IELTS Reading 練習 馬雅文明崩潰之謎（含題目+詳解）

The Mystery of the Maya Collapse

A. For roughly six centuries, between about 250 and 900 AD, the lowland rainforests of what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize supported one of the most sophisticated civilisations of the pre-modern world. Classic Maya kings ruled tens of cities, raised limestone temples taller than the surrounding canopy and developed an elaborate writing system, astronomy and a calendar accurate to within hours over thousands of years. Then, with surprising speed, the system collapsed. By 950 AD most of the great southern lowland centres — Tikal, Palenque, Copán — had been abandoned, the inscriptions had ceased and the population of the region had fallen by perhaps ninety per cent.

B. Early explanations tended to single out one cause. Soil exhaustion, peasant revolt and military pressure from northern neighbours have all been proposed at various times. Each explanation captures part of what archaeologists now observe in the record but none, considered alone, accounts for the speed and the geographic scope of the collapse, which affected dozens of independent kingdoms more or less simultaneously.

C. A breakthrough came from an unexpected source: cores drilled from the bottom of Lake Chichancanab, in northern Yucatán, in the 1990s. The chemical composition of layered sediments preserves a record of past rainfall going back several thousand years. The cores showed that the period 800-1000 AD was the driest the region had experienced in eight millennia, with at least three multi-decade droughts so severe that the lake itself shrank significantly. Subsequent cave-stalagmite records from Belize have confirmed and refined the picture.

D. Drought alone, however, does not explain why some Maya regions weathered the same climate while the southern lowlands did not. Northern Yucatán, in fact, recovered after a period of difficulty and produced its own flowering at Chichén Itzá in the tenth century. Most current scholars therefore favour a "cascade" model: prolonged drought stressed agriculture in the densest, most over-extended lowland kingdoms; food shortages weakened royal authority based on rain rituals; warfare between starving rivals accelerated the loss of population; and emigration to better-watered regions deepened the decline.

E. What collapsed, in this view, was not the Maya as a people — millions of their descendants still live in the same region today and speak Mayan languages — but a particular form of political organisation: the divine-king-and-temple-city system of the Classic period. The mystery is no longer why anything ended, but why a sophisticated society that had flourished through earlier difficulties was unable to absorb this particular combination of pressures.

The passage has five paragraphs, A-E. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, and D from the list below.

• i. A continuing people, a vanished political form
• ii. Multiple causes acting in cascade
• iii. Single-cause theories and their limits
• iv. A century of cultural flowering
• v. Sediment cores reveal an unprecedented drought
• vi. Why northern cities escaped untouched

1. Paragraph B
2. Paragraph C
3. Paragraph D

1. Most great southern lowland centres had been abandoned by 950 AD.
2. The drought between 800 and 1000 AD was the worst the region had experienced in eight thousand years.
3. Northern Yucatán suffered no difficulty during the drought period.

Complete the sentences below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

1. Sediment cores from Lake Chichancanab preserve a record of past ______.
2. According to current scholars, prolonged drought weakened royal authority that had been based on rain ______.
3. Most descendants of the Classic Maya still speak ______ languages today.

1. iii — Single-cause theories and their limits Paragraph B reviews soil exhaustion, peasant revolt and military pressure as single explanations and concludes that "none, considered alone, accounts for the speed and the geographic scope". The heading captures both halves.

2. v — Sediment cores reveal an unprecedented drought Paragraph C is entirely about the lake cores showing "the driest the region had experienced in eight millennia". "Unprecedented" paraphrases "driest in eight millennia".

3. ii — Multiple causes acting in cascade Paragraph D introduces the "'cascade' model" explicitly and lists drought, food shortage, warfare and emigration acting in sequence. Direct match.

4. TRUE Supporting sentence: "By 950 AD most of the great southern lowland centres — Tikal, Palenque, Copán — had been abandoned". Direct paraphrase.

5. TRUE Supporting sentence: "the period 800-1000 AD was the driest the region had experienced in eight millennia". Eight millennia = eight thousand years.

6. FALSE Supporting sentence: "Northern Yucatán, in fact, recovered after a period of difficulty". The passage explicitly mentions "a period of difficulty" — not "no difficulty". Direct contradiction.

7. rainfall Supporting sentence: "The chemical composition of layered sediments preserves a record of past rainfall". Single-word answer.

8. rituals Supporting sentence: "food shortages weakened royal authority based on rain rituals". Single-word answer; the question supplies "rain".

9. Mayan Supporting sentence: "millions of their descendants still live in the same region today and speak Mayan languages". Single-word answer; the question supplies "languages".