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  3. According to historical evidence, the Chinese have used chopsticks since the

According to historical evidence, the Chinese have used chopsticks since the

游客2023-11-09  31
问题     According to historical evidence, the Chinese have used chopsticks since the time of the Shang Dynasty(ca 1766-1066 BCE). The first sticks used as eating utensils were twigs that the hungriest eaters used to scoop food into their mouths. This invention obviously brought added convenience to eating as the sticks made it easier to handle steaming hot food. The same ingenious idea was undoubtedly conceived in other parts of the world as well, but evidence shows that elsewhere spoon-like utensils eventually achieved greater popularity at the expense of chopsticks.
    The reason why chopsticks became a fixture of the Chinese table setting may be the fact that local food is often chopped up into small pieces and only rapidly heated, which makes it especially suitable for chopsticks. Another more philosophical explanation for the development is that the revered philosopher and vegetarian Kong Zi, or Confucius, would have had antipathies towards handling knives at the dinner table. He considered using knives to tear at food to be a show of barbarism. According to this theory then, the fact that chopsticks became the main eating utensils is evidence that civilized behavior gradually replaced a culture marked by brutish knife toting. Whatever the truth may be, the use of chopsticks spread from China to Korea and Japan around the year 500. And the populations of these three nations have tightly held on to their chopsticks ever since.
    Chopsticks are mainly made out of wood or bamboo, but some are also made from jade, ivory, silver, steel and nowadays even plastic. Sticks made from bamboo have the advantage of being cheap and their surface is naturally slightly coarse, which makes it easier to balance food on them. On the other hand, these materials tend to warp and break quite easily in use, which makes a strong case for favoring chopsticks made of metal, except for the fact that they are very slippery and tend to clank against the teeth quite annoyingly.
    Legend has it that Chinese emperors used to prefer silver chopsticks because the material reacted to poisons that assassins put in food by turning black.
    Food etiquette in China is significantly more tolerant than in Japan or Korea. The Chinese consider it to be completely polite to raise a bowl to one’s lips, at least in one’s home, and scoop food over the rim into the mouth with the help of chopsticks. The Chinese prefer to cook their rice quite sticky, so it is not as difficult as one might think to eat it with chopsticks. Noodle soup is also another delicacy that is eaten, true to Chinese style, quite flexibly but noisily with chopsticks. The only absolute taboo regarding chopsticks is that they should never be left to stand in the middle of a heap of rice in a bowl as this evokes food offerings and incense sticks.
    Disposable chopsticks were invented at the end of the 19th century, and they soon became a hit product throughout Asia. Today, the fad for using disposable chopsticks has become a significant environmental problem, as about 45 billion pairs of them are used annually in China alone. Producing such a huge amount of chopsticks requires 1.7 million cubic meters of wood. Last year, the central government added a five percent tax to disposable chopsticks to help curb waste. [br] According to Confucius, _____ people should use chopsticks instead of knives.
选项 A、philosophical
B、vegetarian
C、cultivated
D、graceful
答案 C
解析 第2段第3句中的barbarism表明孔子认为用刀叉进食是未开化的表现，而下一句的civilized表明他认为文明人应该使用筷子，C与civilized含义最相近，为本题答案。A、B都利用了原文第2段第2句的词汇，但philosophical是作者对这段“历史”的看法，不是孔子的看法，而孔子自己是vegetarian，但根据他的看法，是不是vegetarian并不重要，重要的是“文明的人”就要用筷子；D的含义比civilized的含义要窄得多，不能完全表达civilized的意思，所以不能选。
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