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EXTRA1 The word "rigidly" in the passage is closest in meaning to

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Europe in the Twelfth Century
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Europe in the eleventh century underwent enormous social, technological, and economic changes, but this did not create a new Europe—it created two new ones. The north was developed as a rigidly hierarchical society in which status was determined, or was at least indicated, by the extent to which one owned, controlled, or labored on land; whereas the Mediterranean south developed a more fluid, and therefore more chaotic, world in which industry and commerce predominated and social status both reflected and resulted from the role that one played in the public life of the community. In other words, individual identity and social community in the north were established on a personal basis, whereas in the south they were established on a civic basis. By the start of the twelfth century, northern and southern Europe were very different places indeed, and the Europeans themselves noticed it and commented on it.

Political dominance belonged to the north. Germany, France, and England had large Populations and large armies that made them, in the political and military senses, the masters of Western Europe. Organized by the practices known collectively as feudalism, these kingdoms emerged as powerful states with sophisticated machineries of government. Their kings and queens were the leading figures of the age; their castles and cathedrals stood majestically on the landscape as symbols of their might; their armies both energized and defined the age. Moreover, feudal society showed a remarkable ability to adapt to new needs by encouraging the parallel development of domestic urban life and commercial networks; in some regions of the north, in fact, feudal society may even have developed in response to the start of the trends toward bigger cities. But southern Europe took the lead in economic and cultural life. Though the leading Mediterranean states were small in size, they were considerably wealthier than their northern counterparts. The Italian city of Palermo in the twelfth century, for example, alone generated four times the commercial tax revenue of the entire kingdom of England. Southern communities also possessed urbane, multilingual cultures that made them the intellectual and artistic leaders of the age. Levels of general literacy in the south far surpassed those of the north, and the people of the south put that learning to use on a large scale. Science, mathematics, poetry, law, historical writing, religious speculation, translation, and classical studies all began to flourish; throughout most of the twelfth century, most of the continent's best brains flocked to southern Europe.

So too did a lot of the north's soldiers. One of the central themes of the political history of the twelfth century was the continual effort by the northern kingdoms to extend their control southward in the hope of tapping into the Mediterranean bonanza. The German emperors starting with Otto I (936-973), for example, struggled ceaselessly to establish their control over the cities of northern Italy, since those cities generated more revenue than all of rural Germany combined. The kings of France used every means at their disposal to push the lower border of their kingdom to the Mediterranean shoreline. And the Normans who conquered and ruled England established outposts of Norman power in Sicily and the adjacent lands of southern Italy; the English kings also hoped or claimed at various times to be, either through money or marriage diplomacy, the rulers of several Mediterranean states. But as the northern world pressed southward, so too did some of the cultural norms and social mechanisms of the south expand northward. Over the course of the twelfth century, the feudal kingdoms witnessed a proliferation of cities modeled in large degree on those of the south. Contact with the merchants and financiers of the Mediterranean led to the development of northern industry and international trade (which helped to pay for many of the castles and cathedrals mentioned earlier). And education spread as well, culminating in the foundation of what is arguably medieval Europe's greatest invention: the university. The relationship of north and south was symbiotic, in other words, and the contrast between them was more one of differences in degree than of polar opposition.

1.The word "rigidly" in the passage is closest in meaning to

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词汇题,rigid意为严格的,严酷的。D选项strictly为同义词,意为严格的。对应原文:The north was developed as a rigidly hierarchical society in which status was determined, or was at least indicated, by the extent to which one owned, controlled, or labored on land; whereas the Mediterranean south developed a more fluid, and therefore more chaotic, world in which industry and commerce predominated and social status both reflected and resulted from the role that one played in the public life of the community.对应原文采取了分号结构,而分号之后用了whereas,表明分号前后的内容相对立。从内容上看,分号前是在讨论欧洲北部是怎么样一个阶级社会,而分号后则描述南方是一个更加流动的社会,两者呈现出完全不同的社会形态。而rigidly在原文中是用来修饰hierarchical society的一个程度副词,我们可以将选项带入看看哪一个词将这种相对的社会形态表现的最正确。A选项意为极端地和D的严格的代入都通,但是D更为合适,因为在原文中强调了社会地位是由哪些因素而决定的,和严格的社会等级相呼应;B选项意为正常的,C选项意为明显的,代入原文语义都不连贯,是错误答案。

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