Page 21 - m reading 일부

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iBT Practice 2

TOEFL Reading REVIEW HELP BACK NEXT HIDE TIME
00:20:00

Language Families

Historians have always faced one particular difficulty. The earliest societies to read and
write seem to have surfaced around 5,000 years ago. How could historians learn about earlier
ones that had no written records? To make the problem even more difficult, most of the physical

evidence which scientists normally use to learn about a society, such as the remains of houses
5 • and tools, no longer exists for these early societies. And yet scientists have managed to learn a
great deal about these early societies. What has made this possible is the study of languages.

As you probably know, many languages have words that appear to be quite similar. For
example, “police” in English is the same as “policia” in Spanish. By studying these similarities,
we know that some languages are related; that is, they all come from an earlier common

10 • language. One example of this would be Spanish, French, and Italian, which all came from an
earlier language, Latin. If different groups of people have a common ancestral language, we can

guess that they also had a common group of ancestors. By tracing these language families back
thousands of years, we can trace back to our earliest ancestors.
One of the largest language families is the Indo-European language family. Today the

15 • Indo-European language family consists of 431 languages. Over three billion people speak those
languages, and they are spread all over the world. But 7,000 years ago, they all had a common

group of ancestors who spoke the same language and lived together in a single society. Over
many years, that society separated and moved into new areas, and that single Indo-European
language slowly changed into the hundreds of different languages they speak today.

20 • Studying languages can tell us much more than simply what groups of people have
common ancestors. It can also tell us what the lives of those common ancestors were like. By
studying what kinds of words the languages in a language family have in common, we can

learn a great deal about our early ancestors. For example, we know that the Indo-Europeans
rode horses, were herders and shepherds (they raised cows and sheep), wrote poems about

25 • the battles they fought, and worshiped a sky deity. And we know all of this just by studying the
words we speak every day!

28 M TOEFL READING