请教PREP2-ESSAY10-Q35

lavenderwu

Essay #10.
247

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 #35.
247-06

The "silver lining to the Black Death" (the highlighted text) refers to which of the following?



(A) The decay of European feudalism precipitated by the Black Death

(B) Greater availability of employment, sustenance, and housing for survivors of the epidemic

(C) Strengthening of the human species through natural selection

(D) Better understanding of how to limit the spread of contagious diseases

(E) Immunities and resistance to the Black Death gained by later generations


答案选B,对答案没什么疑问,但不明白答案是根据什么与原文绿色部分的意思刚好相反

viviansecret

应该是楼主对silver lining的理解有且却， 英文有句话叫every cloud has a silver lining，意思是黑暗中总有一丝光明 silver lining是一线希望，一点亮色的一丝George Coulton同意this epidemic greatly intensified the political and religious upheaval that ended the Middle Ages这一观点，但不同的是他把原因归结于prosperity engendered by
                    diminished competition for food, shelter, and work led survivors of the epidemic into the Renaissance and subsequent rise of modern Europe.
虽然黑死病恐怖，但有一个正面的影响就是死的人多了，对逃过黑死病的幸存者而言食物住房和工作的竞争就减少了，所以说是黑死病的一个silver lining。注意我加粉色的地方是减少了竞争，所以不存在跟绿色部分的意思相反的问题。diminished competition 在答案B种被改写成Greater availability

lavenderwu

明白了,太不仔细了,谢谢

nancy5130

这道我也错了。而且来就把b排出了
读不懂那个silver lining 什么意思。

reirayanqing

同意选B 但对A有疑问

由第一段最后一句话subsequent rise of modern Europe.是不是可以推出A The decay of European feudalism precipitated by the Black Death是不是也是一种改写呢？

gui5910667

a的定位在文章第二段，是另外一种观点了。而此题定位就是文章第一段最后一句话。