Cause and effect are often presented in the same sentence. Either the cause or the effect can be at the beginning of the sentence so you have to look for clues in the vocabulary which the writer uses. These clues help you to understand the text effectively.
Exercise 1
- a) Countless lives have been saved b) through UN funded vaccination programs worldwide.
- Countless lives have been saved through UN funded vaccination programs worldwide.
The effect is a) ‘Countless lives have been saved…’
The cause is b) ‘…through UN funded vaccination programs worldwide’
Which is cause and Which is Effect?
Exercise 2
Ancient Egyptian Contributions to Science
Ancient Egypt was a land of rural villages and farmers who relied on the annual flooding of the great river Nile to lay a rich layer of sediment on the land, ensuring its fertility in the next growing season. Land was restricted to a narrow fertile area along the banks of the river Nile. The importance of this limited area of fertile land produced advances in geometry
which were needed by the Egyptians in order to agree on the boundary of an individual farmer’s piece of land. Improvements in the mathematics of building grew out of this development in mathematics. For example, the geometry required to build rectilinear structures and stone temples. Because of the need for the measurement of land, early on the Egyptians invented the decimal system of counting. It also led to the development of mathematics for calculating volume. This was put to use in a very practical way to calculate the amount of grain a granary could hold and thus how many people could be fed.
The consequence of these early advances in mathematics can be seen realized in the gigantic stone structures of the pyramids at Giza, the largest of which has a base are of 13 acres. In order to construct these huge structures ancient Egyptian builders had to employ their understanding of geometry and volume as well as their understanding of astronomy and social organization.
| 1. | The Importance of land surveying led to advances in . |
| 2. | Advances in mathematics resulted in better building techniques for buildings. |
| 3. | It also allowed for the pharaoh’s scribes to calculate how much was held in his granaries. |
| 4. | This allowed for an assessment of how many people could be in times of need. |
| 5. | An impressive result of these advances was the construction of the which required the use of many skills. |
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