The following passages and questions are reprinted from earlier editions of the text and the test booklets. Working through each carefully will give you excellent practice to prepare for either a midterm or a final examination, depending on your instructor's course schedule. The skills they represent are a composite of those taken up in Parts I and II, Chapter 1 - 7. 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.
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