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  3. Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the staggering disparity between the indigenous po

Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the staggering disparity between the indigenous po

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问题     Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the staggering disparity between the indigenous population of America in 1492—new estimates of which jump as high as 100 million, or approximately one-sixth of the human race at that time—and the few million full-blooded Native Americans alive at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that chronic disease was an important factor in the percipitous decline, and it is highly probable that the greatest killer was epidemic disease, especially as manifested in virgin-soil epidemics.
    Virgin-soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless. That virgin-soil epidemics were important in American history is strongly indicated by evidence that a number of dangerous maladies—smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, and undoubtedly several more—were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World. The effects of their sudden introduction are demonstrated in the early chronicles of America, which contain reports of horrendous epidemics and steep population declines, confirmed in many cases by recent quantitative analyzes of Spanish tribute records and other sources. The evidence provided by the documents of British and French colonies is not as definitive because the conquerors of those areas did not establish permanent settlements and began to keep continuous records until the seventeenth century, by which time the worst epidemics had probably already taken place. Furthermore, the British tended to drive the native populations away, rather than to enslave them as the Spaniards did, so that the epidemics of British America occurred beyond the range of colonists’ direct observation.
    Even so, the surviving records of North America do contain references to deadly epidemics among the native population. In 1616—1619 an epidemic, possibly of pneumonic plague, swept coastal New England, killing as many as nine out of ten. During the 1630’s smallpox, the disease most fatal to the Native American people, eliminated half the population of the Huron and Iroquois confederations. In the 1820’s fever devastated the people of the Columbia River area, killing eight out of ten of them.
    Unfortunately, the documentation of these and other epidemics is slight and frequently unreliable, and it is necessary to supplement what little we do know with evidence from recent epidemics among Native Americans. For example, in 1952 an outbreak of measles among the Native American inhabitants of Ungava Bay, Quebec, affected 99 percent of the population and killed 7 percent, even though some had the benefit of modern medicine. Cases such as this demonstrate that even diseases that are not normally fatal can have destroying consequences when they strike an immunologically defenseless community.
It can be inferred from the text about Spanish tribute records that
选项 A、they were being kept prior to the seventeenth century.
B、they mention only epidemics of smallpox.
C、they provide quantitative and qualitative evidence about Native American populations.
D、they prove that certain diseases were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World.
答案C
解析 本题是一道推理判断题。第二段第二、三句写道：“处女地流行病在美国历史上是很重要的。许多证据说明了这一点。这些证据表明，许多危险的疾病，如：天花、麻疹、黄热病，毫无疑问还有几种其它疾病，在哥伦布发现新大陆以前是从未听说过的。这些突然出现的疾病所产生的影响可以在美国早期的编年史中看到。这些编年史报道了可怕的流行病和人口数量锐减。对西班牙贡品和许多其他资料的定量分析在许多情况下证实了上述情况。”可见，选项C“西班牙贡品记录提供了有关美洲印第安人的定量和定性分析”是从上面的表述中推理出来的。故答案为C。
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