<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThe passage below is accompanied by four questions (Questions 1-4). Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n[Fifty] years after its publication in English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins himself died\u2014we may ask: why did [his essay] \u201cOriginal Affluent Society\u201d have such an impact, and how has it fared since? . . . Sahlins\u2019s principal argument was simple but counterintuitive: before being driven into marginal environments by colonial powers, huntergatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite the contrary, they satisfied their needs with far less work than people in agricultural and industrial societies, leaving them more time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep bankers\u2019 hours. Refusing to maximize, many were \u201cmore concerned with games of chance than with chances of game.\u201d . . . The so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life, imposed a harsher work regime and set in motion the long history of growing inequality . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective self-determination. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data\u2014the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic\u2014but rather its conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of possibilities. With its title\u2019s nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith\u2019s famously skeptical portrait of America\u2019s postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, \u201cThe Original Affluent Society\u201d brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers\u2019 lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging societies follow \u201cthe Zen road to affluence\u201d: not by getting more, but by wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by \u201cprogress,\u201d this is due only to the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . . . Viewed in today\u2019s context, of course, not every aspect of the essay has aged well. While acknowledging the violence of colonialism, racism, and dispossession, it does not thematize them as heavily as we might today. Rebuking evolutionary anthropologists for treating present-day foragers as \u201cleft behind\u201d by progress, it too can succumb to the temptation to use them as proxies for the Paleolithic. Yet these characteristics should not distract us from appreciating Sahlins\u2019s effort to show that if we want to conjure new possibilities, we need to learn about actually inhabitable worlds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>Passage-2<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThe passage below is accompanied by four questions (Questions 5-8). Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nRESIDENTS of Loz\u00e8re, a hilly department in southern France, recite complaints familiar to many rural corners of Europe. In remote hamlets and villages, with names such as Le Bacon and Le Bacon Vieux, mayors grumble about a lack of local schools, jobs, or phone and internet connections. Farmers of grazing animals add another concern: the return of wolves. Eradicated from France last century, the predators are gradually creeping back to more forests and hillsides. \u201cThe wolf must be taken in hand,\u201d said an aspiring parliamentarian, Francis Palombi, when pressed by voters in an election campaign early this summer. Tourists enjoy visiting a wolf park in Loz\u00e8re, but farmers fret over their livestock and their livelihoods. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As early as the ninth century, the royal office of the Luparii\u2014wolf-catchers\u2014was created in France to tackle the predators. Those official hunters (and others) completed their job in the 1930s, when the last wolf disappeared from the mainland. Active hunting and improved technology such as rifles in the 19th century, plus the use of poison such as strychnine later on, caused the population collapse. But in the early 1990s the animals reappeared. They crossed the Alps from Italy, upsetting sheep farmers on the French side of the border. Wolves have since spread to areas such as Loz\u00e8re, delighting environmentalists, who see the predators\u2019 presence as a sign of wider ecological health. Farmers, who say the wolves cause the deaths of thousands of sheep and other grazing animals, are less cheerful. They grumble that green activists and politically correct urban types have allowed the return of an old enemy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Various factors explain the changes of the past few decades. Rural depopulation is part of the story. In Loz\u00e8re, for example, farming and a once-flourishing mining industry supported a population of over 140,000 residents in the mid-19th century. Today the department has fewer than 80,000 people, many in its towns. As humans withdraw, forests are expanding. In France, between 1990 and 2015, forest cover increased by an average of 102,000 hectares each year, as more fields were given over to trees. Now, nearly one-third of mainland France is covered by woodland of some sort. The decline of hunting as a sport also means more forests fall quiet. In the mid-to-late 20th century over 2m hunters regularly spent winter weekends tramping in woodland, seeking boars, birds and other prey. Today the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Nationale des Chasseurs, the national body, claims 1.1m people hold hunting licences, though the number of active hunters is probably lower. The mostly protected status of the wolf in Europe\u2014hunting them is now forbidden, other than when occasional culls are sanctioned by the state\u2014plus the efforts of NGOs to track and count the animals, also contribute to the recovery of wolf populations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the lupine population of Europe spreads westwards, with occasional reports of wolves seen closer to urban areas, expect to hear of more clashes between farmers and those who celebrate the predators\u2019 return. Farmers\u2019 losses are real, but are not the only economic story. Tourist venues, such as parks where wolves are kept and the animals\u2019 spread is discussed, also generate income and jobs in rural areas.<\/p>\n\n\n