Do you think China needed the Great Wall? Justify your Answer.

Construction period of the Great Wall of China

Which of the following is the most accurate description of the First Great Wall?it kept Chinese citizens from emigrating to foreign landsit ran from Beijing all the way to the Silk Roadit was built during the Zhou dynastyit generally proved to be an ineffective barrierit prevented invaders from attacking China from the north

Which of the following statements is true about the Great Wall of China, based on this passage?

Which of the following statements is true about the Great Wall of China, based on this passage? The popular image of the Great Wall was deliberately created to attract tourists.Some parts of the Wall have been destroyed completely.It was built over a span of 1,500 years.It was built to keep barbarians out of China.

Most people think they know certain things about the Great Wall of China: that it is the only man-made structure visible from space, that it runs in an unbroken line of stone across north China, that it was built to keep the barbarians at bay, etc. But are any of these ideas true? First of all: no, the Great Wall cannot be seen from space. That quaint idea was made up wholly by Robert Ripley, an American illustrator, in the 1930s, decades before anyone had even been to space. The Chinese were delighted with the idea, and included it as a ‘fact’ in textbooks until the first Chinese space flight in 2003, when their astronaut, Yang Liwei, admitted he couldn’t see anything of it from orbit. It was too narrow, too similar in colour to its background. What about the idea of the Wall as an unbroken line of stone across north China? Most people see only the sections of the Wall outside Beijing. Here the Wall is as astounding as the hype suggests: a roller-coaster of masonry riding ridges over mountains as chaotic as crinkled tinfoil. Statistics batter you into acceptance: 6,000 kilometres long, a zillion bricks, enough to build a wall right around the earth. You also believe it is old, as old as China herself, as timeless as the pyramids. The weasel word in the last paragraph is ‘it’. The Wall is not an ‘it’. It’s a ‘them’, ‘walls’ in the plural, and they do not form a continuous line. They are in bits, and up close, very few of them look like the glorious creation to which tourists go. Tame sections give way to wild ones – crumbling, overgrown, barred to walkers – and wild ones vanish into gaps made by roads and reservoirs. You cannot join the dots even of the Ming Great Wall (the section near Beijing), and come up with a unity. And these divided sections are nothing compared to the other walls, those that rise, fall and vanish as you journey westward. And out there, where tourists seldom go, majestic brick and stone give way to earth: sometimes a rough barrier blasted by wind and washed by rain, sometimes no more than a gentle bank a metre or two in height, sometimes nothing at all. And all of these bits overlap each other in time. The sections you see around Beijing are recent in two ways, for these are twentieth-century restorations of an original that is a mere 500 years old. This wall has ancient precedents, some of them directly beneath it. Sometimes a new dynasty would keep previous creations, sometimes not. A few sections come down to us unsullied, survivals from the very first Great Wall over 2,000 years ago. Some are the worse for wear after 500 years. And there is much more to the Wall than wall: fortresses and barracks, guard-towers and beacon towers, ranging out ahead of and behind the main Wall. How can such a muddle be measured? Estimates of the Wall’s length vary from 2,694 to 6,000 to 50,000 kilometres. All are meaningless: there are so many bits, some rebuilt many times over, that no one has yet defined what is meant by the one-and-only Great Wall. Even on the mainstream sections, do you count only those bits that survive today? In which case, what about the gaps? And if the length remains unknown, so must the volume, much of which is not stone but earth. Exit, therefore, the idea that the Wall could provide stones enough to circle the globe. All these bits and pieces, overlapping in time and place, make nonsense of a singular ‘it’.