Page 21 - Reading Success B7

The Mayas were agricultural people who never grasped the principle of the
wheel. Yet they rose to artistic and intellectual heights that possibly no other

culture in the ancient Americas attained. They could calculate the movements of
heavenly bodies and predict lunar eclipses far into the future with amazing

accuracy. Their writing was still in a crude picture form, but they had books, made
of long strips of bark paper, which they folded like an accordion into pages.

Their systems of mathematics were unrivaled even in ancient Egypt. They used
only three symbols: a dot for one, a bar for five, and shell shape for zero. They

could count in millions and used the concept of zero 1,000 years before the
Europeans. Yet it enabled them to calculate in hundreds of millions.

How they developed from village communities of farmers and fishermen around

1000 B.C. or earlier into a mighty culture is not clear, but they did. Gradually, the
Mayas developed a distinctive class system of hereditary nobles, rulers, and

priests; free working commoners; and slaves, usually prisoners taken in battle.
During the Golden Age, the Mayas built magnificent cities with wide boulevards

and plazas. Their architecture was of startling beauty, with temple-crowned
pyramids silhouetted against the brilliant jungle foliage. For some unknown

reason, the Mayan civilization disintegrated and their cities were left abandoned.
In the next few centuries the Mayan civilization that had flowered so brilliantly

had vanished.

Main Idea

What is the main idea of this story?

a. why the Mayan civilization disappeared

b. the architecture of the Mayan civilization
c. some of the advancements made by the Mayan civilization

d. the Mayan system of mathematics

24_Reading Success B 7