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OFFICIAL52 Which of the following can be inferred from paragraph 2 about the pastoral peoples in the East African Highlands around 3300 B.C.?

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Early Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa
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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.

3.Which of the following can be inferred from paragraph 2 about the pastoral peoples in the East African Highlands around 3300 B.C.?

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正确答案:B
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【题目翻译】从公元前3300年左右关于东非高地牧民的第2段中可以推断出以下哪一个? A他们住在群山周围,很少下到平原去。 B他们在干燥月份依赖的食物来源不同于潮湿月份。 C他们的定居点比西非和苏丹的牧民要大。 D他们在潮湿的月份从附近的狩猎-采集社区获得食物。 【判定题型】:根据题干中出现的关键词“imply”/“infer”/“suggest”等其他表示推断的词,判定本题为推理题。 【关键词定位】根据题干中的关键年份“3300 B.C.”可以直接定位到这句话“The highlands were inhabited by hunter-gatherers living around mountains near the plains until about 3300 B.C., when the first cattle herders appeared.” 【逻辑分析】直到大约公元前3300年,第一批牧牛人出现时,高地上居住着狩猎采集者,他们居住在平原附近的山区。最后一句话也是在描述游牧民族到达高地后的生活模式:在旱季和雨季,这些放牧人可能在固定的定居点之间移动,在旱季他们过着打猎的生活,在雨季靠畜牧和种植为生。 【选项分析】 A选项:他们住在山的附近,很少到平原去。这句话是描述说高地上原来居住的那些“hunter-gatherers”,不是在描述pastoral people,而且文中也没有说这些“hunter-gatherers”很少来到平原上。故A选项直接排除。 B选项:他们在旱季的食物来源要比在雨季的食物来源更丰富。我们可以从文中最后一句话推理出B选项是正确的。最后一句说:这些游牧民族在旱季过着打猎的生活,在雨季靠畜牧和种植为生。打猎获得的食物肯定更丰富,而靠畜牧和种植,食物来源相对比较单一,故B选项正确。 C选项:他们的定居点要比西非和苏丹的游牧民族大。文中没有提到定居点规模大小的信息,故C选项排除。 D选项:在雨季,他们从附近的依靠采集狩猎卫生的原住民那边获得食物。文中未提到该信息,故排除。

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