托福阅读真题+题目+答案：The Middle East and Agriculture

托福阅读真题+题目+答案：The Middle East and Agriculture

Sometime around 10,000 BCE, people living in the region that we currently call the Middle East (which encompasses parts of northeastern Africa, southeastern Europe, and southwestern Asia) learned how to plant and cultivate the grains that they and their ancestors had gathered for millennia. ▋With this skill, humankind entered the Neolithic era, or the New Stone Age. ▋Agriculture did not bring complete improvement over hunting and gathering to people's lives. ▋Diets were often worse (with a reliance on fewer foods), sewage and animal waste brought more health problems, and farming was a lot of work. ▋People adopted this way of life because the environment changed, but once people learned how to plant crops instead of simply gathering what grew naturally, human society changed dramatically

1.The word “encompasses” in the passage is closest in meaning to

A.originated in

B.borders

C.includes

D.expanded to

2.According to paragraph 1, the Neolithic era was a time when

A.the introduction of new stone tools significantly changed the activities of hunting and gathering

B.humankind experienced better heath because of an improved diet

C.people first began gathering grain

D.environmental change forced people to adopt farming

Just as people discovered how to control crops, they also began to domesticate animals instead of hunting them. Dogs had been domesticated as hunting partners during the earlier Paleolithic period but around 8500 BCE, people first domesticated sheep as a source of food. Throughout the Middle East, some people lived off their herds as they traveled about looking for pasture. Others lived as agriculturalists, keeping their herds near stationary villages.

These two related developments-agriculture and animal domestication-fostered larger populations than hunting and gathering cultures did, and gradually agricultural societies prevailed. Why were people in the Middle East able to embrace agriculture so successfully? The main answer is luck-the Middle East was equipped with the necessary resources. Of the wealth of plant species in the world-over 200,000 different varieties-humans eat only a few thousand. Of these, only a few hundred have been more or less domesticated, but almost 80 percent of the world's human diet is made up of about a dozen species (primarily cereals). The Middle East was home to the highest number of the world's prized grains, such as wheat and barley, which are easy to grow and contain the highest levels of protein. By contrast, people who independently domesticated local crops in other regions did not enjoy the same abundance.

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