共用题干
第二篇

The Iceman

On a September day in 1991,two Germans were climbing the mountains between Austria and Italy. High
up on a mountain pass,they found the body of a man lying on the ice.At that height(10,499 feet,or 3,200
meters),the ice is usually permanent,but 1991 had been an especially warm year. The mountain ice had
melted more than usual and so the body had come to the surface.
It was lying face downward. The skeleton（骨架）was in perfect condition , except for a wound in the
head.There was still skin on the bones and the remains of some clothes.The hands were still holding the
wooden handle of an ax and on the feet there were very simple leather and cloth boots.Nearby was a pair of
gloves made of tree bark（树皮）and a holder for arrows.
Who was the man?How and when had he died?Everybody had a different answer to these questions.
Some people thought that it was from this century,perhaps the body of a soldier who died in World War Ⅰ,
since several soldiers had already been found in the area.A Swiss woman believed it might be her father,who
had died in those mountains twenty years before and whose body had never been found.The scientists who
rushed to look at the body thought it was probably much older,maybe even a thousand years old.
With modem dating techniques,the. scientists soon leamed that the iceman was about 5,300 years old.
Bom in about 3300 B.C.,he lived during the Bronze Age in Europe.At first scientists thought he was proba-
bly a hunter who had died in an accident in the high mountains.More recent evidence,however,tells a differ-
ent story.A new kind of X-ray shows an arrowhead still stuck in his shoulder. It left only a tiny hole in his
skin,but it caused internal damage and bleeding. He almost certainly died from this wound,and not from the
wound on the back of his head.This means that he was probably in some kind of a battle.It might have been
part of a larger war,or he might have been fighting bandits. He might even have been a bandit himself.
By studying his clothes and tools,scientists have already leamed a great deal from the iceman about the
times he lived in.we may never know the full story of how he died,but he has given us important clues to the
history of those distant times.

The body of the iceman was found in the mountains mainly because__________.
A:he was lying on the ice
B:two Germans were climbing the mountains
C:the melted ice made him visible
D:he was just on a mountain pass