High-Q | סימולציה 11

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סימולציה מס' 11

אנגלית – פרק ראשון

Text II (Questions 18-22)

Road building (or highway engineering) is as old as history itself, and had achieved a certain sophistication even in ancient civilization. Strabo recorded that Babylon had paved roads over 4,000 years ago and we have details of the construction of their royal processional route built in about 620 BC. Another impressive example is the stone faced sloping causeway built by the Pharaoh 5 Cheops in about 2700 BC in order to move the massive limestone blocks used on the Great Pyramid at Giza. Possibly the oldest road in Europe is the dual carriageway (built in about 2000 BC) connecting Cortina in the south-east of Crete with Knossos in the north of the island. In Britain, although the ridgeways and trackways came into being in about 2800 BC, no formal roads were constructed until Roman times. The Romans are generally acknowledged as 10 the first real road builders and these early roads were noted for their directness: they were usually constructed as a series of straight sections connecting individual military stations. Also they were generally built on embankments to give a commanding view of the surrounding countryside, giving rise to the term ‘highway’. Transportation in all its forms still presents the modern civil engineer with a wide range of 15 problems. Road engineering is very different from many of the other modern sciences: we measure the life of a road in tens or even hundreds of years, whereas we measure the life of most new products in months. Also, in this electronic age, when microminiaturization packs an entire computer into a matchbox, the highway engineer still calculates his quantities of materials in millions of cubic meters or tons and his labor force in tens of thousands of people. 20