To take the apple as a forbidden fruit is the most unlikely story the Christians (基督教徒) ever cooked up. For them, the forbidden fruit from Eden is evil. So when Colu 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. 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 man 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 of 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 named 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.
小题1:The tomato was shut out of the door of early Europeans mainly because _______.
A．it made Christians evil
B．it was the apple of Eden
C．it came from a forbidden land
D．it was religiously unacceptable小题2:What can we infer from 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.小题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.小题4:What is the main purpose of the passage?
A．To challenge people's fixed concept 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 introduce the establishment of the first tomato-canning factory.
