小站备考
托福
托福阅读
Official52阅读真题

OFFICIAL52 The word "exploiting” in the passage is closest in meaning to

展开
Early Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tip:单击查看句义;划选/双击查生词
插图.png  At the end of the Pleistocene (around 10,000 B.C.), the technologies of food production may have already been employed on the fringes of the rain forests of western and central Africa, where the common use of such root plants as the African yam led people to recognize the advantages of growing their own food. The yam can easily be resprouted if the top is replanted. This primitive form of "vegeculture" (cultivation of root and tree crops) may have been the economic tradition onto which the cultivation of summer rainfall cereal crops was grafted as it came into use south of the grassland areas on the Sahara's southern borders.

As the Sahara dried up after 5000 B.C., pastoral peoples (cattle herders) moved southward along major watercourses into the savanna belt of West Africa and the Sudan. By 3000 B.C., just as ancient Egyptian civilization was coming into being along the Nile, they had settled in the heart of the East African highlands far to the south. The East African highlands are ideal cattle country and the home today of such famous cattle-herding peoples as the Masai. The highlands were inhabited by hunter-gatherers living around mountains near the plains until about 3300 B.C., when the first cattle herders appeared. These cattle people may have moved between fixed settlements during the wet and dry seasons, living off hunting in the dry months and their own livestock and agriculture during the rains.

As was the case elsewhere, cattle were demanding animals in Africa. They required water at least every 24 hours and large tracts of grazing grass if herds of any size were to be maintained. The secret was the careful selection of grazing land, especially in environments where seasonal rainfall led to marked differences in graze quality throughout the year. Even modest cattle herds required plenty of land and considerable mobility. To acquire such land often required moving herds considerable distances, even from summer to winter pastures. At the same time, the cattle owners had to graze their stock in tsetse-fly-free areas The only protection against human and animal sleeping sickness, a disease carried by the tsetse fly, was to avoid settling or farming such areas -  a constraint severely limiting the movements of cattle-owning farmers in eastern and central Africa. As a result, small cattle herds spread south rapidly in areas where they could be grazed. Long before cereal agriculture took hold far south of the Sahara, some hunter-gatherer groups in the savanna woodlands of eastern and southern Africa may have acquired cattle, and perhaps other domesticated animals, by gift exchange or through raids on herding neighbors.

Contrary to popular belief: there is no such phenomenon as "pure" pastoralists, a society that subsists on its herds alone. The Saharan herders who moved southward to escape drought were almost certainly also cultivating sorghum, millet; and other tropical rainfall crops. By 1500 B.C., cereal agriculture was widespread throughout the savanna belt south of the Sahara. Small farming communities dotted the grasslands and forest margins of eastern West Africa, all of them depending on what is called shifting agriculture. This form of agriculture involved clearing woodland, burning the felled brush over the cleared plot, mixing the ash into the soil, and then cultivating the prepared fields. After a few years, the soil was exhausted, so the farmer moved on, exploiting new woodland and leaving the abandoned fields to lie fallow. Shifting agriculture, often called slash-and-burn, was highly adaptive for savanna farmers without plows, for it allowed cereal farming with the minimal expenditure of energy.

The process of clearance and burning may have seemed haphazard to the uninformed eye, but it was not. Except in favored areas, such as regularly inundated floodplains: tropical Africa's soils were of only moderate to low fertility. The art of farming was careful soil selection, that is, knowing which soils were light and easily cultivable, could be readily turned with small hoes, and would maintain their fertility over several years' planting, for cereal crops rapidly remove nitrogen and other nutrients from the soil. Once it had taken hold: slash-and-burn agriculture expanded its frontiers rapidly as village after village took up new lands, moving forward so rapidly that one expert has estimated it took a mere two centuries to cover 2,000 kilometers from eastern to southern Africa.

9.The word "exploiting” in the passage is closest in meaning to

你的答案:
正确答案:A
题目解析:
 后才能查看题目解析,还没有账号? 马上注册
【题目翻译】文章中的“exploiting”一词最接近于下列哪个选项? A选项:making use of 的意思是“利用” B选项:finding的意思是“找到” C选项:destroying的意思是“破坏” D选项:looking for的意思是“寻找” 【判定题型】:题目要求选出与高亮单词意思最接近的选项,故判断本题为词汇题。 【关键词定位】:根据关键词“exploiting,定位到原句“After a few years, the soil was exhausted, so the farmer moved on, exploiting new woodland and leaving the abandoned fields to lie fallow.” 【词汇解析】:词汇“exploiting”的意思是“开采、利用”,带入到原句中,原句的意思是“几年后,土地耗尽了养分,于是农民们继续前进,开辟新的林地,让原来的荒地休耕。” 【选项分析】 A选项:making use of 的意思是“利用”,意思最接近,故为正确答案。 B选项:finding的意思是“找到”,意思不符,故排除。 C选项:destroying的意思是“破坏”,意思不符,故排除。 D选项:looking for的意思是“寻找”,意思不符,故排除。

学习页面

Medi

terr

anean

加强 + 政府 + 名词后缀

加强的政府——管理

原文例句

加入生词

本文生词 0

色块区域是你收藏过的生词;

查询次数越多,颜色越深哦~

显示文中生词

登录后才能收藏生词哦,现在登录注册>

本文重点词 45

文中加粗单词为本文重点词;

根据词频与核心词范围精心挑选,托福考试必掌握词汇。

显示文中重点词
学习本文词汇

文中划选/双击的生词、加粗重点词已收纳至词盒

可随时点击词盒查看哦~

只有在词句精学模式下才能开启词盒功能哦~

我知道了

词盒
收藏
笔记
我的笔记
5000
保存
反馈