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  3. Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the staggering disparity between the indigenous po

Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the staggering disparity between the indigenous po

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问题     Increasingly, historians are blaming diseases imported from the Old World for the staggering disparity between the indigenous population of America in 1492—new estimates of which jump as high as 100 million, or approximately one-sixth of the human race at that time—and the few million full-blooded Native Americans alive at the end of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that chronic disease was an important factor in the precipitous decline, and it is highly probable that the greatest killer was epidemic disease, especially as manifested in virgin-soil epidemics.
    Virgin-soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless. That virgin-soil epidemics were important in American history is strongly indicated by evidence that a number of dangerous maladies—smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, and undoubtedly several more—were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World. The effects of their sudden introduction are demonstrated in the early chronicles of America, which contain reports of horrendous epidemics and steep population declines, confirmed in many cases by recent quantitative analyzes of Spanish tribute records and other sources. The evidence provided by the documents of British and French colonies is not as definitive because the conquerors of those areas did not establish permanent settlements and began to keep continuous records until the seventeenth century, by which time the worst epidemics had probably already taken place. Furthermore, the British tended to drive the native populations away, rather than to enslave them as the Spaniards did, so that the epidemics of British America occurred beyond the range of colonists’ direct observation.
    Even so, the surviving records of North America do contain references to deadly epidemics among the native population. In 1616—1619 an epidemic, possibly of pneumonic plague, swept coastal New England, killing as many as nine out of ten. During the 1630’s smallpox, the disease most fatal to the Native American people, eliminated half the population of the Huron and Iroquois confederations. In the 1820’s fever devastated the people of the Columbia River area, killing eight out of ten of them.
    Unfortunately, the documentation of these and other epidemics is slight and frequently unreliable, and it is necessary to supplement what little we do know with evidence from recent epidemics among Native Americans. For example, in 1952 an outbreak of measles among the Native American inhabitants of Ungava Bay,
    Quebec, affected 99 percent of the population and killed 7 percent, even though some had the benefit of modern medicine. Cases such as this demonstrate that even diseases that are not normally fatal can have destroying consequences when they strike an immunologically defenseless community.
The 1952 measles outbreak is mentioned so as to
选项 A、demonstrate the impact of modern medicine on epidemic disease.
B、refute allegations of unreliability made against the historical record of colonial America.
C、advocate new research into the continuing problem of epidemic disease.
D、confirm the documentary evidence of epidemic disease in colonial America.
答案D
解析 本题是一道逻辑结构题。本文最后一段第一句写道：“不幸的是，这些以及其他流行病的文献资料很少并且常常是不可靠的，因此必须从美洲印第安人近期的流行病来补充我们知之甚少的不足。”接着，作者以1952年的麻疹为例说明上述论据。可见，D是正确答案。
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