سؤال قراءة ستيب محلول — فهم التفاصيل (تدريب 7135)

(1)Rome is known for many things: its military conquests, its civic architecture, temples, roads, emperors, and sculpture. Yet none of these would have been possible without the most vital resource of all: water. Now, as then, water is life, and without the effective distribution, there would have been no great Roman civilization. Even until relatively modern times, Roman techniques to collect, store, and channel water over huge distances remained unsurpassed. (2)Such technology, was not, of course, invented from scratch by the Romans, and many earlier Mediterranean people had poured resources and expertise into managing water. On the island of Crete, the Minoans developed sophisticated rain- harvesting and filtering systems as early as the middle of the third millennium B.C. Crelan water management techniques were later adopted across the Greek- speaking world, and examples abound of tunnels, drainage systems, and cisterns, sometimes of considerable size. (3)Yet although the water management tradition Rome inherited was rich and extensive, no previous system came close to the sophistication and reach of the Roman aqueduct. Striding across the landscape from Spain to Syria, these awe- inspiring structures not only carried life and livelihood but also proclaimed the greatness of Rome. (4) Timeline: Bringing Water to Rome 312 B.C. The censor Appius Claudius Caecus builds Rome’s first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia, which runs almost entirely underground. 144 B.C. Work begins on Rome’s longest aqueduct, the 56-mile-long Aqua Marcia. The city has doubled in size since the last channel was built. 33 B.C. After the chaotic civil wars Octavian (later Emperor Augustus) improves Rome’s water by building the Aqua Julia. 19 B.C. Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’s son-in-law, oversees the building of the Aqua Virgo to supply the thermal baths in the Campus Martius. A.D. 38-52 Caligula begins a new aqueduct to meet increased demand from baths. Claudius nishes the work and calls it Aqua Claudia. A.D. 109 Trajan builds the Aqua Traiana, which brings water from near Lake Bracciano to supply Rome’s new suburbs, known today as Trastevere. (5)The Lifeline of Empire Aqueducts were costly public works, and not all Roman cities necessarily required them. Some cities, such as Pompeii, had their water needs met by wells or public and private cisterns dug beneath houses. Some cisterns could reach a colossal size, such as the Basilica Cistern (Yerebatan Sarnıcı) in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) and the Piscina Mirabilis in Miseno, Italy. The latter, built to provide drinking water to the Roman navy in the Bay of Naples, had a capacity of just under half a million cubic feet. Its colossal vault is held up by 48 pillars. Some cities needed much more water than cisterns could provide. Booming populations such as Rome’s—thought to have reached one million in the first century A.D.— needed an entire system of aqueducts not only for drinking water but also for supplying ornamental public fountains and baths. (6)The popular image many people have of an aqueduct is probably something like the spectacular bridge structure of the Pont du Gard in southern France. These aboveground arches were, in fact, only a small section of an aqueduct system. Roman engineers would create a gentle downward slope all the way from start to finish, since the only force powering the water’s progress was gravity. Only valleys or gullies necessitated a monumental arched structure. For most of its route, water ran along underground or ground-level channels. Rome, for example, was supplied by aqueducts totaling 315 miles in length. Of that, 269 miles ran underground and 46 total miles aboveground; however, only about 36 miles consisted of arched structures—just under 12 percent in all. Who developed rain harvesting in the third millennium B.C.?