10. According to the passage, why was the site of Bab edh-Dhra a potential area for urban development? ( D )

(a) It offered defensible borders.

(b) The fertility of the soil favored agriculture.

(c) Mineral deposits favored trade agreements.

(d) Water resources favored settlement.

TOP  

Passage Three

     History, in its broadest sense, is the totality of all past events. Historiography is the written record of what is known of human lives and societies in the past and how historians have attempted to understand them. The concern of all serious historians is to collect and record facts about the human past and often to discover new facts. Historians know that the information they have is incomplete, partly incorrect, or biased, and that it requires careful attention. They try to sift through the facts to discover patterns of meaning addressed to the enduring questions of human life.

    Except for the special circumstance in which historians record events they themselves have witnessed, historical facts can only be known through intermediary sources. These include testimony from living witnesses; narrative, legal, financial, and other written records; and the unwritten information derived from the physical remains of past civilizations. The relation between evidence and fact is rarely simple and direct. Historians must assess their evidence with a critical eye. In this process, the historian must respect the facts, avoid ignorance and error as far as possible, and create a convincing, intellectually satisfying interpretation.

    Western historiography originated with the ancient Greeks, and the standards and interests of the Greek historians dominated historical study and writing for centuries. In the 5th century BC Herodotus and Thucydides recorded contemporary or near-contemporary events in prose narratives of striking style, depending as much as possible on eyewitnesses or other reliable testimony for evidence. Roman historian Sallust developed a political analysis, based on human motivation, which had a long and pervasive influence on historical writing. During the 4th century AD, Christianity introduced new subjects and approaches to history, mingling secular and religious history with moral interpretation.

    With the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, many monasteries kept continuing annals that recorded events year by year, with no attempt at artistic or intellectual elaboration. The renewal of classical education in 15th-century Italy encouraged a secular and realistic approach to political history. While the classical traditions had emphasized literary skill and interpretation at the expense of basic research, many European scholars from the 16th century onward systematically collected sources for their histories.

    In the 18th century all facets of civilization were included in a historiography of sweeping intellectual scope, although some of the era's historians displayed a rather careless evaluation of evidence. With the work and influence of 19th-century historians, history achieved its identity as an independent academic discipline with its own critical method and approach. By the 20th century, history was firmly established in European and American universities as a professional field, resting on exact methods and making productive use of archival collections and new sources of evidence.

    In recent years, historiography has been affected by the belief that no accumulation of facts constitutes history as an intelligible structure and that no historian can be a totally objective recorder of reality. Furthermore, the scope of history has expanded immeasurably, both in time, as archaeology and anthropology have provided knowledge of earlier ages, and in breadth, as fields of inquiry such as economic history and the history of ideas have emerged and refined their methods and goals.

(530 words)