreds of occupational surnames are at once familiar to us, or at least recognisable after a little thought: Archer, Carter, Fisher, Mason, Thatcher, Taylor, to name but a few.Hundreds of others are more obscure in their meanings and testify to the amazing specialization in medieval arts, crafts and functions.Such are “Day” (old English for breadmaker) and “Walker” (a fuller whose job was to clean and thicken newly made cloth).
All these vocational names carry with them a certain gravity and dignity, which descriptive names often lack.Some, it is true, like “Long” “Short” or “Little” , are simple.They may be taken quite literally.Others require more thinking; their meanings are slightly different from the modern ones.“Black” and “White” implied dark and fair respectively.“Sharp” meant genuinely discerning,alert, acute rather than quick-witted or clever.
Place-names have a lasting interest since there is hardly a town or village in all England that has not at some time given its name to a family.They may be picturesque, even poetical; or they may be pedestrian, even trivial.Among the commoner names which survive with relatively little change from old-English times are “Milton” (middle enclosure) and “Hilton” (enclosure on a hill).