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tpo52阅读-3Early Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa
原文 (1)
译文 (3)
题目 (4)
答案 (8)
背景知识 (11)
原文
Early Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa
①At 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.
②As 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.
③As 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.
④Contrary 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.
⑤The 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.
译文
撒哈拉以南非洲的早期粮食生产
①更新世末期（大约公元前10000年），人们或许已经在非洲西部和中部的热带雨林周边运用粮食生产技术，例如非洲山药等根茎植物在这些地区的普遍种植使人们意识到粮食种植的优势。

如果将顶部进行再植，山药就很容易再次发芽。

这一原始的蔬菜栽培形式（培养块根作物或乔木作物）或许已经成为一种经济传统。

在此基础上，人们开始在撒哈拉南部边境地带的草原南部使用嫁接技术对夏季降雨粮食作物进行耕种。

②公元前5000年之后，撒哈拉地区逐渐干涸，游牧民族（牧民）沿主要河流南迁至西非和苏丹的热带稀树草原地带。

到公元前3000年，正如古埃及文明沿尼罗河畔成形一样，这些远在南方的游牧民族定居在东非高原的中心地带。

东非高原是理想的养牛国度，也是如今著名的牧牛民族马赛人的家园。

直到大约公元前3300年第一批牧牛人出现时，这一高地上居住着狩猎采集者，这些人生活在平原周边的山区。

这些牧牛人或许会在雨季和旱季在不同的固定定居点搬迁，他们在旱季以打猎为生，在雨季以牲畜和农业为生。

③和其他地区的情况一样，在非洲养牛的要求也很高。

不论牛群数量的大小，至少每24小时就要饮水，同时需要大片广阔的草场。

其中的奥秘在于对牧场的精心挑选，尤其是季节性降雨对全年放牧质量会产生显著差异的那些环境。

即便是中等规模的牛群也需要大量的土地和相当大的移动性。

为了获得这样的土地，牛群通常需要迁移相当长的距离，甚至需要从夏季草场迁至冬季草场。

同时，牛群的主人们不得不在没有采采蝇的地区放牧。

采采蝇会导致人和牲畜患上昏睡症，唯一的保护方法就是避免在这些地区定居或务农，这一约束条件严重限制了牧牛农民在非洲东部和中部的移动性。

因此，规模较小的牛群迅速遍布南部适宜放牧的地区。

在谷物农业生产占据撒哈拉沙漠南端之前的很长一段时间内，在非洲东部和南部热带稀树草原林地的狩猎采集者们或许已经开始饲养牛群以及其他家养动物了，这些家畜是通过礼物交换或者打劫周边的放牧人而获得的。

④与流行观点不同的是，并没有“纯粹的”牧民，即只依靠牧群生存的社会。

为逃避干旱而南下的撒哈拉牧民几乎也都在种植高粱、小米等其他热带降雨作物。

到公元前1500年，谷物农业生产已遍布撒哈拉沙漠南部的热带稀树草原地带。

依靠所谓的游耕农业，小型农业群落遍布西非东部的草原和森林边缘。

这种农业生产涉及清理林地、在清理过的土地上将砍倒的灌木丛进行焚烧、将灰烬混合到土壤之中，然后在这些准备好的田地上耕种。

几年之后，土壤会变得贫瘠，这些农民会迁移至新的林地进行开垦，让之前荒废的田地休耕。

通常被成为刀
耕火种的游耕农业特别适合生活在热带稀树草原地区的没有犁的农民，因为这种谷物种植方式仅需消耗最少的力气。

⑤在外行看来，清除和燃烧林地的过程看似是缺乏计划的，但事实并非如此。

除了一些条件较好的地区，例如定期被洪水淹没的泛滥平原，地处热带地区的非洲土壤的肥力只处在中等甚至偏下的水平。

农耕的技巧就在于对土地的细心筛选，换言之，知道哪些是易于耕种的轻质土壤，能够用小锄头轻松翻种，并且可以在几年的耕种之后，依旧保持土壤的肥力，因为粮食植物会迅速消耗掉土壤中的氮和其他营养物。

