
Time:
00:
00:
00DIRECTIONS for the question 6-9 : Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
On August 3, 1492 , Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos , Spain , with less than a hundred crew members to discover a new route to Asia. After spending a difficult time at sea, the party sighted land early on the morning ofOctober 12, 1492. They set foot on an island in the Bahamas which they named Al Salvador. Columbus presumed that the indigenous people were Native Indians as he was under the mistaken belief that he had set foot on Indian soil. Probably some 10 million American Indians were natives to the land before the large-scale inhabitation by Europeans and subsequent annihilation of Native Americans started.
However, it took more than a hundred years after Columbus discovered America for the Europeans to finally take the momentous decision to make the New World their home.
The Native Americans actually welcomed the pale-skinned visitors primarily out of curiosity than anything else. They were fascinated by the steel knives and swords, fire spewing cannons, brass and copper utensils, etc. that these visitors brought with them. Eventually, cultural differences erupted. The natives could not stomach the arrogance of the newcomers and the scant respect they paid to nature. The European settlers viewed every resource — plants, animals, and people as something to be commercially exploited.
The native Indians were vastly outnumbered in the wars that ensued. The resistance they put up never proved enough to stop the European settlers. The nomadic lifestyle of the Indians, the relatively unsophisticated weapons at their disposal, the unwillingness of some of their own people to defend themselves, and the diseases of the white men — all contributed to the virtual elimination of their race. Some of the diseases brought by Europeans from their overcrowded cities that decimated the natives were: small pox, plague, measles, cholera, typhoid, and malaria. These deadly diseases, to which most natives had developed no resistance, devastated many tribes between 1775 and 1850.
America was named after an Italian navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the Northern parts of South America in 1499 and 1500 and later announced to the world about the discovery of a new continent.
From the passage we can infer that in comparison to the Europeans, Native Americans were
Login/Signup to comment