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  3. It is an unfortunate fact that most North Americans know little about American Indian culture and history. Scholars have studied

It is an unfortunate fact that most North Americans know little about American Indian culture and history. Scholars have studied

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问题     It is an unfortunate fact that most North Americans know little about American Indian culture and history. Scholars have studied such matters, but they have not succeeded in broadcasting their conclusions widely. Thus, it is still not widely known that American Indians have epics, that they performed plays long before Europeans arrived, and that they practiced politics and carried on trade.
    One way to gain a fuller appreciation of this rich culture is to examine American Indian poetry, for poetry is in all cultures the most central and articulate of the arts. It is especially important that we study American Indian poetry as this poetry can create a context that gives cohesive expression to the crafts, the artifacts, and the isolated facts that many Americans have managed to notice willy-nilly. Even a survey of American Indian poetry reveals a range of poetic thought and technique that defies easy generalization. Jarold Ramsey hazards a summary, however, which serves at least to give the uninitiated reader some sense of what American Indian poetry is like. Overall, he writes, it represents " an oral, formulaic, traditional, and anonymous art form," whose approach is to emphasize the "mythic and sacred" components of reality. It "flourished through public performances... by skilled recitalists whose audiences already knew the individual stories" and valued the performers for their "ability to exploit their material dramatically and to combine them[their stories]in longer cycles" rather than for their "plot invention. " Because this poetry belongs to highly ethnocentric tribal peoples, whose cultures " we still do not know much about," it " is likely to seem all the more terse, even cryptic.
    American Indian poetry has another feature that Ramsey ignores: it is always functional. Whether sung, chanted, or recited; whether performed ceremonially, as entertainment, or as part of a task such as curing a patient or grinding corn; or whether recited individually or by a group, it is always fully woven into the fabric of ordinary life.
    For complicated reasons, American Indian poetry has basically been ignored by non-Indian cultures. Kenneth Lincoln writes that failure to hear American Indian voices results " partly... from the tragedies of tribal dislocation, partly from mistranslation, partly from misconceptions about literature, partly from cultural indifference. " Brian Swann suggests an additional explanation; tribal poetry is oral, whereas Europeans arrived in the New World with a deeply ingrained belief in the primacy of the written word. As a result, European settlers found it hard to imagine that poetry could exist without written texts and thus that the American Indians had achieved something parallel to what Europeans called literature long before Europeans arrived. As a consequence, Europeans did not fully respond to the rich vitality of American Indian poetry.
It can be inferred from the passage that Brian Swann believes which of the following about the European settlers of America?
选项 A、They probably were more literate, on the average, than the general European population they left behind.
B、They probably thought it necessary to understand American Indian politics before studying American Indian literature.
C、They probably did not recognize evidence of an oral poetic tradition in the American Indian cultures they encountered.
D、They probably could not appreciate American Indian poetry because it was composed in long narrative cycles.
答案C
解析 由题干中的Brian Swarm可定位至原文最后一段。由文章最后三句可知，Brian Swann的解释为：印第安人部落的诗歌是以口头形式流传的，而来到美洲新世界的欧洲人却深信文字居首要地位，因此欧洲人忽略了美洲印第安人诗歌的价值，C项描述与文意相符，故选C项。其余三项文中均未提及。
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