2014年6月28日托福阅读真题P1+题目+答案：Southwest Agriculture

2014年6月28日托福阅读真题P1+题目+答案：Southwest Agriculture

After the arrival of hunter-gatherers in the southwestern region of North America, several alternative types of agriculture emerged, all involving different solutions to the Southwest’s fundamental problem: how to obtain enough water to grow crops in an environment in which rainfall is so low and unpredictable that little or no farming is practiced there today. People experimented with alternative strategies for almost a thousand years in different locations, and many experiments succeeded for centuries, but eventually all except one succumbed to environmental problems caused by human impact or climate change.

1. The word ―eventually‖ in the passage is closet in meaning to

A.to some degree

B.unfortunately

C.in the end

D.gradually

2. Paragraph 1 supports which of the following inferences about the North American Southwest?

A.Its sources of water were plentiful when the hunter-gathers first arrived.

B.It has always lacked the large population needed to perform successful experiments in agriculture.

C.Its climatic conditions today are essentially similar to those existing when the hunter-gathers first arrived.

D.It was more seriously affected by climate change than it was by human impact.

One strategy was to live at higher elevations where rainfall was higher, as did the Mogollon, the people at Mesa Verde, and the people of the early agricultural phase at Chaco Canyon known as the Pueblo I phase. But that carried a risk, because it is cooler at high than at low elevations, and in an especially cool year, it might be too cold to grow crops at all. An opposite extreme was to farm at the warmer low elevations, but there the rainfall is insufficient even for dryland agriculture. The Hohokam got around that problem by constructing the most extreme irrigation system in the Americas outside Peru. But irrigation entailed the risk that human digging of ditches and canals could lead to sudden heavy water runoff from rainstorms, digging further down into the ditches and canals and carving out deep channels called arroyos. In that case, the water level would drop below the field level, making irrigation impossible for people without pumps.

3. All of the following are mentioned in paragraph 2 as potential problems faced by the Hohokam EXCEPT

A.insufficient rainfall to allow crops to grow

B.rainstorms leading to destructive water runoff

C.insufficient workers to dig ditches and canals

D.irrigation water levels in channels too low to be used

A more conservative strategy was to plant crops only in areas with reliable springs and groundwater tables. That was the solution initially adopted by the Mimbres and by people in the phase known as Pueblo II. However, it then became dangerously tempting to expand agriculture during wet decades with favorable growing conditions into marginal areas with less reliable springs and groundwater. The population multiplying in those marginal areas might then find itself unable to grow crops and might starve when the unpredictable climate turned dry again. That fate actually befell the Mimbres, who started by farming the floodplain and then began to farm adjacent land above the floodplain as their population came to exceed the floodplain’s capacity to support it. They got away with their gamble during a wet climate phase, when they were able to obtain half their food outside the floodplain. However, when drought conditions returned, that gamble left them with a population double what the floodplain could support, and Mimbres society collapsed suddenly under the stress.

4. The word ―initially‖ in the passage is closet in meaning to

A.first

C.sometimes

D.reluctantly

5. The word ―adjacent‖ in the passage is closet in meaning to

A.neighboring

B.higher

C.unused

D.additional

6. According to paragraph 3, which of the following was the cause of the collapse of the Mimbres society?

A.They could not overcome the stress of moving to a new area with each change in the climate.

B.The flooding of their farmland during a wet climate phase prevented them from growing enough to feed their population.

C.A decline in population during dry periods prevented them from expanding their farming into nearby areas.

D.Their population became too large to survive when the climate entered a dry period.

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