Задание 13 на тексты и заголовки

A) The Aztecs were great fighters. In fact, they lived to fight. When they arrived to the Valley of Mexico about 700 years ago, the best lands in the valley had already been taken by other Indian tribes. But this didn’t stop the Aztecs: They began to conquer these tribes. By 1500 they had conquered most of Mexico. Aztec boys were trained to be warriors. They were told, ‘The house you were born in is not your true home. Your true home is out there — on the battlefield.’ When they grew up, they stopped cutting their hair until they killed someone in battle!

B) The Aztecs had many gods and goddesses. They believed that they had to give them gifts. They sacrificed about 50000 people a year (that’s a thousand a week, six an hour or one every ten minutes!). Some of the people sacrificed were Aztecs. But most of the people they sacrificed were people captured from other tribes. The Aztecs had many ways of sacrificing people. Here’s just one of them. The Aztecs put the victim on the sacrificial stone,
opened his chest with a knife, took out the heart and gave it to the gods in a
stone vase!

C) Aztec life wasn’t all about sacrifice and wars. They also grew food, made clothes, pots and jewellery. They built towns, bridges and canals. They invented ‘floating gardens’, or chinampos. First, they built a series of rafts and tied them to the shore. Then they put earth on them. This was a very clever way to grow vegetables. It’s hard to imagine modern food without the plants grown in the Valley of Mexico. Thanks to the Aztecs, we can enjoy corn, chilli pepper, pumpkins, tomatoes, turkeys and chocolate (they grew cacao beans)!

D) Chocolate was a special drink that only rich Aztecs drank. Emperor Montezuma, for example, drank 50 cups of hot chocolate every day. It wasn’t sweet, however. It was bitter. Noble Aztecs wore very beautiful clothes decorated with ornaments and feathers. They also carried fans made of feathers. Common people were not allowed to carry fans and wear rich clothes. The Aztecs did not use letters. They wrote in pictures. Aztec literature was written down in books which folded like a fan.

E) By 1500 Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztec Empire, was probably the largest city in the world. When Spanish soldiers first arrived in Tenochtitlan, they were amazed. The streets in the capital city weren’t filled with rubbish and rotting food like the streets of Europe at that time. They were cleaned by thousands of sweepers every day. The Aztecs were the only people in the world at this time in history to have free schools for boys and girls. In Europe only rich people went to school but in the Aztec Empire every child went to school.

F) The Aztecs had a code of behaviour for everything. Here are just some of their rules. Do not mock the old. Do not mock the sick. Do not set a bad example. Do not interrupt the speech of another. Do not make wry faces. Wherever you go, walk with a peaceful air. Do not complain. Aztec boys could get married only after they reached the age of 20. Weddings were usually arranged by matchmakers (usually old women), and nobody asked the girl if she wanted to get married. The girl’s family gave a party for three or four days before the wedding.

G) The Aztecs had a religious calendar and a solar calendar. The religious year had 20 days and 13 numbers (260 days). The solar year had 18 months each 20 days long and 5 spare days (365 days). The most important Aztec god was Huitzilopochtli, their god of sun (and also of war). They truly believed that if they couldn’t make Huitzilopochtli happy, he would refuse to bring up the sun, and the world would end.

A) – 7
B) – 5
C) – 1
D) – 2
E) – 6
F) – 3
G) – 8