江苏省常州市2014高考英语阅读理解联合训练（二）及答案.docVIP

江苏省常州市2014高考英语阅读理解联合训练（2）及答案 阅读理解 The diversity of the original American Indian settlers was not quite as great as that of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries when waves of European, Asian and unwilling African immigrants arrived on American shores. However, the First Americans did have more far-going origins that were ever suspected. For example, Brace’s studies have revealed that the Blackfoot, Iroquois, and other tribes from Minnesota, Michigan, Ontario, and Massachusetts came down from the Jomon, a prehistoric people of Japan. The Inuit in the far north and tribal groups who once lived down the Eastern seaboard into Florida appear to be a later branch from the trunk of the Jomon family tree. The Athabaskan-speaking people from the Yukon and northern-western Canada, who spread as far south as Arizona and northern Mexico, appear to trace their origins to China. “Their facial shapes link them more closely to the living Chinese than to any other population in either part of the world,” says Brace. Johanna Nichols, a Professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley, says that new evidence from native languages throughout the New World strongly suggests that humans have been in the Americas since as early as 40,000 BC. She says that it is only along the west coast that languages appear to have come from immigrants who arrived after the ice age, 14,000 years ago. Nichols also has some different ideas about the direction in which the country was settled. Breaking with the traditional view of migrations, she says that the inside of North America was colonized not only from Siberia but also from the south. To bolster her argument for an early settlement date, Nichols points to findings from the Monte Verde site in southern Chile. It has been dated at 12,500 years old, which means the area was occupied during the last ice age. And, the Monte Verde people would have needed at least 6,500 years to travel from Alaska to Chile. Yet,