墨尔本PTE素材库——Silk Road Transported Goods and Disease

墨尔本PTE素材库——Silk Road Transported Goods and Disease

中文批注

这段Podcast主要讲了丝绸之路不仅仅促进了物品交换和商业的发展，也很有可能是古代疾病的一个传播途径。文章中有很多生词，内容也是历史和病理学相关，是很好的Re-tell Lecture，Summarize Spoken/Written Text的练习材料。

大家可以尝试能不能用一句话总结本段录音的内容，注意75个字的限制。亦或者尝试回答以下这些问题：

• How did infectious disease transmit through the Silk Road?
• What evidence did the archaeologists find?

澳大利亚语言学院整理的墨尔本PTE素材库，旨在帮助各位PTE考生整理一些可以用作PTE考试题型练习的素材，可以帮助大家提升dictation、re-tell lecture、Summarize  spoken text 等等题型的能力哦！PTE市面上的素材并不多，练习的题目也不多，所以AIL整理的这些PTE素材库，真的是帮助非常大的哦！

【Key Vocabulary】

latrine n. 公共厕所

hard evidence 铁证，确凿的证据，真凭实据

trading route贸易路线，商队路线

pathogen n. 病原体

transmission n. 传播，传送

infectious adj. 传染的，传染性的

excavate v. 发掘，挖掘

relay station 中继站

paleopathologist 古病理学家

archaeologist n. 考古学家

feces n. 排泄物

adherent to 附着

parasite n. 寄生虫

viable adj. 可行的，能养活的

strain n. 张力，品种，种类

Full Transcript

Silk Road Transported Goods–and Disease

By Cynthia Graber

A 2,000-year-old latrine in China provides the first hard evidence that people carried diseases long distances along the ancient trading route.

For thousands of years, what’s called the Silk Road was a group of land and sea trade routes that connected the Far East with South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe. Of course, when humans travel they carry their pathogens with them. So scientists and historians have wondered if the Silk Road was a transmission route not just for goods, but for infectious disease.

Now we have the first hard evidence of ancient Silk Road travelers spreading their infections. The find comes from a 2,000-year-old latrine that had first been excavated in 1992. The report is in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. [Hui-Yuan Yeh et al., Early evidence for travel with infectious diseases along the Silk Road: Intestinal parasites from 2000 year-old personal hygiene sticks in a latrine at Xuanquanzhi Relay Station in China]

“So the site is a relay station on the Silk Road in northwest China. It’s just to the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, which is a large arid area just to the east of the Taklamakan desert, and not far from the Gobi Desert. So this is a dry part of China.”

Piers Mitchell, paleopathologist at the University of Cambridge, and one of the study’s authors, along with his student Ivy Yeh and colleagues in China.

In the latrine, archaeologists found used hygiene sticks wrapped with cloth. These were used for what you think they were used for.

“This excavation was great because the cloth was still preserved and the feces was still adherent to the cloth on some of the sticks. So the archaeologist kept these sticks in the museum. And so my Ph.D. student, Ivy Yeh, who’s first author on the paper, she went out to China took some scrapings from the feces adherent to the cloth. So we were then able to analyze that down the microscope when she brought it back to Cambridge.”

Where they found eggs from parasites—including one from a liver fluke.

“And that’s the exciting one because that’s only found in eastern and southern China and in Korea, where they have marshy areas that have the right snails and the right fish.”

The fluke needs snails and fish for its lifecycle, but there were no such snails or fish in this dry region of china. So the unlucky traveler who harbored the parasite had to have transported the disease to that spot.

“Well firstly it tells us that people were doing very long journeys along the Silk Road and you might think that’s obvious. But no one really knew how long people were traveling. Some people may have been trading, only going short distances selling their goods on to the next person. And so the goods might have gone all the way along the Silk Road, but people might not. But we know that some people were doing huge distances….

“Secondly it shows that this was, would be a viable route for the spread of those other infectious diseases like Bubonic plague and leprosy and anthrax that people had previously suggested might have been spread between East Asia and Europe along the Silk Road. Because modern genetic analyses have shown similarities between the strains of one end and the other.”

Mitchell says there’s much more work to be done to better understand the spread of diseases around the world. Perhaps from analyzing skeletons—or various other kinds of remains—to be found along the Silk Road.

(Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/silk-road-transported-goods-and-disease/)