ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by big game hunting. Fun for the whole family.

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Unless you're a family of water buffalo.

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By referring to "the then-prevailing view of the first inhabitants as big game hunters

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on the western prairies", the author of Passage 2 implies that the first inhabitants... what?

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Answering this question takes a little bit of close reading, so prepare to decipher the

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many mysteries of question 4.

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Okay, the one mystery of question 4.

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The biggest clue here is the phrase "then-prevailing,"

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otherwise known as "formerly dominating" or "previously convincing."

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Basically, we no longer think that the first inhabitants were big game hunters on the western prairie.

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(A) is totally wrong. The whole point of this passage is that we have a better understanding

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these days. Previous generations got nothin' on us.

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Nope, like we just said, today's archaeologists have a much better understanding. Choice (C)

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can't be right. It's probably true that these cultures left

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less evidence than others. However, this has nothing to do with what the author is implying.

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(D) isn't right either. It might also be true that the ideas of earlier

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archaeologists still shape the way a lot of people think about America's earliest inhabitants.

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That just isn't what the author is implying with the lines in question, though, so we

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can eliminate choice (B).

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Choice (E) hits the nail on head.

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The author is telling us that we now know that American Indians had more ways of getting

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food than big game hunting.

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Probably good news for the buffalo.

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