问答题

The term "Ice Age" may give a wrong impression. The epoch that geologists know as the Pleistocene and that spanned the 1.5 to 2.0 million years prior to the current geologic epoch was not one long continuous glaciation, but a period of oscillating climate with ice advances punctuated by times of interglacial climate not very different from the climate experienced now. Ice sheets that derived from an ice cap centered on northern Scandinavia reached southward to Central Europe. And Beyond the margins of the ice sheets, climatic oscillations affected most of the rest of the world; for example, in the deserts, periods of wetter conditions (pluvials) contrasted with drier, interpluvial periods. Although the time involved is so short, about 0.04 percent of the total age of the Earth, the amount of attention devoted to the Pleistocene has been incredibly large, probably because of its immediacy, and because the epoch largely coincides with the appearance on Earth of humans and their immediate ancestors. Select a sentence that suggests the cause behind people’s unusual focus on Pleistocene epoch.

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Although the time involved is so short, about 0.04 percent o......

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问答题

In his 1976 study of slavery in the United States, Herbert Gutman, like Fogel, Engerman, and Genovese, has rightly stressed the slaves’ achievements. But unlike these historians, Gutman gives plantation owners little credit for these achievements. Rather, Gutman argues that one must look to the Black family and the slaves’ extended kinship system to understand how crucial achievements, such as the maintenance of a cultural heritage and the development of a communal consciousness, were possible. His findings compel attention.Gutman recreates the family and extended kinship structure mainly through an ingenious use of what any historian should draw upon, quantifiable data, derived in this case mostly from plantation birth registers. He also uses accounts of ex-slaves to probe the human reality behind his statistics. These sources indicate that the two-parent household predominated in slave quarters just as it did among freed slaves after emancipation. Although Gutman admits that forced separation by sale was frequent, he shows that the slaves’ preference, revealed most clearly on plantations where sale was infrequent, was very much for stable monogamy. In less conclusive fashion Fogel, Engerman, and Genovese had already indicated the predominance of two-parent households; however, only Gutman emphasizes the preference for stable monogamy and points out what stable monogamy meant for the slaves’ cultural heritage. Gutman argues convincingly that the stability of the Black family encouraged the transmission of—and so was crucial in sustaining—the Black heritage of folklore, music, and religious expression from one generation to another, a heritage that slaves were continually fashioning out of their African and American experiences.Gutman’s examination of other facets of kinship also produces important findings. Gutman discovers that cousins rarely married, an exogamous tendency that contrasted sharply with the endogamy practiced by the plantation owners. This preference for exogamy, Gutman suggests, may have derived from West African rules governing marriage, which, though they differed from one tribal group to another, all involved some kind of prohibition against unions with close kin. This taboo against cousins’ marrying is important, argues Gutman, because it is one of many indications of a strong awareness among slaves of an extended kinship network. The fact that distantly related kin would care for children separated from their families also suggests this awareness. When blood relationships were few, as in newly created plantations in the Southwest, fictive kinship arrangements took their place until a new pattern of consanguinity developed. Gutman presents convincing evidence that this extended kinship structure—which he believes developed by the mid-to-late eighteenth century—provided the foundations for the strong communal consciousness that existed among slaves.In sum, Gutman’s study is significant because it offers a closely reasoned and original explanation of some of the slaves’ achievements, one that correctly emphasizes the resources that slaves themselves possessed.Select a sentence in the first or second paragraph in which the author introduces a kind of resource a historian ought to use.

单项选择题

The transfer of heat and water vapor from the ocean to the air above it depends on a disequilibrium at the interface of the water and the air. Within about a millimeter of the water, air temperature is close to that of the surface water, and the air is nearly saturated with water vapor. But the differences, however small, are crucial, and the disequilibrium is maintained by air near the surface mixing with air higher up, which is typically appreciably cooler and lower in water-vapor content. The air is mixed by means of turbulence that depends on the wind for its energy. As wind speed increases, so does turbulence, and thus the rate of heat and moisture transfer. Detailed understanding of this phenomenon awaits further study. An interacting—and complicating—phenomenon is wind-to-water transfer of momentum that occurs when waves are formed. When the wind makes waves, it transfers important amounts of energy—energy that is therefore not available to provide turbulence. For the following question, consider each of the choices separately and select all that apply. According to the passage, wind over the ocean generally does which of the following

A. Causes relatively cool, dry air to come into proximity with the ocean surface.
B. Maintains a steady rate of heat and moisture transfer between the ocean and the air.
C. Causes frequent changes in the temperature of the water at the ocean’s surface.