Early Human and Prehistoric Cultures

Different members had different tastes and likings which led to

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Families formed as an answer to the questions faced by growing tribes in the early times. When the number of people of an early human tribe kept on growing, space became short. It became impossible to keep on sharing common roofs. The grazing, hunting, and farming grounds close to the home of the tribe were no more enough to feed all. People had to cover greater distances in a day to get food. It became more and more difficult to carry back food from where it was found.

When people grew in skills and knowledge, it made life easier and plentiful. There was no more any need to share most of their belongings. So, people started to have personal belongings and attachments. This gave rise to greed and envy. Greater numbers of people meant greater differences among them. Everybody had his or her own tastes. So, it became harder to please everybody by common cooking. To find an answer to these problems, the tribe divided into smaller groups called families that started to live and cook separately. Families built themselves around providers, or the persons who put food on the table, and were made up of blood relations of the main provider. Thus, the tribe grew from a family-less group to a group of families.

Tribesmen started moving to far off places for food because

Directions: Choose the most correct answer based on the given reading.

Families formed as an answer to the questions faced by growing tribes in the early times. When the number of people of an early human tribe kept on growing, space became short. It became impossible to keep on sharing common roofs. The grazing, hunting, and farming grounds close to the home of the tribe were no more enough to feed all. People had to cover greater distances in a day to get food. It became more and more difficult to carry back food from where it was found.

When people grew in skills and knowledge, it made life easier and plentiful. There was no more any need to share most of their belongings. So, people started to have personal belongings and attachments. This gave rise to greed and envy. Greater numbers of people meant greater differences among them. Everybody had his or her own tastes. So, it became harder to please everybody by common cooking. To find an answer to these problems, the tribe divided into smaller groups called families that started to live and cook separately. Families built themselves around providers, or the persons who put food on the table, and were made up of blood relations of the main provider. Thus, the tribe grew from a family-less group to a group of families.

The passage is an exposition on

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The history of money and coins takes us back to when man first felt the need to exchange goods and services. Early palaeolithic man lived by hunting and fishing, sharing the flesh or fish obtained by the members of a group, each a self-sufficient unit in clash or conflict with neighbouring groups, from whom things of value could be had only through robbery or violence. With more peaceful forms of contact, trade began as simple barter of commodities; and gradually, instead of jealously guarding their resources, men began to go in search of products of other tribes and regions.

In India a form of barter of goods and services survived till recently in its jajmani system, where services rendered by members of hereditary castes of potters, carpenters, masons, weavers of goods, barbers, washer men, weavers, cooks, pundits and astrologers were traditionally paid for in kind—gram, oil, raw sugar, dairy products etc.But barter had its limitations: there had to be a simultaneous need to buy and sell and there had to be some standards of value. It therefore gave way, as the market place developed and widened choices, to a more precise way of using some durable products of intrinsic value. A seller could accept in exchange a product, which although he did not need to buy then, or not at all, could be used as a store of value and medium of exchange in the future.

Limestone money was in use in the Yap Islands till after the Second World War. Not cheap by current standards, a stone ‘a foot in diameter cost about seventy-five US dollars. A stone man-high was worth many villages and plantations, and a stone two-men high was beyond price’, according to William Price. He adds, ‘our experience in trying to make United States dollars legal tender on Yap is somewhat humbling. Yesterday it was the Japanese; today it is the Americans; tomorrow it could be somebody else.

Shells, particularly cowries, remained in universal use in Asia, China, Africa and Europe till not so long ago. In the Punjab, till the late 1920s, cowries valued at much less than a pice (sixty-four to a rupee) were sold by old women in markets from heaps piled in front of them as a subsidiary currency for marginal adjustment of prices. The cowry shell had a special value for rituals and ceremonies, for warding off the evil eye because of its resemblance to an eye, and a as a symbol of fertility and reproduction for its shape.

The passage records

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The history of money and coins takes us back to when man first felt the need to exchange goods and services. Early palaeolithic man lived by hunting and fishing, sharing the flesh or fish obtained by the members of a group, each a self-sufficient unit in clash or conflict with neighbouring groups, from whom things of value could be had only through robbery or violence. With more peaceful forms of contact, trade began as simple barter of commodities; and gradually, instead of jealously guarding their resources, men began to go in search of products of other tribes and regions.

In India a form of barter of goods and services survived till recently in its jajmani system, where services rendered by members of hereditary castes of potters, carpenters, masons, weavers of goods, barbers, washer men, weavers, cooks, pundits and astrologers were traditionally paid for in kind—gram, oil, raw sugar, dairy products etc.But barter had its limitations: there had to be a simultaneous need to buy and sell and there had to be some standards of value. It therefore gave way, as the market place developed and widened choices, to a more precise way of using some durable products of intrinsic value. A seller could accept in exchange a product, which although he did not need to buy then, or not at all, could be used as a store of value and medium of exchange in the future.

