题目内容：

    In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near the village of Istabl Antar uncovered a mass tomb. The bodies weren’t human. They were feline—ancient cats that had been mummified and buried in holes in astonishing numbers. “Not one or two here and there”, reported English Illustrated Magazine, “but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer of them, a layer thicker than most coal joints, ten to twenty cats deep.” Some of the linen-wrapped cats still looked presentable, and a few even had golden faces. Village children peddled the best ones to tourists for change; the rest were sold as fertilizer (肥料). One ship transported about 180,000, weighing some 38, 000 pounds, to Liverpool to be spread on the fields of England.

Those were the days of generously funded (资助的) explorations—that dragged through acres of desert in their quest for royal tombs, and for splendid gold and painted masks to decorate the museums of Europe and America. The many thousands of mummified animals that turned up at religious sites throughout Egypt were just things to be cleared away to get treasure. Few people studied them, and their importance was generally unrecognized.

In the century since then, archaeology (考古学) has become less of a treasure hunt and more of a science. Archaeologists now realize that much of their sites’ wealth lies in the majority of details about ordinary folks—what they did, what they thought, how they prayed. And animal mummies are a big part of that.

“They’re really displays of daily life,” says Egyptologist Salima Ikram. After looking beneath bandages with x-rays and cataloguing her findings, she created a gallery for the collection—a bridge between people today and those of long ago. “You look at these mummified animals, and suddenly you say, Oh, King So-and-So had a pet. I have a pet. And instead of being at a distance of 5,000-plus years, the ancient Egyptians become clearer and closer to us.”

1.The underlined word “peddled” in Paragraph 1 probably means        .

A.examined B.displayed

C.replaced D.shared

2.What is Paragraph 2 mainly about?

A.Treasure hunting explorations. B.Egyptian Royal tombs in desert.

C.Mummified animals in museums. D.Big archaeological discoveries.

3.From the last paragraph, we can learn that Salima Ikram        .

A.wishes to keep the continuity of pets over history

B.wants to identify the King’s personal belongings and classify them

C.believes that studying the remains can help modern society relate to the past

D.doubts if current society will understand the significance of Egyptian remains

4.The passage probably encourages the readers to        .

A.make full use of the remains the ancestors left behind

B.become more sensitive to the ancient lifestyle of the ancestors

C.pay more attention to the historical and cultural value of ancient remains

D.understand there are more the historical remains waiting for explorations