请教prep2-Q33-ESSAY10（ Black Death）

cookie128

Essay #10.  247  (22730-!-item-!-188;#058&00247-00)

 

The Black Death, a severe epidemic that ravaged fourteenth-century Europe, has intrigued scholars ever since Francis Gasquet's 1893 study contending that this epidemic greatly intensified the political and religious upheaval that ended the Middle Ages.  Thirty-six years later, historian George Coulton agreed but, paradoxically, attributed a silver lining to the Black Death:  prosperity engendered by diminished competition for food, shelter, and work led survivors of the epidemic into the Renaissance and subsequent rise of modern Europe.

 

In the 1930s, however, Evgeny Kosminsky and other Marxist historians claimed the epidemic was merely an ancillary factor contributing to a general agrarian crisis stemming primarily from the inevitable decay of European feudalism.  In arguing that this decline of feudalism was economically determined, the Marxist asserted that the Black Death was a relatively insignificant factor.  This became the prevailing view until after the Second World War, when studies of specific regions and towns revealed astonishing mortality rates ascribed to the epidemic, thus restoring the central role of the Black Death in history.

 

This central role of the Black Death (traditionally attributed to bubonic plague brought from Asia) has been recently challenged from another direction.  Building on bacteriologist John Shrewsbury's speculations about mislabeled epidemics, zoologist Graham Twigg employs urban case studies suggesting that the rat population in Europe was both too sparse and insufficiently migratory to have spread plague.  Moreover, Twigg disputes the traditional trade-ship explanation for plague transmissions by extrapolating from data on the number of dead rats aboard Nile sailing vessels in 1912.  The Black Death, which he conjectures was anthrax instead of bubonic plague, therefore caused far less havoc and fewer deaths than historians typically claim.

 

Although correctly citing the exacting conditions needed to start or spread bubonic plague, Twigg ignores virtually a century of scholarship contradictory to his findings and employs faulty logic in his single-minded approach to the Black Death.  His speculative generalizations about the numbers of rats in medieval Europe are based on isolated studies unrepresentative of medieval conditions, while his unconvincing trade-ship argument overlooks land-based caravans, the overland migration of infected rodents, and the many other animals that carry plague.

（C）Question #33.  247-02       (22822-!-item-!-188;#058&000247-02)

 

The passage suggests that Twigg believes that rats could not have spread the Black Death unless which of the following were true?

 

(A) The rats escaped from ships that had been in Asia.

(B) The rats were immune to the diseases that they carried.

(C) The rat population was larger in medieval Europe than Twigg believes it actually was.

(D) The rat population primarily infested densely populated areas.

(E) The rats interacted with other animals that Twigg believes could have carried plague.

 答案：C

想请教一下D为什么不对啊，那专家suggesting that the rat population in Europe was both too sparse and insufficiently migratory to have spread plague，这样的话选D似乎更准确阿

请牛牛们帮忙解答，感激感激

dianecarton

划线部分是说中世纪欧洲老鼠分散而且迁徙不足，所以较难散布瘟疫。D里面的densely populated areas是只人口密集区。一个说人的的population一个说老鼠的。

cookie128

还似有点不懂，原文说瘟疫不易蔓延是因为老鼠分散移动性也不强，自然传播给人的机会就不多，那么如D所说老鼠在人口密集区大量繁殖（infest）的话，应该会挺容易就让人染病的亚

dianecarton

题目是问unless就是除非怎么怎么样，是一个绝对条件的提问。而D是有前提的，谁说主要传染人多的地区即便老鼠分散而且迁移性不强也可以散布疫情呢？这是对suggesting that the rat population in Europe was both too sparse and insufficiently migratory to have spread plague的一个进一步推断，可能成立也可能不成立。人多的地方就一定能传播吗，如果就两只老鼠（too sparse)有一亿人(densely populated areas)也还是不能传播的。而C是对划线部分的直接理解，是满足unless提问的绝对条件，除非老鼠比twigg实际认为的数量多，老鼠才能传播疫情。

cookie128

哦，我都不好意思再问了，我笨……但是还是困惑。infest的意思是大量繁殖哦，正好对应sparse，不是么？

yanhuang2

1、首先范围错了文章中是rat population in Europe
            可是选项中是：The rat population primarily infested densely populated areas.缩小了范围

2、文章是后面指出His speculative generalizations about the numbers of rats in medieval Europe are based on isolated studies unrepresentative of medieval conditions，说明他的这个数字是自己估计的而不一定是事实，所以The rat population was larger in medieval Europe than Twigg believes it actually was.就很好的对应了