How Art Made The World 人、艺术、世界 -01

There's something we do hundreds of times a day without even noticing it. It's an ability that we utterly¹ depend on in our lives, and we take it for granted². Just watch.

We see some lines and can give them meaning. We can tell one shape from another. And we understand that an arrangement of colors can represent something. The ability to read images is an essential part of our lives. But what if we didn't have this ability? Imagine we couldn't understand images, what would our world be like?

Well for a start, images would never have been invented, we would've lost something we totally rely on, life would be impossible, and our world would be unrecognizable. But at some point in our ancient past, that's what the world looked like, imageless. Now of course pictures dominate³ our lives. Well, this is the extraordinary story of how we humans discovered the power of images and how they created the world we live in today.

How long has it taken for you to realise that I'm drawing a horse? A second? A fraction⁴ of a second? We can tell what a two-dimensional image represents almost instantaneously⁵ without even having to think about it. I'm not much of an artist, but even I can arrange a collection of pencil lines on a piece of paper, so you see what I want you to see. And I don't do just horses. I could draw almost anything in the world. And you'd probably guess what it was. But there must have been some point in our human story when we first got this ability, some moment in time when we began to create pictures and to understand what they meant.

1 utterly   

adv.完全地，绝对地

参考例句：

• Utterly devoted to the people,he gave his life in saving his patients.他忠于人民，把毕生精力用于挽救患者的生命。
• I was utterly ravished by the way she smiled.她的微笑使我完全陶醉了。

2 granted   

conj.假定，就算v.（退一步）承认( grant的过去式和过去分词 )；（尤指正式地或法律上）同意；准许；让渡

参考例句：

• The president granted a general amnesty for all political prisoners. 总统大赦了所有的政治犯。
• She feared she would not be granted re-entry into Britain. 她担心不会获准再次踏足英伦。

3 dominate   

v.支配，统治，高出，俯视，在...中占首地位

参考例句：

• They had the ambition to dominate this small country.他们有控制这个小国的野心。
• The strong usually dominate over the weak.强者常常支配弱者。

4 fraction   

n.小部分，碎片；一点，一些；分数

参考例句：

• The car missed me by a fraction of an inch.那车子差一点儿就要撞到我了。
• The cost is only a fraction of his salary.那项费用不过是他薪水的一小部分。

5 instantaneously   

ad.瞬间地；即刻地

参考例句：

• Once the cargo has been shipped, insurance can be covered instantaneously. 货物一旦发出，我会立即投保。
• In a crash, momentum changes abruptly but not instantaneously. 在撞击过程中，动量的变化是突然的，但非瞬时的。