What does age mean

The word age can have several dif­ferent meanings. You probably think of it first as indicating how old a person is. It can also be used to mean the life­span, or number of years of living, of a human being or animal. The next article, on age of man, will cover part of this subject. Here we will think of the word age only as meaning a period in history. An age is a number of years in which something takes place that makes it dif­ferent from any other years. An age can last only a few years, or it can last hun­dreds of years, or it can last thousands of years. We speak of the Elizabethan Age, the time when Queen Elizabeth I was queen of England, about four hundred years ago. During her reign, the English wrote great plays and poetry; they sailed the seas bravely and won great territory and wealth for their country; and at home they were rich and gay and happy.

It is convenient to say that a man lived in the Elizabethan Age, because those two words can give a picture of exactly what life was like in England when he was alive. In the same way we speak of a "golden age" as one in which the wealth and cultivation and literature and art of a particular country, such as an­cient Rome or Greece, w ere at their peak. The progress that mankind has made is usually divided into ages. The earliest of these ages is called the Old Stone Age; that was the time many thousands of years ago, when men were just be­ginning to learn to act like human be­ings, and the only tools or weapons they had were chipped out of pieces of flint. After that, men entered the New Stone Age, in which they made better tools out of flint and other stones, and also built houses and made pottery and learned to farm land and raise animals. The Bronze Age came next, when they dis­covered how to use metals; at first, they could use only copper or other metals made from it, such as bronze, and that