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  3. If you fly over the Nazca Desert along the southern coast of Peru, you will see huge drawings in the sand; a monkey, a spider, f

If you fly over the Nazca Desert along the southern coast of Peru, you will see huge drawings in the sand; a monkey, a spider, f

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问题     If you fly over the Nazca Desert along the southern coast of Peru, you will see huge drawings in the sand; a monkey, a spider, flowers, triangles, rectangles, zigzags, spirals, even human forms with crowned heads. Also, straight lines can be seen spreading out from a circle, like spokes in a wheel. Some drawings are more than six hundred feet from end to end, longer than two football fields. Some continue for miles, up hills and down valleys. In all, the markings cover 250 square miles of desert.  Some drawings are so large that you can tell what they are only by looking at them from the air.   But no one knows how they got there, or why.

    We do know they were made about two thousand years ago by South American Indians called the Nazcas. The Nazca people lived in a green valley just below a huge stretch of desert called the pampas, meaning "flat place". The air around the pampas is hot and dry, and the pampas gets only about half an inch of rain each year. So the markings made long ago on its sandy, stony surface have not been worn away by the weather even after two thousand years.
    To find some clues about why the drawings were made, we can turn to history and anthropology. We know that Spain conquered Peru in 1532. The Spaniards destroyed much of the Peruvian way of life, except in remote regions of the Andes Mountains. Today, descendants of the Peruvian natives who survived live in villages along the mountainsides. Farmers there have to hike thousands of feet each day to reach their fields. On their way, many of them perform religious ceremonies. Those ceremonies offer clues to the meaning of the Nazca lines.

    When you look at the drawings from the ground, the lines look like pathways. Along the pathways are stone mounds, littered with scraps of broken pottery. The pathways resemble the mountain paths where today’ s farmers make their religious processions. The farmers leave offerings at stone mounds, which they call wa’ kas, meaning shrines. The offerings include pieces of pottery, seashells, coca leaves, and food.
    In these sacred ceremonies, farmers ask the mountain gods and animal spirits of the Andes to send them water. Since similar offerings are found on the lines and mounds of the pampas, it is likely that the ancient Nazcas had similar beliefs. Since the pampas is one of the driest deserts on earth, it makes sense that the Nazcas would worship gods to bring them water. Perhaps the drawings were meant to be viewed by the gods.
    Perhaps we will never know the real meaning of the Nazca lines. But we do know that even though the Nazcas had none of our modern technology and few of the comforts of our modern society, they did extraordinary things. They made pottery and cloth with so much detail and colour that it is believed to be some of the best ever made. They developed superior irrigation canals for watering their fields. Then, too, they left us those mysterious drawings in the sand, leaving us wondering still about the people who made them.
Why did the Nazca fanners hold sacred ceremonies?
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答案They wanted the mountain gods and animal spirits of the Andes to send them water.
解析 题目问的是为什么纳斯卡的农民要举行神圣的仪式。文章第五段提到因为潘帕斯草原是地球上最干燥的沙漠之一，所以纳斯卡的农民要举行神圣的仪式祈求山神和动物神灵给他们送水。
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本试题收录于： C类竞赛（非英语专业本科）题库大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）分类
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C类竞赛（非英语专业本科）

大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）

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