Ancient Rome’s Monte Testaccio and modern Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market reveal a lot about thenature of cities. Monte Testaccio is a hill made of broken pottery in the middle of Rome. Around2,000 years ago, people tossed empty wine and olive oil vessels onto what was then a garbage heap.Tokyo’s vast seafood emporium, also known as Toyosu Market, includes passageways where forkliftsdeposit and remove containers of every sea creature imaginable, as chefs and home cooks bid for theday’s catch.   These metropolitan destinations illustrate how mass production and consumption of goods —along with public markets, complex infrastructure and trash — have always characterized cities,archaeologist Monica Smith writes in Cities. She argues that cities provide work and leisureopportunities that, once invented around 6,000 years ago, people couldn’t do without. Trash was partof the deal, along with poverty and pollution — all of which remain city challenges.   Ancient human traits and behaviors contributed to cities’ rapid ascendance, even if it took a fewhundred thousand years for agriculture and other cultural developments to spark that urban transition,Smith writes. As a restless, talkative species searching for meaning in the world, people eventuallystarted building gathering spots for religious pilgrimages. One of the earliest such places was GöbekliTepe in what’s now Turkey, dating back 10,000 years or more. Public structures there set the stagefor farmers and herders to create the oldest known city, Tell Brak, about 4,000 years later in Syria.   As Smith notes, archaeological lessons learned from the ancient past, applicable to the present aswell, are that there are always socioeconomic hierarchies. In cities, the demands of social andeconomic life yield an upward spiral that affords diversity and rewards creativity. People havealways been drawn to those benefits, both for survival and for excitement, she writes.   Smith offers a spirited defense of conspicuous consumption, which is defined as apractice spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publiclydisplay economic power. Excavations have yielded lots of trash at ancient cities. Changing styleshave always fueled a desire to get the latest goods. Many objects were made to be used and thrownout. Heaps of cheap ceramic fast food containers, for instance, have been found at Pompeii andelsewhere. The inventiveness that takes flight in cities is worth the cost of the trash, Smith concludes.   The urban drawbacks of crime and disease get minimal mention. And Smith’s arguments seemincomplete without a comparison of cities to hunter-gatherer societies, the venues for most of humanevolution. But she plausibly concludes that people will continue to flock to cities, warts and all.
44. According to the passage, which of the following is NOT mentioned as one of the features inbig cities?
(A) Display of wealth.
(B) Cultural homogeneity.
(C) Networked infrastructure.
(D) Existence of poverty and garbage.