|
选修八 Module 4 阅读理解提速练——练速度 (限时：20分钟) A (2016·东北三校二模)CANYOUIMAGINEHOWHARDITWOULDBETOREADSENTENCESLIKETHIS? Every one of us gets so used to punctuation marks that not many of us give them a second thought. Actually, the ancient Greeks wrote this way. The lack of punctuation marks probably didn't bother good readers, though. As they read, they just put pauses where they fit best. Also at this time, sentences switched directions. A sentence read from left to right. The next one read right to left, and then left to right again, etc. The ancient Romans sometimes punctuated like this: They·put·something·that·can·separate·words·in·a·sentence. The word punctuation actually comes from this idea and the Latin word puncture, which means a dot. When the 5th century arrived, there were just two punctuation marks: spaces and points. The spaces separated words while the points showed pauses in reading. Then in the 13th century, a printer named Aldus Manutius tried to standardize punctuation. He always used a period for a complete stop at the end of a sentence. He used a slash (/) to indicate a short pause. Over time, that slash was shortened and curled, and it became the modern comma (逗号)． Since that time, other marks have enlarged the punctuation family. The exclamation mark (感叹号) comes from the Latin word io. It means “exclamation of joy”. The question mark originally started out as the Latin word questio, meaning question. Eventually, scholars put it at the end of a sentence to show a question. | 
