Based on the origin of Chinese characters, they have four main categories, the pictographic characters (象形字), the indicative characters (指事字), the associative characters (会意字) and pictophonetic characters (形声字). We will explain the indicative characters in this lesson.
Like the pictographic characters, the indicative characters are also of the single components (独体字), but different from them, they express things that are abstract in meaning. The ancient people used abstract symbols to indicate the meaning. One kind of symbols is purely symbolic, for example, they used one short line over a longer one to indicate the meaning of "above", which is like this: 
. The other kind is by the addition of a stroke or some strokes, they gave abstract meaning to a pictographic character. For example, they added a short line at the lower end of the pictographic character which means tree to indicate that the root of the tree came into being, which character later on had got some new meaning like the essence of things.
Here we have some indicative characters, can you match them with their today's versions?
1. 
a. 上 (shāng, means up, above)
2. b. 本 (běn, means root, original)
3. 
c. 下 (běn, means down, under)
4. 
d. 末 (mò, tail, end)
5. 
e. 四 (sì, means four)
Answers to the question above:
1. ---> b. 本
2. ---> a. 上
3. ---> e. 四
4. ---> c. 下
5. ---> d.
末
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