The Silk Road Lesson 28 of the geography course of Mova's primary school: 22 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 Think of passing a note along a row of desks: nobody walks the whole way, each pupil hands it to the next. 1 The Silk Road worked like that. 3 Caravans of two-humped Bactrian camels crossed cold deserts from one oasis to the next, resting at inns called caravanserais about a day's march apart. 4 Oasis cities such as Samarkand, Bukhara and Kashgar grew rich in between. 5 The road carried more than silk: horses, paper, glass and spices, and also ideas such as Buddhism going to China and papermaking going west. 6 It carried disease too: the Black Death is thought to have spread west along trade routes in the 1340s. 7 Europa Universalis 5 passes trade from one market to the next in a chain, which is close to how the routes really worked. 8 But at its start in 1337 the Mongol peace that had made the roads safe was already breaking into rival khanates, and after about 1500 more Asian goods went to Europe by sea. 9 Nobody in 1300 called it the Silk Road: a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, invented the name in 1877. 10 The Silk Road was not one road but a network of land routes linking China with Central Asia, Persia, India and the Mediterranean. 11 Few traders travelled the whole Silk Road; goods usually passed from merchant to merchant and market to market. 12 China kept the making of silk secret for a long time, so silk was rare and costly in the West; silk is spun by silkworms, and a well-known story says monks smuggled silkworm eggs to the Byzantine Empire in the 500s. 13 Goods crossed the deserts of Central Asia in caravans of Bactrian camels, which have two humps, go a long time without water and survive cold winters. 14 Caravanserais, inns spaced about a day's journey apart, gave caravans safe places to rest. 15 Cities such as Samarkand, Bukhara and Kashgar grew rich at oases on the Silk Road. 16 In the 1200s and 1300s the Mongol Empire controlled most of the Silk Road, making it safer for traders to cross. 17 By 1337 the Mongol world had split into separate khanates such as the Yuan, the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate, and the Ilkhanate in Persia was falling apart. 18 Marco Polo of Venice wrote a famous account of his journey to the court of Kublai Khan in China in the late 1200s, though some details of his book are doubted. 19 The Silk Road carried ideas as well as goods, such as Buddhism from India to China and papermaking from China westward. 20 The Black Death is thought to have spread from Central Asia westward along trade routes in the 1340s, its germs carried by traders, animals, goods and fleas, reaching the Crimean port of Caffa and then the Mediterranean in 1347. 21 After about 1500 more trade between Europe and Asia went by sea, because ships could carry far more goods more cheaply, so the overland Silk Road became less important. 22 The name "Silk Road" was invented by a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, in 1877. ← previous Resources and what countries tradenext → The spice trade and the Indian Ocean↑ back to Geography This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/28-the-silk-road/