QUESTION TEXT: It can be inferred from the passage that the…
DISCUSSION: This question provides no prompt. To solve it, you should first go through all the answers, quickly, in order to narrow your focus to the 1-2 that seem most likely. Then try to prove those right or wrong.
If neither answer seems right, then expand your focus to the remaining answers. But first focus on the high priority answers.
___________
- Unlikely. The author said wampum only became a currency because the Europeans “misinterpreted it” (lines 9-11). So wampum wasn’t destined to become money.
- Nonsense. The second paragraph describes the use of color in wampum, in the period before the Haudenosaune confederacy.
- CORRECT. This was a hard answer to choose, but it has support from the third paragraph. Lines 40-42 say “arbitrary and pictorially designed symbols”. The “arbitrary” suggests that earlier, religious meanings of wampum were taken to have political meanings in wampum belts. And lines 45-49 say that wampum belts were combinations of string wampum that could be deciphered by “those knowing the significance of the stylized symbols [of the string wampum combined into belts].” This implies that wampum belts depended in part on the established, prior meanings of string wampum. (The bit in brackets in the quote refers to the start of the sentence I took the quote from)
This answer is less directly supported by the passage than I like, but it has some support, and all the other answers are clearly wrong. Also, it fits with common sense – the Haudenosaune had a centuries old system of meaning for wampum, so it would be hard to discard that entirely when moving to using wampum for political symbols. - The passage never says that meanings shifted over time. This answer has no support.
- There’s no evidence for this. Europeans seem to have found it useful to use wampum as money, so they might have done so even if they knew wampum had other uses.
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