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托福阅读高分练习素材:欧洲政府职能的转变

2017-09-27 15:22:08来源:网络

  为了帮助考生更加熟悉托福阅读考试内容,在考试中有更加理想的发挥,下面新东方在线托福网为大家带来托福阅读高分练习素材:欧洲政府职能的转变一文,希望对大家备考冲刺有所帮助。更多精彩尽请关注新东方在线托福网!

  Ancient Athens

  One of the most important changes in Greece during the period from 800 B.C. to 500 B.C. was the rise of the polis, or city-state, and each polis developed a system of government that was appropriate to its circumstances. The problems that were faced and solved in Athens were the sharing of political power between the established aristocracy and the emerging other classes, and the adjustment of aristocratic ways of life to the ways of life of the new polis. It was the harmonious blending of all of these elements that was to produce the classical culture of Athens.

  Entering the polis age, Athens had the traditional institutions of other Greek protodemocratic states: an assembly of adult males, an aristocratic council, and annually elected officials. Within this traditional framework the Athenians, between 600 B.C. and 450 B. C., evolved what Greeks regarded as a fully fledged democratic constitution, though the right to vote was given to fewer groups of people than is seen in modem times.

  The first steps toward change were taken by Solon in 594 B. C., when he broke the aristocracy's stranglehold on elected offices by establishing wealth rather than birth as the basis of office holding, abolishing the economic obligations of ordinary Athenians to the aristocracy, and allowing the assembly (of which all citizens were equal members) to overrule the decisions of local courts in certain cases. The strength of the Athenian aristocracy was further weakened during the rest of the century by the rise of a type of government known as a tyranny, which is a form of interim rule by a popular strongman (not rule by a ruthless dictator as the modern use of the term suggests to us). The Peisistratids, as the succession of tyrants were called (after the founder of the dynasty, Peisistratos), strengthened Athenian central administration at the expense of the aristocracy by appointing judges throughout the region, producing Athens’ first national coinage, and adding and embellishing festivals that tended to focus attention on Athens rather than on local villages of the surrounding region. By the end of the century, the time was ripe for more change: the tyrants were driven out, and in 508 B C a new reformer, Cleisthenes, gave final form to the developments reducing aristocratic control already under way.

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