一旦生根发芽，刀耕火种的农业会迅速扩大其范围，正如同一个个村落出现在新土地上一样，有专家估计仅仅用了两百年的时间，它就覆盖了从非洲东部到南部两千公里范围的土地。

题目
1.According to paragraph 1, which of the following is true of early food production by the end of the Pleistocene?
A. In certain areas of western and central Africa, some people were already growing root plants such as yams.
B. The cultivation of cereal crops had already been used effectively and widely by people living on the fringes of rain forests.
C. Sophisticated forms of "vegeculture" were introduced for the first time in central and western Africa by people from the Sahara's southern borders.
D. The cultivation of root and tree crops replaced the cultivation of cereal crops because of decreasing summer rainfall in grassland areas.2.According to paragraph 2.Paragraph 2 mentions all of the following as developments in Sub-Saharan Africa from 5000 to 3000 B.C. EXCEPT
A. The Sahara dried up.
B. Ancient Egyptian civilization started to form along the Nile.
C. The inhabitants of the East African highlands gave up hunting when cattle herders arrived.
D. Pastoral peoples moved through the savanna belt to settle in the East African highlands.
3.Which of the following can be inferred from paragraph 2 about the pastoral peoples in the East African Highlands around 3300 B.C.?
A. They lived around the mountains and rarely descended into the plains.
B. They relied on different food sources during dry months than they did during wet months.
C. Their settlements were larger than those of pastoral peoples in West Africa and the Sudan.
D. They obtained food from nearby hunter-gatherer communities during wet months.
4.The word "modest" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A. small
B. strong
C. good
D. typical
5.Paragraph 3 mentions all of the following as reasons that raising cattle in Africa was demanding EXCEPT:
A. Cattle had to drink frequently.
B. Cattle needed large areas of good-quality grazing grass.
C. Cattle required a great deal of movement from one season to the next.
D. Cattle suffered from sleeping sickness after the herds spread south.
6.The word "severely" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A. gradually
B. permanently
C. indirectly
D. very seriously
7.According to paragraph 3, the presence of the tsetse fly in eastern and central Africa caused which of the following?
A. People in the sub-Saharan region began to focus more on the cultivation of cereal crops than in maintaining livestock.
B. Raids among neighboring cattle herders increased dramatically.
C. Cattle herders spread south where they could graze their stock in tsetse-fly-free areas.
D. Most hunter-gatherer groups limited their food collection to the tsetse-fly-free areas south of the Sahara.
8.Paragraph 4 indicates which of the following about shifting agriculture?
A. It allowed farmers to cultivate cereal crops without reducing the size of their herds.
B. It allowed farmers to cultivate a variety of crops at the same time.
C. It enabled farmers to cultivate crops with minimal equipment and effort.
D. It enriched the soil and produced large yields of crops over the years.
9.The word "exploiting”in the passage is closest in meaning to
A. making use of
B. finding
C. destroying
D. looking for
10.The word "readily" in the passage is closest in meaning to
A. completely
B. easily
C. properly
D. regularly
11.Select the TWO answer choices that, according to paragraph 5, indicate true statements about sub-Saharan slash-and-burn agriculture. To obtain credit you must select TWO answer choices.
A. It involved a careful selection of soils for cultivation.
B. It involved regular flooding of the soils to improve fertility.
C. It was abandoned after being implemented intensively for two centuries.
D. It spread quickly once it took hold.
12.Which of the following best describes the relationship of paragraph 5 to paragraph 4?
A. Both paragraphs compare the effectiveness of cereal agriculture and cattle herding as food-production strategies in the sub-Saharan regions.
B. Paragraph 5 challenges the ideas in paragraph 4 about the relative importance of shifting agriculture in the sub-Saharan regions.
C. Both paragraphs emphasize the idea that agricultural practices south of the Sahara took a very long time to develop.
D. Paragraph 5 provides further details about the practice of shifting agriculture south of the Sahara presented in paragraph 4.
13.Look at the four squares [▇] that indicate where the following sentence could be added to the passage. Where would the sentence best fit? Click on a square [▇] to add the sentence to the passage.
Southern Africa was, however, relatively free of tsetse flies..
③As 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.
14.Directions: An introductory sentence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by selecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage. Some sentences do not belong in the summary because they express ideas that are not presented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points. Drag your answer choices to the spaces where they belong. To remove an answer choice, click on it. To review the passage, click VIEW TEXT. The technologies of food production may have already been employed by some sub-Saharan peoples by the end of the Pleistocene.
A.Food production started with the cultivation of root plants and developed to include the cultivation of cereal crops.
B.In order to avoid human and animal sleeping sickness, which posed a danger to herders and cattle, more and more herders took up cultivation.
C.By 1500 B c. cereal agriculture was widespread throughout the savanna belt south of the Sahara, and shifting agriculture was used effectively and widely by farmers.
D.Pastoralists who moved south across the Sahara to find suitable land for cattle grazing may have also cultivated some crops for food.
E.Hunter-gatherer groups in eastern and southern Africa raided their herding neighbors to acquire cattle and other domesticated animals.
F.Slash-and-burn agriculture was initially rejected by farmers because it was too labor-intensive, but once the technique was improved, it expanded gradually to eastern and southern Africa.
答案
1-5. A C B A D
6-10.D C C A B
11-13. AD D C
14.ACD
小结题解析
【段落大意】
第一段：Pleistocene时期末期，非洲种植情况介绍：
1）非洲中西部热带雨林边缘地带种植root plants
2）撒哈拉沙漠南部边界草原地区种植cereal crops
第二段：牧民迁徙活动介绍：
after 5000 B.C. 撒哈拉沙漠干涸，游牧民族南迁到西非和苏丹，
By 3000 B.C. 他们最终定居在the East African highlands（适宜游牧）
第三段：牧民养牛的要求及条件（饮水、牧区及草原，注意事项：避免在舌蝇出没地区放牧）
第四段：介绍迁徙牧民除了放牧之外，还进行耕种，并介绍一种农耕方式：shifting agriculture
第五段：承接上一段，shifting agriculture这种方法的使用并不是偶然的，因为需要合理判断土壤fertility，农耕效率等等问题
【题目翻译】说明：下面是文章的简要概括的介绍句。

