Decide what title is more suitable for the text. 1. Technological and political achievements.

1. Technological and political achievements.

2. Vital natural element

3.Water and the Development of Civilization

4. The human need for water

5. Myths concerned with water

3. Find in the text words having the similar meaning to:

1. Water diversion

2. Insufficient

3. Mixture

4. Undelayable catastrophe

5. Result in

Answer the questions about the text.

1. Why is one of the crucial components regulating human life and survival?

2. What has obliged men to adapt to the challenging environment and fight systematically and intelligently against arid­ity or flood?

3. Why were the first human settlements founded on riverbanks?

4. What led to high technological and political achievements?

5. What has rivers been connected with ?

These are answers to the questions about the text. Write the questions.

1. to high technological and political achievements.

2. Regions with no rain.

3. Rivers are indispensable, life-ensuring natural elements.

4. People were depen­dent on the river waters to survive.

5.It provides food, essential quantities of water and the possibility to travel.

Are the following sentences true or false? If they are false correct them.

1. People were indepen­dent on the river waters to survive, so they didn’t have to invest huge amounts of human effort into the construction of canals, dams and dikes.

2. Success to control natural forces led to immediate disasters or gradual degradation of the environment, including floods, changing river courses, meagre harvests and famine as a result of excess salt concentration in the soil.

3. Regions with either complete absence or threatening abundance of water have obliged men to move to other regions.

4. Myths concerned with this basic need are widespread in various cultures, rejecting this major reality of human life.

5. The first large agricultural civilization has grown out of this challenging; difficult but still very rich environment.

Translate into Russian.

Text 4.

Read the text.

Without any doubt, people were always preoccupied with the quality of food consumed. This is an essential prerequisite for health, and dietary attention is not restricted to our modern over-consuming societies. Whether we consider the staple crops common in each con­tinent, or the transition from foraging to farming, or religious re­strictions concerning food preparation or consumption, we realize that a bio-historical investigation of human culture is very intensely connected with nutritional matters. Nutrition is a basic element of cul­tural identity, and it influences the way of living, social structure (large-scale agriculture engenders centralized urban societies as opposed to nomadic hunters), and health.

In 1999, a very original exhibit was organized at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, as a result of an exem­plary international and interdisciplinary collaboration. Through bioarchaeological, zoological, anthropological, and archaeologi­cal analyses, the nutritional backgrounds of two major cultures which flourished in Greece during the second millennium B.C. were exam­ined: the Minoans in Crete and the Mycenaean, who inhabited many regions in continental Greece.

The study began with the examination of ceramic artifacts, the clay vessels used for the preparation and consumption of food. Or­ganic remains on the clay shards were analyzed. The results of the analysis were astonishing, proving that every single examined shard revealed some kind of information about the products it had once contained. Thus, through chemical analysis, long speculated theo­ries about the nutritional habits of early societies would be checked and re-examined upon a purely scientific basis. In addition, skeletal remains from 227 tombs and various sites were examined, in search of the protein content of diet (stable isotope analysis). As a result, a generally held theory about Bronze Age diet, that meat was reserved for high days and holidays, has been disproved. All Bronze Age results indicate that Minoans and Myceneans had diets rich in ani­mal protein. This has been shown for surprise was that the popula­tion buried in the cemetery of Armenoi in Central Crete was not eating fish. A Neolithic bowl from Cave Gerani in Rethymnon con­tained vegetable stew.

Honey was used as a sweetener for drinks. Wine was resinated, sometimes with pine resin, proving that the Greek resin is more than 3,500 years old. Mixed fermented beverages (wine, beer and mead) have been attested for both Crete and the Mainland. Perfume industries have been traced, using oil of iris, an extremely valuable product even today.

The production of olive oil in Crete, the consumption of meat, leafy vegetables, fruit, olive oil, stew, lentils in various palatial set­tlements of Crete and of pork, cereals, pulses and honey at Mycenae­an Thebes, are revealed by the analysis of the shards. This infor­mation can be compared to iconographic representations or refer­ences in later texts — like Homer—and contribute towards a lively bioarchaeological examination of the organic past of these major European civilizations.

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