RC Question 17 Explanation
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.
How is E unsupported by the evidence? The passage says, “While wampum certainly did become a medium of exchange among Europeans and Haudenosaune alike, this was DUE TO the Europeans, who misinterpreted the significance of wampum and use it solely to purchase goods…” Doesn’t the phrase ‘due to’ imply that the Europeans’ misunderstanding of wampum was the sole reason that it was used as currency? So wouldn’t E work as well, saying that if they had been aware that it was used as communication, they wouldn’t have used it as currency. I’m stuck on this question.
So the main thing is you have to choose the best answer, where the author is the most likely to agree. C has strong support.
As for E, we can’t say what the Europeans would have done in a counterfactual. First, European settlers weren’t exactly famous for being friendly or sensitive towards Native Americans. The Europeans might have done as they pleased regardless of how Native Americans had been using wampum.
Second, the section you cite says Europeans used wampum solely to trade. This suggests the alternative was using wampum for more than trade. Had the Europeans known of the cultural significance of Wampum they might well have used it for both messaging and trade.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.