<p>Passage 1 </p>
<p>In 1929, a teenager named RIdgely Whiteman wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC about what he called warheads that he had found near Clovies, New Mexico. These warheads were actually spear points, elegantly chipped to sharpness on both edges and finished off with a grove, or flute, down the centre of each side. Eventually, such fluted points turned up in the oldest archaeological excavations elsewhere in North America.</p>
<p>Stone cannot be carbon-dated, but the dating of organic material found with these tools showed that the people who used them were in America no earlier than about 13,500 years ago. The story most archaeologists built on these tools was of a people they nicknamed Clovis, who came into North America via Siberia, moved south through an ice-free corridor, then dispersed, their descendants occupying North and South America within a thousand years. Since their tools were often found within the bones of mammoths and other large creatures, scientists usually described the Clovis people as big-game hunters. As late as 1996 a prominent archaeologist, Frederick Hadleigh West, could state that Clovis is taken to be the basal, founding, population for the Americas. But in the past decade such certainty has been dramatically shaken.</p>
<p>The most straightforward challenge to the old story is the matter of time. The era in which the Cloves people lived is limited by a time barrier that stops about 13,500 years ago: there is geologic evidence that an ice-free corridor between Siberia and North American would not have been open much before then. But in 1997 a blue-ribbon panel of archaeologists visited a site in Chile called Monte Verde and agreed that people had lived there at least 14,500 years ago, about 1,000 years before the first sign of Clovis people in North America. Acceptance of the Monte Verde date not only broke the time barrier but also focused new interests on other sites that may have even earlier dates.</p>
<p>Passage 2</p>
<p>One of the biggest barriers to accepting pre-Clovis sites has been geographic. During the most recent ice age, the New World was pretty much closed to pedestrian traffic: the northwest corridor in Canada would have been covered with ice. Though ancient humans might have mastered prehistoric crampons, mastodons almost certainly did not, and finding food and shelter under those circumstances would have been difficult at best. But the latest idea circulating among archaeologists and anthropologists has people ditching their crampons and spears for skin-covered boats. Maybe the first Americans came not by hand but by sea, hugging the ice-age coast.</p>
<p>When the seafaring theory was proposed in the mid-1970s, it sank for lack of evidence. But as the time line for New World occupation has changed, the theory seems downright sensible, if not quite provable. The Pacific Rim has vast resources of salmon and sea mammals, and people need only the simplest of tools to exploit them: nets, weirs, clubs, knives. Whereas ancient landlubbers would have had to reinvent their means of hunting, foraging, and housing as they passed through different terrains, ancient mariners could have had smooth sailing through relatively unchanging coastal environments. And recent geologic studies show that even when glaciers stretched down into North America, there were thawed pockets of coastline in northwest North America where people could take refuge and gather provisions. Most archaeologists have a continental mindset, says anthropologist Robson Bonnichsen, but the peopling of the Americas is likely to be tied very much to the development and spread of maritime adaptation.</p>
<p>Q1. Both authors agree on which of the following points?</p>
<p>a) A maritime environment would have presented unique challenges to early Americans
b) The first Americans most likely subsisted on mastodons and other big game
c) Overland travel to the New World would have been difficult during the most recent ice age.
d) It may never be definitively determined when America was initially settled
e) The Clovis people were most likely the first Americans</p>
<p>I chose d. But it turned out to be C. After a second reading, I somehow got it through paraphrase but dont have a strong idea of it.</p>
<p>Q2. The author of passage 2 would most likely claim that the information presented in lines 25-36 of passage 1 </p>
<p>a) Validates the notion that the peopling of Americas occurred shortly after the most recent ice age
b) Adds credibility to the theory that the first Americans may have arrived by boat
c) Indicates that overland travel to the New World was not possible
d) Demonstrates that early Americans must have relied on the sea for sustenance
e) Reveals that archaeologists can differ over even the most basic facts</p>
<p>I was quite certain after ruling out b-e. But it turns out the answer is b. Someone please help!!</p>