The following text is for questions 33-35.

    Ranking together with the wheel and the calendar as one of the Sumer's three most precious gifts to succeeding Western Civilization was the invention of writing. To say that writing was "invented" is slightly misleading since the emergence of writing in Sumer was gradual, evolving over the course of a millennium from the representation of ideas by means of pictorial conventions to writing (albeit not alphabetic writing) as we currently know it. Around 3500 BCE Sumerians had begun to carve pictures in stone or to stamp them on clay as ownership marks: a picture might have stood for a person's nickname (perhaps a rock for "Rocky"). Some five centuries later the evolution toward writing had advanced vastly farther. By then Sumerian temple administrators were using many ____ (33) schematic pictures in combination with each other to preserve records of temple property. Although the script of this period was still pictographic, it had advanced beyond pictures standing for people and tangible things to pictures standing for abstractions: a bowl meant any kind of food and a head with a bowl conveyed the concept of eating. After five more centuries full-fledged writing had taken over, for by then the original pictures had become so schematized that they were no longer ____ (34) as pictures but had to be learned purely as signs, and many of these signs no longer represented specific words but had become symbols of syllables that ____ (35) words when combined with other such signs.

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