Limestone money was in use in the Yap Islands till after the Second World War. Not cheap by current standards, a stone ‘a foot in diameter cost about seventy-five US dollars. A stone man-high was worth many villages and plantations, and a stone two-men high was beyond price’, according to William Price. He adds, ‘our experience in trying to make United States dollars legal tender on Yap is somewhat humbling. Yesterday it was the Japanese; today it is the Americans; tomorrow it could be somebody else.

Shells, particularly cowries, remained in universal use in Asia, China, Africa and Europe till not so long ago. In the Punjab, till the late 1920s, cowries valued at much less than a pice (sixty-four to a rupee) were sold by old women in markets from heaps piled in front of them as a subsidiary currency for marginal adjustment of prices. The cowry shell had a special value for rituals and ceremonies, for warding off the evil eye because of its resemblance to an eye, and a as a symbol of fertility and reproduction for its shape.

Some of the following give forth many ingredients that define money. Which one of them can be taken as the chief ingredient?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

The history of money and coins takes us back to when man first felt the need to exchange goods and services. Early palaeolithic man lived by hunting and fishing, sharing the flesh or fish obtained by the members of a group, each a self-sufficient unit in clash or conflict with neighbouring groups, from whom things of value could be had only through robbery or violence. With more peaceful forms of contact, trade began as simple barter of commodities; and gradually, instead of jealously guarding their resources, men began to go in search of products of other tribes and regions.

In India a form of barter of goods and services survived till recently in its jajmani system, where services rendered by members of hereditary castes of potters, carpenters, masons, weavers of goods, barbers, washer men, weavers, cooks, pundits and astrologers were traditionally paid for in kind—gram, oil, raw sugar, dairy products etc.But barter had its limitations: there had to be a simultaneous need to buy and sell and there had to be some standards of value. It therefore gave way, as the market place developed and widened choices, to a more precise way of using some durable products of intrinsic value. A seller could accept in exchange a product, which although he did not need to buy then, or not at all, could be used as a store of value and medium of exchange in the future.

Limestone money was in use in the Yap Islands till after the Second World War. Not cheap by current standards, a stone ‘a foot in diameter cost about seventy-five US dollars. A stone man-high was worth many villages and plantations, and a stone two-men high was beyond price’, according to William Price. He adds, ‘our experience in trying to make United States dollars legal tender on Yap is somewhat humbling. Yesterday it was the Japanese; today it is the Americans; tomorrow it could be somebody else.

Shells, particularly cowries, remained in universal use in Asia, China, Africa and Europe till not so long ago. In the Punjab, till the late 1920s, cowries valued at much less than a pice (sixty-four to a rupee) were sold by old women in markets from heaps piled in front of them as a subsidiary currency for marginal adjustment of prices. The cowry shell had a special value for rituals and ceremonies, for warding off the evil eye because of its resemblance to an eye, and a as a symbol of fertility and reproduction for its shape.

What is the structure of the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
Some scholars believe that the Neanderthals died out at the hands of the more graceful, more intelligent and more numerous Homo sapiens. These scholars also seem to take an almost perverted pleasure in projecting the beetle browed Neanderthals as being oafish and dim witted, and go on to propose that the modern humans survived because of their superior mental prowess. However, recent research suggests that the Neanderthals had a brain size that rivaled modern humans, and were physically fitter too. Neanderthals are believed to have been present in Europe and in a large part of Eurasia while all of the Homo sapiens are believed to have evolved from ancestors that came mainly out of Central Africa. One does feel like saying Hail Hitler to all the racists, Ku Klux Klan members, and the assorted White supremacists at that. If populations of both these races were not very sizeable, as is a reason to believe, it leads one to the belief that it could not have been a struggle for resources or land that would have lead to a clash between them
Another theory contends that the Neanderthals were the victims of a rapid change in their environs. It is hypothesized that Europe was suddenly overrun with several volcanic eruptions and perhaps the earth also went through a gelid period and both these reasons combined with other reasons to cause the obliteration of the Neanderthals. The theory contends that the erstwhile denizens were caught off guard and that even though they were quite accustomed to the extremely cold environs of the continent at that time, the magnitude and the sheer scale of the metamorphosis was too extreme to handle. Neanderthals were also let down by their societal makeup. All members of the society were involved in hunting big and mid sized game, and that activity resulted in a lot of falls and breaks. As there was no division of labor that could have resulted in women and children trapping small game and otherwise be engaged in innocuous pursuits, there was no insulation for their children or for the procreators of the race and that in itself played a preeminent part in the untimely demise of the race. There is always a serpent in paradise and even this explanation has unsurprisingly found its fair share of detractors. The naysayer tribe points to the fact that there is no credible evidence that there was a spurt in volcanic activity concomitantly in the region that the Neanderthals were supposed to have originated from and mostly lived and hunted in.