SSS 2011-02-09
时间：2019-01-08 作者：英语课 分类：Scientific American(二)月
This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber. This will just take a minute.
Many of us have plenty of leisure time to devote to trying out the latest Wii game or even watching others play poker 1 on TV. But this focus on play is nothing new, says a researcher at Sweden's University of Gothenburg.
For her doctoral thesis, Elke Rogersdotter studied a 4000-year-old city called Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan. It was the largest Bronze-Age urban settlement in the region, thriving at the same time as the ancient Egyptian Middle Kingdom.
Play is not generally studied for its significance to ancient peoples. Rogersdotter says that archaeologists do often find game-related relics 2 at dig sites, but they're usually discounted as unimportant or considered a ritual object. But at this site, almost every tenth find was related to leisure—dice or gaming pieces.
And they're not uniformly scattered 3. The artifacts are clustered together in what might have been ancient, say, gaming halls or courtyards. Rogersdotter says that these games may have had real social significance and might be used to give us a better view of the lives of these Bronze-Age individuals. Who very well might have hoped to roll double-sixes four millennia 4 ago.
Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Cynthia Graber.
- He was cleared out in the poker game.他打扑克牌，把钱都输光了。
- I'm old enough to play poker and do something with it.我打扑克是老手了，可以玩些花样。
- The area is a treasure house of archaeological relics. 这个地区是古文物遗迹的宝库。
- Xi'an is an ancient city full of treasures and saintly relics. 西安是一个有很多宝藏和神圣的遗物的古老城市。
- Gathering up his scattered papers,he pushed them into his case.他把散乱的文件收拾起来，塞进文件夹里。