通过选择三个答案来完成总结，这三个答案表达了文章中最重要的观点。

有些句子不属于摘要，因为它们表达了文章中没有呈现的想法，或者是文章中的次要思想。

A：粮食生产始于种植根茎植物，后来发展到包括种植谷类作物。

B：为了避免对牧民和牛群造成危险的人和动物昏睡病，越来越多的牧民开始耕种。

C：到公元前1500年，谷物农业在撒哈拉以南的稀树大草原地带得到了广泛的应用，而轮流农业则被农民们广泛有效地利用。

D：为了寻找适合放牧牛群的土地而南移到撒哈拉沙漠的牧民可能也种植了一
些农作物作为食物。

E：东部和南部非洲的狩猎-采集者组织袭击了他们的放牧邻居，以获取牛和其他家养动物。

F：刀耕火种的农业最初因为劳动强度太高而被农民们拒绝，但是一旦技术得到改进，它就逐渐扩展到非洲东部和南部。

【判定题型】：根据问题的提问方式和6选3的作答方式可以确定该题目为概要小结题。

【选项定位及分析】
A 选项：食物的生产是从根茎植物的种植开始的，然后渐渐地谷类作物也开始被种植。

正确。

A 选项是全文的概括总结，第一段提到一开始人们种植块根植物和树本作物，而后人们用轮耕法来种植谷类，故 A 选项正确。

B 选项：为了防止人类和牲畜患上昏睡症，危及到牧民和牛群，越来越多的牧民开始种植农作物。

错误，第四段第一句话说“Contrary to popular belief: there is no such phenomenon as "pure" pastoralists, a society that subsists on its herds alone.”说明牧民不仅放牧，同时也种植农作物。

文中并没有说因为昏睡症，牧民就不放牧转而去种植农作物了。

畜牧和耕种两者是同步进行的。

故 B 选项与原文矛盾，排除。

C 选项：到公元前1500年，谷类农业已经在撒哈拉以南地区的稀树草原带传播开了，轮耕法能高效种植，被农民广泛采用。

正确，对应文章第四、第五段的内容。

四、五段都在论述轮耕法的好处和传播情况，故 C 选项正确。

D 选项：穿过撒哈拉地区向南寻找合适的牧场的牧民可能也会种植农作物。

正确，对应第四段第1句“Contrary to popular belief: there is no such phenomenon as "pure" pastoralists, a society that subsists on its herds alone.”说明牧民不仅放牧，同时也种植农作物。

第四段第2句还说，牧民会种植高粱、小米和其他热带降雨作物。

故 D 选项正确。

E 选项：东非和南非以狩猎和采集为生的人，靠掠夺邻居的牲畜，来获得牛以及其他的家养动物。

对应第三段最后一句，但是这只是细节信息，并不是文章的主干内容，所以不选。

F 选项：“刀耕火种”法最早被农民们排斥，因为它需要大量的劳动力，但是一旦技术提高了之后，它逐渐扩展到了东非和南非。

错误，因为第四第五段说，轮耕法，即“刀耕火种”一开始就被农民们所采用。

所以 F 选项与原文矛盾，且 F 选项中的“技术提高”并没有在原文中提到，故 F 选项排除。

背景知识
农业粗放，落后，技术水平低，投入少，单产低，商品率低。

原因如下
第一，撒哈拉以南非洲气候以热带草原和热带沙漠气候为主，降水不均匀，严重影响农业生产。

刚果盆地是热带雨林气候，以原始森林为主。

第二，撒哈拉以南的非洲地形以高原山地为主，不适宜农业生产。

第三，非洲人口集聚增长，粮食产出不如人口增长快速。

第四，非洲南部地区政局不稳，战争频发，不利于农业生产。

第五，由于技术投入不够，撒哈拉以南的非洲农业生产水平很低。

11。