托福阅读真题试卷.docx

托福阅读真题 3 PASSAGE 3 The Native Americans of northern California were highly skilled at basketry, using the reeds,grasses, barks, and roots they found around them to fashion articles of all sorts and sizes- not only trays, containers, and cooking pots, but hats, boats, fish traps, baby carriers, and ceremonialobjects. Of all these experts,  none excelled the  Pomo—  a group who lived  on or near  the coast during the 1800's,  and whose descendants continue  to live  in parts of the same region to this day. They made baskets three feet in diameter and others no bigger than a thimble. The Pomo people were masters of decoration. Someof their baskets were completely covered with shell pendants; others with feathers that made the baskets' surfaces as soft as the breasts of birds. Moreover, the Pomopeople madeuse of more weaving techniques than did their neighbors. Most groups made all their basketwork by twining — the twisting of a flexible horizontal material, called a weft, around stiffer vertical strands of material, the warp. Others depended primarily on coiling — a process in which a continuous coil of stiff material is held in the desired shape with tight wrapping of flexible strands. Only the Pomopeople used both processes with equal ease and frequency. In addition, they made use of four distinct variations on the basic twining process, often employing more than one of them in a single article. Although a wide variety of materials was available, the Pomo people used only a few. The warp was always madeof willow, and the most commonly used weft was sedge root, a woody fiber that could easily be separated into strands no thicker than a thread. For color, the Pomo people used the bark of redbud for their twined work and dyed bullrush root for black in coiled work. Though other materials were sometimes used, these four were the staples in their finest basketry. If the basketry materials used by the Pomopeople were limited, the designs were amazin