Unit 3 A taste of English humour using language课时作业

Ⅰ.阅读理解

　　A

　　Just in time for National Popcorn Day, a new study shows that people in what's now Peru were eating the snack about 2,000 years earlier than we thought.

　　Coastal peoples were preparing corn－based foods up to 6,700 years ago, according to analysis of remains of the ancient corn recently discovered at the Paredones and Huaca Prieta archaeological sites on Peru's northern coast.

　　Previously, evidence of corn as a food about 5,000 years ago had mostly come from what are called microfossils-microscopic remains that do not offer information on the size and shape of the corncobs (玉米棒). But the newly found corn remains revealed a lot, via radiocarbon dating and other tests.

　　The people who lived in Paredones and Huaca Prieta probably cooked corn in several ways: Wrapping a corncob and resting it on coals, roasting a corncob directly over a flame, or cooking a corncob in an earthen oven. In this culture, corn was a delicious food or a minor supplement to the diet­archaeological evidence shows they did not eat it in large amounts.

　　Corn was first grown in Mexico about 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte, according to Piperno, whose research has been published in the journal ProceedingsoftheNationalAcademyofSciences. A few thousand years later, corn was brought to South America, where farmers bred the plant crop into hundreds of varieties.

　　Indeed, what surprised Piperno most about the new research was the diversity of corn-from corncob shapes to kernel (玉米粒) colors discovered in the new­found remains. "Farmers like to experiment and grow cool things，" she said.

篇章导读：本文是一篇说明文。一项新的考古研究发现人类在