Hand gestures are a very useful communication tool because they are easy to learn and simple to perform 【小题1】 . Many hand gestures have been around for a very long time, though their meanings may have changed over the years. Here are the histories of three of our most commonly used hand signs.

Thumbs-up

Is there a more well-known sign of approval than the thumbs-up? 【小题2】. When one gladiator (角斗士) beat another, he would look to the crowd for their opinion: Should the loser be allowed to live? The crowd would respond by turning their thumbs up if they wanted the man to be saved or down if they wanted him to be killed —at least, that’s what people used to think. 【小题3】 What would an ancient Roman think if he saw the number of thumbs-up we give each other today?

V Sign

【小题4】. Captured English archers (弓箭手) would have their first two fingers cut off so they could no longer fight. Uncaptured archers would therefore raise these two fingers to the enemy to show them that they could— and would— still draw their bows. Centuries later, the sign was employed by those who were fighting against the Nazis to represent “V for Victory,” and later to mean “peace” by American activists in the 1960s. During this time, people in Japan also started using the V sign in photos.

High Five

On October 2, 1977, after Dusty Baker hit a home run, L.A Dodgers baseball player Glenn Burke raised his hand to greet his teammate. 【小题5】 From then on, they would often give high fives during their games, and the gesture caught on.

Country music is one of the most popular kinds of music in the United States today because it is about simple but strong human feelings and events — love, sadness, good times, and bad times. It tells real-life, stories and sounds the way people really talk. As life becomes more complicated (复杂), it is good to hear music about ordinary people.

Country music, sometimes called country-western, comes from two kinds of music. One is the traditional music of the people in the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. The other is traditional cowboy music from the west. The singers usually play guitars, and in the 1920s they started using electric guitars. At first city people said country music was low class. It was popular mostly in the South.

But during World War II, thousands of Southerners went to the Northeast and Midwest to work in the factories. They took their music with them. Soldiers from the rest of the country went to army camps (军营) in the South. They learned country music. Slowly it became popular all over the country.

Today country music is also popular everywhere in the United States and Canada — in small towns and in New York City, among black and white, and among educated and uneducated people. About 1, 200 radio stations broadcast country music twenty-four hours a day. English stars sing it in British English, and people in other countries sing it in their own languages. The music that started with cowboys and poor southerners is now popular all over the world.

A new study analyzing stone tools from southern China provides the earliest evidence of rice harvesting, dating to as early as 10，000 years ago. The researchers identified two methods of harvesting rice, which helped start rice domestication(家庭种植).

To harvest rice, some sort of tools would have been needed. “For quite a long time, one of the puzzles has been that harvesting tools have not been found in southern China from the early Neolithic period or New Stone Age (10，000－7，000 Before Present)—the time period when we know rice began to be domesticated” says lead author Jiajing Wang, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth.

“However, when archaeologists (考古学家) were working at several early Neolithic sites in the Lower Yangtze River Valley, they found a lot of small pieces of stone, which had sharp edges that could have been used for harvesting plants.”

“Maybe some of those small stone pieces were rice harvesting tools, which is what our results show.”

In the Lower Yangtze River Valley, the two earliest Neolithic culture groups were the Shangshan and Kuahuqiao.

The researchers examined 52 flaked (成薄片的) stone tools from the Shangshan and Hehuashan sites, the latter of which was occupied by Shangshan and Kuahuqiao cultures.

To determine if the stone flakes were used for harvesting rice, the team conducted use­wear and phytolith residue (植物石残渣) analyses.

For the use­wear analysis, micro­scratches (划痕) on the tools’ surfaces were examined under a microscope. The results showed that 30 flakes have use­wear patterns similar to those produced by harvesting siliceous (silica­rich) plants, likely including rice.

Through the phytolith residue analysis, the researchers analyzed the microscopic residue left on the stone flakes known as “phytoliths” (silica skeletons of plants). They found that 28 of the tools contained rice phytoliths.

“What’s interesting about rice phytoliths is that rice husk and leaves produce different kinds of phytolith, which enabled us to determine how the rice was harvested,” says Wang.

The findings from the use­wear and phytolith analyses illustrated that two types of rice harvesting methods were used—“finger­knife” and “sickle” techniques. Both methods are still used in southern China today.