English Language · English

Read the passage and answer the question that follows. Primitive man was probably more concerned with fire as a source of warmth and as a means of cooking food rather than as a source of light. Before he discovered less laborious ways of making fire, he had to preserve it, and whenever he went on a journey he carried a firebrand with him. His discovery that the firebrand from which the torch may very well have been developed could be used for illumination was probably incidental to the primary purpose of preserving a flame. Lamps, too, were probably developed by accident. Early man may have had his first conception of a lamp while watching a twig burning in the molten fat dropping from a roasting carcass. All he had to do was fashion a vessel to contain the fat and float a lighted reed in it. Such lamps, which were made of hollowed stones, bones or sea shells, have persisted in identical form up to quite recent times. Another appropriate word for 'fashion' in this context would be: