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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. Question #34. 247-04 (22868-!-item-!-188;#058&000247-04)
Which of the following statements is most compatible with Kosminsky's approach to history, as it is presented in the passage?
(A) The Middle Ages were ended primarily by the religious and political upheaval in fourteenth-century Europe. (B) The economic consequences of the Black Death included increased competition for food, shelter, and work. (C) European history cannot be studied in isolation from that of the rest of the world. (D) The number of deaths in fourteenth-century Europe has been greatly exaggerated by other historians. (E) The significance of the Black Death is best explained within the context of evolving economic systems. 答案是E 我觉得这个问题应该是从第二段入手找知识点。可是第二段没有提到economic systems吧！ E的意思是不是“BD的重要性最好的解释了经济系统进化的内容”，我不是很理解，这是什么意思啊，第二段不是再说BD不是 那么重要吗？为什么它不重要还能解释经济系统的重要性呢？ | 
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发表于 2009-6-6 21:59:00
