四、閱讀測驗【請在下列各題中選出最適當的答案】      Long before there were flowers, the world was green. The first plants appeared some 500 million years ago, earlymosses, hornworts and liverworts, low and clinging to the ground. Then, 360 million years ago, ferns rose up, withnewly evolved vascular systems that helped them ferry water to their extremities and gain height. They prevailed as thedinosaurs fell, through extinction after extinction, obstinate and mostly unchanging; according to the fossil record, a fernfrom 180 million years ago was almost identical to its descendants today.
      Ferns were, therefore, a part of human existence from our very start, and yet in the West, it wasn’t until theVictorians that we went mad for these prehistoric relics. Pteridomania, the official name of the fever, was fueled in partby the 1829 invention of the Wardian case, a glazed glass box built to transport and protect sensitive plants, and by theextension of roads and railways to previously less accessible and particularly damp corners of Britain, where fernsthrived. The craze was democratic, cutting across class lines: Farmers foraged for specimens while aristocrats importedrarities hunted in far-flung lands, from Borneo to Brazil.
      You might say that, once awakened, our craze for them never died. In 1960s America, the plants became thedefining decoration of the so-called fern bars, which took inspiration from idealized grandmotherly living rooms (alongwith banks of potted ferns, they often featured homey wooden tables with Tiffany-style lamps), creating a space wheresingle women would feel safe sipping sugary cocktails — an upper-crust version of tiki bars, minus the exuberance. Bythe 1980s, ferns (or, more often, their plastic likeness) drooped from macramé hangers in homes across the country, atropical trope in a decade that celebrated excess.
46. What is the passage mainly about?
(A) When ferns became prehistoric relics.
(B) Where ferns became people’s decorations.
(C) How ferns became a target of human’s craze.
(D) Why ferns became imported items for aristocrats.