阅读理解。
To take the apple as a forbidden fruit is the most unlikely strory the Christians (基督教徒) have ever
cooked up. For them, the forbidden fruit from Eden is evil (邪恶的). So when Columbus brought the
tomato back from South America, a land mistakenly considered to be Eden, everyone jumped to the
obvious conclusion.Wrongly taken as the apple of Eden, the tomato was shut out of the door of
Europeans.
What made it particularly terrifying was its similarity to the mandrake, a plant that was thought to have
come from Hell (地狱).What earned the plant its awful reputation was its roots which looked like a
dried-up human body occupied by evil spirits. Though the tomato and the mandrake were quite different
except that both had bright red or yellow fruit, the general population considered them one and the same,
too terrible to touch.
Cautious Europeans long ignored the tomato, and until the early 1700s most of the Western people
continued to drag their feet. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well-known plant expert wrote that the most
interesting part of an afternoon tea at her father's house had been the "introduction this wonderful new
fruit--or is it a vegetable?" As late as the twentieth century some writers still classed tomatoes with
mandrakes as an "evil fruit".
But in the end tomatoes carried the day. The hero of the tomato was an American namd Robert
Johnson, and when he was publicly going to eat the tomato in 1820,people journeyed for hundreds of
miles to watch him drop dead." What are you afraid of?" he shouted. "I'll show you fools these things are
good to eat!" Then he bit into the tomato. Some people fainted. But he survived and, according to a local
story, set up a tomato-canning factory.
1. The tomato was shut out of the door of early Europeans mainly because ______.
A. it made Christive evil
B. it was the apple of Eden
C. it came from a forbidden land
D. it was religiously unacceptable
2. What can we infer the underlined part in Paragraph 3 ?
A. The process of ignoring the tomato slowed down
B. There was little progress in the study of the tomato
C. The tomato was still refused in most western countries
D. Most western people continued to get rid of the tomato
3. What is the main reason for Robert Johnson to eat the tomato Publicly ?
A. To make himself a hero
B. To remove people's fear of the tomato
C. To speed up the popularity of the tomato
D. To persuade people to buy products from his factory
4. What is the main purpose of the passage ?
A. To challenge people's fixed concepts of the tomato
B. To give an explanation to people's dislike of the tomato
C. To present the change of people's attitudes to the tomato
D. To show the process of freeing the tomato from religious influence
