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請依下文回答第41題至第45題
Travel back in time to 1662, when Catherine of Braganza (daughter of Portugal’s King John IV) won the
hand of England’s newly restored monarch, King Charles II, with the help of a very large dowry that included
money, spices, treasures and the lucrative ports of Tangiers and Bombay. This 41 made her one very
important lady: the Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland. When she relocated up north to join King Charles,
she is said to have 42 loose-leaf tea as part of her personal belongings; it would also have likely been part of
her dowry. A fun legend has it that the crates were marked Transporte de Ervas Aromaticas (Transport of Aromatic
Herbs) – later 43 to T.E.A. That last bit probably isn’t true ( 44 believe the word ‘tea’ came from a
transliteration of a Chinese character), but what is for sure is that tea was already popular among the aristocracy of
Portugal due to the country’s direct trade line to China 45 its colony in Macau, first settled in the mid-1500s
(visit today to sample the other end of this culinary exchange, the Portuguese pastéis de nata, aka egg custard tarts).
41 hookup affair combat breakthrough
42 brewed fermented packed scented
43 abridged hybridized abbreviated hydrated
44 anthropologists psychologists geologists etymologists
45 beyond via for under
請依下文回答第46題至第50題
During the course of a year, the path of the Sun among the stars—the ecliptic—passes through 12 ancient
constellations. Because all but one of these 12 constellations represent living things, human or animal, the Greeks
called them the “circle of Animals”—in ancient Greek, kyklos zodiakos, now shortened to zodiac. The one star
pattern in the zodiac that doesn’t represent an animal is Libra, the Scales. However, the Greeks considered the stars
of Libra to be both a Scales and the Claws of the Scorpion, which follows Libra in the zodiac, so it’s appropriate to
include it in the circle as well.
The Greeks inherited the 12 constellations of the zodiac, as well as the concept of the zodiac as a singular
object, from the Babylonians. (Ancient Babylonia occupied south-central Mesopotamia on the floodplain between
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; today, it corresponds to southern Iraq.) The concept of the zodiac was closely
related to horoscope astrology—the system of predicting a person’s character and future from where the Sun and
planets were in the zodiac at the time of their birth—a practice which also came to Greece from Babylonia, though
it was a very late development in Mesopotamia. In fact the earliest known horoscope from Babylonia dates only to
410 BC. But by that time Babylonia had been under the rule of Persian kings for over a century. The ancient Persians
were Sun-worshippers, whereas traditionally the Babylonians had used a lunar rather than a solar calendar. Thus,
though it was indeed the Babylonians who conceived of the 12 ancient constellations in the path of the Sun as a
unit, which the Greeks then called the zodiac, they did so only as late as the 5th century BC under the influence of
Persian Sun-worship.
Horoscope astrology as we think of it today developed even later: It didn’t attain its final form and great
popularity until the 3rd century AD, when the social and political dislocations of the decaying Roman Empire made
the powerless multitudes vulnerable to anysuperstitionthat promised knowledge about the insecure future and some
illusion of control over it.