The following passages and questions are reprinted from earlier editions of the text and the test booklets. This exercise is not graded, but working through each question carefully will give you excellent practice to prepare for either a midterm or a final examination, depending on your instructor's course schedule. You can print-out your answers if you like.

Good luck!

(1) The traditional notion that hunter-gatherers must carry on a solitary, unremitting search for food, that they supposedly wake each morning not knowing whether or not they will find the day's supply, and that they usually die young from famine happens to be untrue. (2) Hunter-gatherers, who are not solitary but live in small bands and observe many intricate social rules for the distribution of food, are far from impoverished. (3) The San in the bleak Kalahari Desert forage for food for not more than a few hours a day on the average; moreover, the unmarried young people and those older than fifty do hardly any work at all. (4) Medical examinations of the San have shown that their diet, both abundant and nutritious, has enabled them to escape many of the health problems associated with diets that are common in modern societies: obesity and "middle-age spread," dental caries , hypertension and coronary heart disease, and elevated levels of cholesterol. (5) And far from being short-lived, many of the San live into their sixties and seventies. (6) An important point made by studies of surviving hunters-gatherers is that their generally excellent nutrition extends to all members of the society and not just to a privileged few--simply because the prevalence of sharing insures that everyone eats the same way. (7) In those rare hunter-gatherer societies where some individuals were notably more privileged, as were the chiefs of the Northwest Coast Indian tribes, the inequality did not usually extend to nutrition.

1			What fundamental irony can you infer from the writers' contention that hunter-gatherers share their food so that no one goes hungry?
2			Write a complete sentence in your own words stating the main idea.
3			Although the writers do not include any information about the work habits or nutrition of people in the Western world, what are two essential differences between Westerners and the San of the Kalahari Desert that you can infer from their discussion?
4			In sentence 5, explain in your own words the meaning of the phrase, "and far from being short-lived."