👩‍🏫 For Teachers

Use this 15-minute activity to practice IELTS Reading skills like skimming and scanning. Have students work individually before reviewing answers together using the provided evidence lines.

🎓 For Learners

First, read the short passage quickly to get the main idea of each paragraph. Next, read each question carefully and find the exact paragraph that gives you the answer.

The Rosetta Stone is a large piece of stone with ancient writing carved into its surface. The text on the stone is an official decree, or order, created in 196 BC during the reign of King Ptolemy V of Egypt. What makes this stone special is that the exact same message is written three different times: first in hieroglyphs, then in Demotic script, and finally in ancient Greek. At that time, priests mainly used hieroglyphs for important documents, while Demotic was a simpler form of writing used by ordinary people for everyday life.

In 1799, French army engineers accidentally discovered the stone while they were repairing an old fort. They were working near the Egyptian town of Rashid, which is also known as Rosetta. These soldiers belonged to the army led by Napoleon Bonaparte.

A few years later, in 1801, British forces defeated the French army in Egypt. As a result of this defeat, the stone came into their hands. Since 1802, the famous stone has been displayed at the British Museum in London.

For a very long time, nobody could read hieroglyphs. Thomas Young, a British scientist, made the first progress toward solving the puzzle: he guessed that symbols inside small oval frames spelled the names of kings, such as Ptolemy. Later, in the early 1820s, a French scholar named Jean-Francois Champollion showed that hieroglyphic signs could represent both spoken sounds and complete ideas.