Year 7 History Ancient China Starter Sheet

Transcript:Year 7 History Ancient China Starter Sheet:
Year 7 History Ancient China Starter Sheet Readings Year 7 Hist - Ancient China 1 – Geography Reading Activity Write down the heading. ________________________________________________ Number the paragraphs. Circle the metalanguage words : civilisations, continent, deposits, emperors, fertile, inventions, irrigation, Loess Write down the words you don’t know the meaning of or find difficult to spell. ___________________________________________________________________ Highlight 5 nouns. Highlight five verbs. Write down 3 things you have learnt from reading this passage. ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________ Geography China was one of the most successful of the ancient civilisations. The Chinese today can boast that their civilisation has the longest recorded history. The Chinese dominated the eastern part of the Asian continent and developed their civilisation independently from people in Europe and the Middle East, such as the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. The Chinese rice-based farming system was highly successful and was located around two major rivers, the Yellow and the Yangtze. As their civilisation grew, the Ancient Chinese came up with many new inventions such as paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass. Three geographical elements that gave rise to early civilisation in China Loess soil Loess is a silty type of sediment that has been deposited by the wind over a long period of time. It is very fertile, provides good drainage and is also strong enough to be dug out to form caves that people can live in. China has one of the world’s largest deposits of loess, known as the Loess Plateau .Loess erodes very easily, and the Yellow River, which travels through the Loess Plateau, picks up and carries away a lot of loess with it. The Yellow River The Yellow River takes its name from the colour of the loess that it carries downstream and deposits on a large plain. These deposits also elevate the river in its riverbed above the surrounding plain. The Yellow River has been both a source of wealth, with rich fertile plains on which to plant crops, and a source of danger, when it breaks its banks, flooding and killing many people. The Central Plain The Central Plain is sometimes referred to as the ‘cradle of Chinese civilisation’ as it is where a number of early Ancient Chinese societies were located. The plain’s main features are that it is vast, it is flat, and the Yellow River runs through it. Irrigation works allowed these early societies to grow cereal crops such