Passage II SOCIAL SCIENCE:This passage is from the article "Mad About Shells' by Richard Connitt. Anthropologists have identified beads made from ago as among the earliest known evidence of modern shells in North Afric and Israel at least 100,000 years human culture. 5 Since then various societies have used shells not just as ornaments, but also as blades and scrapers, oil lamps, currency, cooking utensils boat bailers, musical instruments and buttons, among other things. Marine 10 painstakingly collected one drop at a time, that became snails were the source of the precious porple the symbolic color of royalty.Shells may also have served as models for the volute on the capital of the column in classical Greece and for Leonardo da Vinci's design for a spiral starcase in a French chateau. 15 In fact, shells inspired an entire French art movement: Rococo, a word blending the French rocaille, referring to the practice of covering walls with shells and roc ks. and the Italian barocco, or Baroque. Its architects and 20 motifs designers favored shell-like curves and other intricate The craving for shells was even powerful enough to change the fate of a continent; at the start of the 19th century, when rival French and British expeditions set out for the unknown coasts of Australia, the British 25 moved faster. The French were delayed, one of those on board complained, because their captain was more eager "to discover a new mollusk than a new landmass." And when the two expeditions met up in 1802 at what is now Encounter Bay on the south coast of Australia, a 30 French officer complained to the British captain that if we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies __ you would not have discovered the south coast before us "The French went home with their specimens, while the British quickly moved to 35 expand their colony on the island continent. The madness for shells that took hold of European collectors from the 17th century onward was largely a byproduct of colonial trade and exploration. Along with spices and other merchandise, ships of the Dutch East 40 India Company brought back specta ularly beautiful shells from what is now Indonesia,and they became royal. "Conchylomania," from the Latin concha, for prized items in the private museums of the rich and cockle or mussel, soon rivaled the Dutch madness for 45 collecting tulip bulbs.and often afficied the same people. One Amsterdam collector who died in 1644, had enough tulips to fill a 38-page inventory, according to Tulipmania, a recent history by Anne Goldgar. But he also had 2,389 shells and considered them so pre- 50 cious that, a few days before his death, he had them put away in a chest with three separate locks. The three executors of his estate each got a single key, so they could show the collection to potential buyers only when all three of them were present. Dutch writer Roemer 55 Visscher mocked both tulip maniacs and "shell- www.actexam.net lunatics." Shells on the beach that used to be playthings for children now had the price of jewels, he bizarre what a madman spends his money on." he was right: at one 18th-ceatury auction in (0) Amsterdam, some shells sold for more than paintings by Jan Steen and Frans Hals.and only slightly less than Vermeer's now-priceless Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. The collection also included a Conus gloria maris shell, for which the owner had paid about three 65 times what his estate was getting for the Vermeer From a financial perspective, valuing shells over . valuing t purchases ever. There are only 30-some known Vermeer paintings on earth. But the scarcity that could make a shell seem 70 so precious was almost always illusory. For instance, C. gloriamaris, a four-inch-long cone covered in cate fretwork of gold and black lines, was for centuries among the most coveted species in the world, known from only a few dozen specimens. One shell-trade story 78 held that a wealthy collector who already owned a spec imanaged to buy another at auction and, in the interest of scarcity, promptly crushed it underfoot. To maintain prices, collectors also spread the rumor that an earthquake had destroyed the species' habitat io the so Philippines and rendered it extinct.Then in 1970, divers discovered the mother lode in the Pacific, north of Guadalcanal Island, and the value of C storiamaris plummeted. Today you can buy one for roughly the price of dinner for Two at a nice restaurant. And paint as ings by Vermeer? The last time one came on the market, in 2004, it went for 30 million. (And it was a minor and slightly questionable one at that.) From the article "Mad About Shells' by Richard Connift (02000 by Smithsonian Institution). Used with pormission. 11. The main purpose of the passage is to: A.consider the attachments people have had to shells. from ancient times to the height of shell collecting and beyond B.show how shells have proven to be a less stable investment than Dutch paintings. C.document the various influences that shells and shell collecting have had on international trade. describe how the Dutch people acquired an interest in shell collecting from French and British shell collectors. 12. The language used to describe the shell collectors in the fourth paragraph (lines 36-58) most nearly charac- terizes them as: F. irrational. G. fearless. H. positive. J. unreliable.