問題詳情

Question 10-19Both in what is now the eastern and the southwestern United States, the peoples ofthe Archaic era (8,000-1,000 B.C) were, in a way, already adapted to beginnings ofcultivation through their intensive gathering and processing of wild plant foods. In bothareas, there was a well-established ground stone tool technology, a method of pounding(5)and grinding nuts and other plant foods, that could be adapted to newly cultivated foods.By the end of the Archaic era, people in eastern North America had domesticated certainnative plants, including sunflowers; weeds called goosefoot, sumpweed, or marsh elder;and squash or gourds of some kind. These provided seeds that were important sources of carbohydrates and fat in the diet.(10) The earliest cultivation seems to have taken place along the river valleys of theMidwest and the Southeast, with experimentation beginning as early as 7,000 years agoand domestication beginning 4,000 to 2,000 years ago. Although the term “Neolithic” isnot used in North American prehistory, these were the first steps toward the same major subsistence changes that took place during the Neolithic (8,000-2,000 B.C.) period(15)elsewhere in the world.Archaeologists debate the reasons for beginning cultivation in the eastern part of thecontinent. Although population and sedentary living were increasing at the time, there islittle evidence that people lacked adequate wild food resources; the newly domesticatedfoods supplemented a continuing mixed subsistence of hunting, fishing, and gathering(20)wild plants, Increasing predictability of food supplies may have been a motive. It has been suggested that some early cultivation was for medicinal and ceremonial plants rather thanfor food. One archaeologist has pointed out that the early domesticated plants were allweedy species that do well in open, disturbed habitats, the kind that would form aroundhuman settlements where people cut down trees, trample the ground, deposit trash, and(25)dig holes. It has been suggested that sunflower, sumpweed, and other plants almostdomesticated themselves, that is , they thrived in human –disturbed habitats, so humans intensively collected them and began to control their distribution. Women in the Archaic communities were probably the main experimenters with cultivation, becauseethnoarchaeological evidence tells us that women were the main collectors of plant foodand had detailed knowledge of plants.
10. The passage mainly discusses which of the following aspects of the life of Archaic peoples?
(A) The principal sources of food that made up their diet
(B) Their development of ground stone tool technology
(C) Their development of agriculture
(D) Their distribution of work between men and women

參考答案

答案：C
難度：適中0.428571
統計：A(2),B(2),C(3),D(0),E(0)

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