题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
黑龙江省大庆中学2020届高三上学期英语入学考试试卷
That little "a" with a circle around it that is found in e-mail addresses is most commonly referred to as the "at" symbol. Surprisingly though, there is no official, universal name for this sign. There are lots of strange terms to describe the @ symbol.
Before it became the fixed symbol for e-mail, the symbol was mostly used to represent the cost or weight of something. For instance, if you bought 6 apples, you might write it as 6 apples @ $1.11 each.
With the introduction of e-mail came the popularity of the @ symbol. The @ symbol separates a person's online user name from his mail server address, for instance joe@uselessknowledge.com. Its widespread use on the Internet made it necessary to put this symbol on keyboards in countries that had never seen or used the symbol before. As a result, there is really no official name for this symbol.
The actual origin of the @ symbol remains unknown. History tells us that the @ symbol came from the tired hands of the monks(僧侣) in the Middle Ages. During the Middle Ages when there were no printing presses, every letter of a word had to be copied by hand for each copy of a published book. The monks that performed these long and boring copying duties looked for ways to reduce the number of strokes (笔划) per word for common words.
Although the word "at" is quite short, it was such a common word in texts and documents that monks in the Middle Ages thought it would be good idea to shorten the word "at" even more. As a result, the monks left out the "t" and created a circle — getting rid of two strokes.
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