兵马俑是什么？
What is the Terracotta Army?
Name: ________________ Date: ________
1974年春天，西安附近的临潼很久没有下雨了。几个农民决定在村子外面打一口井。有一天，有人碰到了硬东西。拿出来一看，是一个土做的人头，眼睛睁着，好像正在看他们。
他们不知道，自己找到的是一支两千多年前的地下军队。它就是今天有名的兵马俑。
兵马俑是为秦始皇做的。秦始皇是中国第一个皇帝，公元前221年，他统一了中国。还很年轻的时候，他就开始给自己建陵墓。兵马俑就埋在陵墓东边一公里多的地方，像真正的士兵一样排得整整齐齐。人们认为，它们是要在另一个世界里继续保护这位皇帝。
兵马俑到底有多少？专家估计，三个坑里一共有八千多个士兵、一百三十辆战车和六百多匹马，其中大部分到现在还埋在地下。
最让人吃惊的是，这些士兵长得都不一样。有的胖，有的瘦；有的很严肃，有的好像在笑；头发和胡子也各不相同。专家认为，工人们先按十来种基本的脸型做出大概的样子，再一个一个地加上细节，所以很难找到两张完全一样的脸。
今天我们看到的兵马俑是灰色的，可是刚做好的时候，它们身上画着红、绿、蓝等很亮的颜色。从土里出来以后，大部分颜色没过多久就掉了。
那秦始皇自己的陵墓里面是什么样子呢？两千多年前，历史学家司马迁写过：里面用水银做成了江河和大海。这听起来像故事，可是现代科学家检查以后发现，陵墓上面的土里，水银确实特别多。到今天，秦始皇的墓还没有打开过，有人认为，这是为了保护里面的东西。
1987年，秦始皇陵和兵马俑成为了世界遗产。当年打井的一位农民，后来在兵马俑博物馆里给游客签了很多年的名。那口井最后连一滴水都没有，却让一支八千人的军队重新见到了阳光。
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 农民 | nóngmín | peasant; farmer |
| 硬 | yìng | hard; stiff |
| 支 | zhī | branch; offshoot (as in 支流) |
| 统一 | tǒngyī | unified; uniform; to unify; to unite |
| 专家 | zhuānjiā | expert; specialist |
| 匹 | pǐ | classifier for horses, mules and bolts of cloth |
| 严肃 | yánsù | serious; solemn; stern |
| 细节 | xìjié | detail |
| 灰色 | huīsè | gray |
| 红 | hóng | red |
| 现代 | xiàndài | modern; contemporary; modern times; modern age |
| 当年 | dāngnián | in those years; back then |
English (for the teacher)
In the spring of 1974 it hadn't rained for a long time in Lintong, near Xi'an. A few farmers decided to dig a well outside their village. One day, someone hit something hard. They pulled it out and looked: it was a head made of clay, eyes open, as if it were looking right at them.
They didn't know it, but what they had found was an underground army more than two thousand years old. It is what we now know as the famous Terracotta Army.
The Terracotta Army was made for Qin Shi Huang. Qin Shi Huang was China's first emperor; in 221 BC he unified China. When he was still very young, he had already begun building his own tomb. The Terracotta Army is buried a little more than a kilometre east of the tomb, lined up in neat rows like real soldiers. People think it was meant to go on protecting the emperor in the next world.
So how many figures are there? Experts estimate that the three pits hold more than eight thousand soldiers, a hundred and thirty chariots and over six hundred horses, and most of them are still under the ground today.
The most surprising thing is that the soldiers all look different. Some are fat, some thin; some look stern, some seem to be smiling; their hair and beards are all different too. Experts think the workers started from about ten basic face shapes and then added the details one by one, which is why it's hard to find two faces exactly alike.
The figures we see today are grey, but when they were first made they were painted in bright reds, greens, blues and other colours. Once they came out of the earth, most of the colour came off before long.
So what does Qin Shi Huang's own tomb look like inside? More than two thousand years ago, the historian Sima Qian wrote that inside it, rivers and seas were made of mercury. It sounds like a fairy tale, but when modern scientists tested it, they found the soil on top of the tomb really is unusually full of mercury. To this day the emperor's tomb has never been opened; some people think that is to protect what is inside.
In 1987 the First Emperor's tomb and the Terracotta Army became a World Heritage Site. One of the farmers who dug the well later spent years signing his name for visitors at the Terracotta Army museum. In the end their well never gave a single drop of water, but it brought an army of eight thousand back into the sunlight.