Gwd-7阅读

wsfuture

By the sixteenth century, the Incas of South America ruled an empire that extendedalong the Pacific coast and Andean highlands from what is now Ecuador to central Chile. While most of the Incas wereself-sufficient agriculturists, the inhabitants of the highland basins above9,000 feet were constrained by the kinds of crops they could cultivate. Whereas95 percent of the principal Andean food crops can be cultivated below 3,000feet, only 20 percent reproduce readily above 9,000 feet. Given this unequalresource distribution, highland Incas needed access to the products of lower,warmer climatic zones in order to enlarge the variety and quantity of theirfoodstuffs. In most of the preindustrial world,the problem of different resource distribution was resolved by long-distancetrade networks over which the end consumer exercised little control. Although the peoples of the Andean highlands participatedin such networks, they relied primarily on the maintenance of autonomous production forces in as many ecological zones as possible. The commodities produced in these zones were extracted,processed, and transported entirely by members of a single group.

       Thisstrategy of direct access to a maximum number of ecological zones by a singlegroup is called vertical economy. Even today, one can see Andean communitiesmaintaining use rights simultaneously to pasturelands above 12,000 feet, topotato fields in basins over 9,000 feet, and to plots of warm-land crops inregions below 6,000 feet. This strategy has two principal variations. The firstis “compressed verticality,” in which a singlevillage resides in a location that permits easy access to closely locatedecological zones. Different crop zones or pasturelands are locatedwithin a few days walk of the parent community. Community members may residetemporarily in one of the lower zones to manage the extraction of productsunavailable in the homeland. In the second variation, called the “vertical archipelago,”the village exploits resources in widely dispersed locations, constituting aseries of independent production “islands.” In certain pre-Columbian Incasocieties, groups were sent from the home territory to establish permanentsatellite communities or colonies in distant tropical forests or coastallocations. There the colonists grew crops and extracted products for their ownuse and for transshipment back to their high-altitude compatriots. In contrastto the compressed verticality system, in this system, commodities rather thanpeople circulated through the archipelago.

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GWD-9-Q5 N-17-Q6:

According to the passage, the inhabitants of the Andean highlands resolvedthe problem of unequal resource distribution primarily in which of thefollowing ways?

A.     Followingself-sufficient agricultural practices

B.     Increasingcommodity production from the ecological zones in the highland basins

C.     Increasingtheir reliance on long-distance trade networks

D.     Establishingsatellite communities throughout the Andean highlands

E.      Establishing production forces in ecological zones beyond theirparent communities

这道题定位到原文，我感觉maintenance of autonomous production forces和A选项的self-sufficient agriculture一样啊！？求解释，为什么选E啊！？