DescriptionThe passage describes research that bears on a presumed historical relationship between environmental variation and sociocultural change among indigenous people of the southwestern United States. The author mentions in the first paragraph that many anthropologists believed until recently that environmental variations explain changes in the human populations of the region. The passage then goes on to point out studies that show problems with this explanation, including the lack of generally applicable characterizations of the environment in the region and lack of correlation between environmental changes and sociocultural changes. In the final paragraph the author mentions an alternative explanation in researchers’ findings suggesting that responses to environmental changes varied according to differing factors such as group size and composition, culture, contact with other groups, and individual choices.
Question 9As the description above indicates,
Choice C is the best answer: the passage introduces an explanation, presents evidence that challenges it, and offers an alternative explanation. The passage does not mention the creation of controversy or discuss flaws in research methodology; therefore, Choices A and B are incorrect. Although the passage reports findings that different groups used different adaptive responses to environmental conditions, there is no focus on the adaptations used by particular groups, so Choice D is incorrect. The passage presents recent research findings but not in defense of a long-held interpretation; therefore, Choice E is incorrect.
Question 10The archaeologists mentioned in line 3 asserted that adverse environmental conditions caused southwestern populations to move or disappear. The question asks which finding would support this assertion.
Choices A, B, and C all describe populations that did not move away or disappear in the face of environmental changes, and hence are all incorrect. Choice D is incorrect because it does not mention a change in environmental conditions and therefore cannot support an assertion about the effects of changing environmental conditions.
Choice E is the best answer: it mentions an adverse environmental change (a long drought) that caused a population to leave the site it had inhabited, which would support the archaeologists’ assertion that such environmental changes caused such population changes.
Question 11Choice D is the correct answer: the second paragraph says rainfall variations between local valleys cause different agricultural yields between adjacent fields and gives this as an example of how climate is not uniform within the Southwest but rather can vary significantly from place to place. Choice A is incorrect: while such variability might give rise to unpredictability, that is not how the difference in agricultural yields is being used as evidence in the passage. Choices B and C are incorrect: the passage does not make or report a claim about feeding large populations, nor does it assert that central Arizona lacks land suitable for cultivation. Choice E is incorrect: a discussion of highand low-frequency processes occurs in the third paragraph, but the author does not present geographic differences in rainfall and agricultural yield as either a high- or a
low- frequency environmental process.
Question 12The phrasing of the question indicates that all but one of the answer choices are examples of a population responding to a high-frequency environmental process. You are asked to choose the one answer choice that does not provide such an example. Choices A, B, D, and E are incorrect because they all present responses to high-frequency environmental processes: developing water-storage jars to adapt to seasonal rainfall variations,
adapting dwellings in response to seasonal flooding, trading to acquire clothing in adaptation to seasonal temperature variations, and moving grazing herds seasonally.
Choice C is the best answer: the passage mentions fluctuations in ground water levels as a low-frequency process (lines 21–22); moving a village because of a change that takes place over the course of a generation is not a response to a high-frequency process.
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