A World of History I have always been fascinated by borders, the limitations man puts on himself. While some borders are internal (the idea for instance that I cannot possibly y to the moon or run a marathon), it is the external ones that delight me. The history of man is a history of changing borders and adversities. illennia ago, man could not cross rivers. !ivers, thus, divided the entirety e ntirety of one group of man from the entirety of others. Then, engineers designed bridges" literally, nature was con#ue con#uered red,, and, and, with with the river river naviga navigable ble,, border borders s no longer longer needed needed to revolve around them. $o man came up with other borders. Through wars or negotiations, he made lines lines betwee between n lands. lands. $ome $ome were were still still geogra geographi phical cal"" mounta mountain in ranges ranges divide divided d nations, rivers and seas still made sense as boundaries, and deserts and tundras became vast borderlands. %ut other lines were arbitrary. &ines of longitude and latitude made straight'line separations. ew states were carved out of parts of old ones. Islands became part of existing lands or became sovereign nations. With those spaces carved out and claimed, man would occasionally go to war to ac#uire more space. %ut then man came up with technological solutions to the prob proble lems ms of sp spac ace. e. If we were were limi limite ted d by movi moving ng outwa outward rd,, we woul would d move move upward. $yscrapers became ubi#uitous in densely populated areas, and, *ust as brid bridge ges s had had con# con#uer uered ed one one ind ind of natu natural ral bord border, er, so towe towers rs of steel steel and and concrete van#uished the very idea of space. I am as interested in understanding how man separates and con#uers space as a geologist is in studying minerals. It is my passion. I believe we can learn more about the world by looing at maps than we can by traveling to every spot on the globe. In person, places loo limitless, but on maps, we reali+e that there is a relative dearth of everything in this world. We also learn part of the story of human interaction from maps. They explain to us something about why the world is the way it is. rom a map, I learn, for instance, that -enmar used to be a powerful enough nation to con#uer territories as vast as reenland. %y looing at name names s of plac places es,, I can can see see whic which h grou groups ps domi domina nate ted d and and when. when. &ooin ooing g at /merica east to west shows that the 0nglish dominated the 0ast 1oast, naming cities ew 2or and ew &ondon, while the $panish dominated the southwest, naming cities &os /ngeles and $an -iego. &iberia must have had an /merican inu inuen ence ce,, give given n the the capit capital al of onr onrov ovia ia (nam (named ed for 3ame 3ames s onr onroe) oe),, and and /lexandria, 0gypt proves that /lexander the reat was there. The region on the map indicating an Inner and 4uter ongolia alongside a state nown as ongolia suggests a history of interactions between the 1hinese dynasties and the ongol 5orde. /ll of this is found simply by perusing a map and poring over the details therein. To To open up an atlas, then, is to open up a world of history history.. 6. /s a. b. c.
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d. submitted e. triumphed /ccording to the author, each of the following have been used as national borders in the past or present 08109T a. deserts b. imaginary lines c. war+ones d. mountain ranges e. rivers /s used in paragraph :, the word dearth most nearly means a a. growth b. shortage c. passion d. plethora e. history /ccording to the author, maps a. provide insight into history b. show that man has con#uered borders c. demonstrate that certain areas in the world are unclaimed d. inform a viewer of how to get around a place e. indicate that little of the world is unexplored The author of this passage mostly sees borders as a. odious b. indelible c. obsolete d. inconse#uential e. mutable The author maes use of which of the following literary devices in this passage> a. $imile, characteri+ed by the maing of a comparison between two unrelated and dissimilar things, people, beings, places and concepts b. /llegory, characteri+ed by the use of symbolic representation to convey the meaning of an often abstract concept c. Irony, characteri+ed by the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning d. $ymbolism, characteri+ed by the use of an ob*ect or action that contains several layers of meaning, often concealed at ?rst sight e. /naphora, characteri+ed by the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive sentences, clauses, or phrases for rhetorical e @ect The authorBs tone in the passage is best described as a. didactic b. exultant c. philosophical d. introspective e. all of the above
