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  3. The Amazon River basin boasts the largest river system on Earth and harbors an ecosystem that is tremendously complex. Early tra

The Amazon River basin boasts the largest river system on Earth and harbors an ecosystem that is tremendously complex. Early tra

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问题     The Amazon River basin boasts the largest river system on Earth and harbors an ecosystem that is tremendously complex. Early travelers from renaissance Europe were overwhelmed by their first encounters. In 1531, Francisco Pizarro overthrew the Incan empire, removing the emperor from his throne and taking for Spain the Incan imperial treasures. A decade later his younger brother ventured east from the high plateau of the Andes Mountains in pursuit of the famous cities of gold and spices thought to be hidden in the jungle forest. Going down the river the expedition soon exhausted its supplies and a small group was sent ahead to search for food. Eight months later, this group emerged at the mouth of the Amazon, having made what would prove to be the first descent of the length of the river.
    A missionary who accompanied the group sent a remarkable account of their adventures to the Pope, including mention of the great signal drums that sounded from village to village far in advance of their arrival, warning of the coming of the European strangers. His manuscript records seeing innumerable settlements along the river—on one day they passed more than twenty villages in succession, and some of these are said to have stretched for six miles or more. Such reports have intrigued scientists ever since, for they describe dense populations and large federations of tribes which, if verified, would be entirely at odds with modern stereotypes of hidden, thinly scattered tribes scratching out an uncertain existence.
    Beginning in the late seventeenth-century, the successors to the first explorers recorded and collected many of the everyday objects fashioned from wood and other organic materials that usually rot in a tropical climate. Such collections housed in European museums preserve a "window" into cultures that were soon to experience huge changes brought about by foreign diseases and cruel abuse at the hands of Europeans.
    Population collapse and movement along the principal rivers of the Amazon system have contributed to a veil of misunderstanding that has long covered the cultural achievements of tropical forest societies. Diffuse bands hunting deep in the forest interior eventually came to be seen as the typical tropical forest adaptation. So much so that when archaeological studies began in earnest at the mouth of the Amazon in the 1950’s, scientists argued that the sophisticated culture they were discovering could not have originated in the Amazon Basin itself, but must have been derived from more advanced cultures elsewhere. They imagined the tropical forest to be an "imitation paradise" unable to support much beyond a simple hunting-and-gathering way of life. This mistaken idea has exerted a persistent influence ever since.
选项 A、in searching for food
B、going down the river
C、proving the length of the river
D、covering the length of the Amazon River
答案D
解析 本题是细节题，参见文章第1段末，其大意是：探险队向河流的下游进发，不久就耗尽了给养，于是他们派一小队人往前去寻找食物。8个月后，这支小队出现在亚马逊河口，完成了探险—后来证明他们首次顺流而下走完了全程。
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