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课件网) Focusing on culture Discuss in groups. How did people count things before writing was invented They used their fingers. They might have used stones. Maybe they used shells. Look at the picture. In ancient times, some people used tally sticks to count things. Let’s read an article and find out more about counting. The story of numbers In ancient times, people developed different counting methods. One of the earliest was called “tally sticks”. Each “stick” (or pebble, or other counting tool) stands for a thing we want to count, such as an animal or a bag of rice. For each animal we want to count, we draw one stick. This is called a “one-to-one correspondence”. Tally sticks are easy to understand, but it can take a long time to write down large numbers. To write “1,000”, you have to draw a thousand tally sticks! Later, people created faster ways of writing numbers. One such system developed in ancient India. Instead of using tally sticks, people began using different abstract symbols to represent different numbers. Researchers do not know exactly how this happened, but some believe that the sticks slowly turned into symbols over the centuries. These Indian numerals became popular, and people in the Arab world started using them too. Thanks to the Arabs, this way of writing numbers spread to Europe and across the world. Nowadays, they are known as Arabic numerals. The ancient Romans wrote numbers in a different way. They used letters from their alphabet. For example, the number 12 is “XII” (10+1+1). The Roman numerals used to be the most common way of writing numbers in Europe. Today we still see them in many places, for example, on clock faces, on buildings or in books. But Roman numerals are not as common as Arabic numerals, maybe because they are too difficult to use! Read and summarize What is each paragraph mainly about Paragraph 1: Tally sticks—one of the earliest counting methods. Paragraph 2: The development of Arabic numerals. Paragraph 3: How Roman numerals work. Focusing on culture Read the article and complete the timeline. People used sticks to count. People used letters as numbers. Arabic numerals became popular. Focusing on culture In pairs, give a summary of the article with the help of the timeline below. People used sticks to count. People used letters as numbers. Arabic numerals became popular. Tally sticks are easy to ... but... It is too difficult to ... Instead of using tally sticks, Indians began using ... Focusing on culture Give each other feedback on the summary. What did your partner do well What can he / she improve 评价维度 内容要求 评分（1–5） 内容完整性 Content 复述内容是否涵盖了数字发展的主要阶段（如计数棍、印度数字、罗马数字、阿拉伯数字等）。 1 2 3 4 5 语言准确性 Accuracy 使用的词汇、语法和句型是否准确，是否符合英语表达习惯。 1 2 3 4 5 逻辑清晰度 Logic 复述过程是否逻辑清晰，是否能够按照时间顺序或因果关系清晰地表达数字发展的过程。 1 2 3 4 5 ... ...
