『新东方在线托福听力』为托福考生准备了ETS托福TPO/【学术讲座】#7听力练习，【学术讲座】#7原文答案解析，【学术讲座】#7听力原文练习音频翻译。

托福TPO/【学术讲座】#7听力原答案解析-音频翻译【新东方在线】

According to the professor, what did some historians mistakenly assumed about the Mesopotamians?

What was on the Mesopotamian tablet mentioned in the talk?

What does the professor imply about the ancient Greeks?

Listen to part of a talk in a history of science class.Let me warn you against a mistake that historians of science often make. They sometimes assume that people in the past use the same concepts we do. Here is a wonderful example that makes the use of history of mathematics some while ago. It concerns an ancient Mesopotamian tablet that has some calculations on it using square numbers. The calculations look an awful one like the calculations of the link of the sides of triangle. So that's what many historians assume they were. But using square numbers to do this is a very sophisticated technique. If the Mesopotamians knew how to do it, as the historians started to thinking that they did. Well, they learn math incredibly advanced. Well, it turns out the idea of Mesopotamians use square numbers to calculate the link of triangle's sides is probably wrong. Why? Because we discovered that Mesopotamians didn't know how to measure angles, which is a crucial element in the whole process of triangle calculations. Apparently the Mesopotamians had a number of other uses for square numbers. These other uses were important but they were not used with triangles. And so these tablets in all likelihood were practice sheets, if you like, for doing simpler math exercises with square numbers. In all likelihood, it was the ancient Greeks who first calculate the link of triangle's sides using square numbers. And this was hundreds of years after the Mesopotamians.

Listen to part of a talk in a history of science class.

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