托福TPO68阅读+题目+答案：Salt and the Rise of Venice

托福TPO68阅读+题目+答案：Salt and the Rise of Venice

【1】The city of Venice, on Italy's coastline, achieved commercial dominance of southern Europe during the Middle Ages largely because of its extensive trade in the valuable commodity of salt. At first, Venice produced its own salt at its Chioggia saltworks For a time its principal competitor in the region was the town of Cervia, with Venice having the advantage because Chioggia was more productive But Chioggia produced a fine-grained salt, so when Venetians wanted coarser salt, they had to import it Then, in the thirteenth century, after a series of floods and storms destroyed about a third of the salt-producing ponds in Chioggia, the Venetians were forced to import even more salt

1.(多选题)

Select the TWO answer choices that give the two reasons provided in paragraph 1 for Venice’s need to import salt from other places. To receive credit, you must select TWO answers.

A.The fine-grained salt produced at the Chioggia saltworks was too expensive for Venetians to purchase.

B.Imports provided Venetians with a kind of salt unavailable from the local salt production site

C.Venice needed to purchase additional supplies of salt because natural disasters had destroyed part of its salt production site

D.When Cervia was no longer a competitor, Venetian salt was used mostly for export, leaving little salt available for local use.

【2】That was when the Venetians made an important discovery More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas As a result of this assistance, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the salt merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could afford to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean, where they picked up valuable cargoes of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer That meant that Venetians were paying extremely high prices for salt, but they did not mind expensive salt if they could dominate the spice trade and be leaders in the grain trade When grain harvests failed in Italy. Venice would use its salt income to subsidize grain imports from other parts of the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian gram market

2.(单选题)

Which of the sentences below best expresses the essential information in the highlighted sentence in the passage? Incorrect choices change the meaning in important ways or leave out essential information

A.Non-Venetian merchants preferred to trade in Indian spices rather than salt because they did not have the salt subsidy that merchants from Venice had

B.The salt subsidy enabled Venetian merchants to sell Indian spices in western Europe at cheaper prices than their competitors could

C.The expense of shipping heavy salt cargoes to western Europe convinced merchants from Venice to sell expensive Indian spices instead.

D.By sending ships to the eastern Mediterranean and western Europe, merchants from many nations were able to offer both salt and spices at profitable prices.

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