PASSAGE 3

　　The Native Americans of northern California were highly skilled at basketry, using the reeds,grasses, barks, and roots they found around them to fashion articles of all sorts and sizes — notonly trays, containers, and cooking pots, but hats, boats, fish traps, baby carriers, and ceremonialobjects.

　　Of all these experts, none excelled the Pomo — a group who lived on or near the coast duringthe 1800's, and whose descendants continue to live in parts of the same region to this day. Theymade baskets three feet in diameter and others no bigger than a thimble. The Pomo people weremasters of decoration. Some of their baskets were completely covered with shell pendants;others with feathers that made the baskets' surfaces as soft as the breasts of birds. Moreover, thePomo people made use of more weaving techniques than did their neighbors. Most groups madeall their basketwork by twining — the twisting of a flexible horizontal material, called a weft,around stiffer vertical strands of material, the warp. Others depended primarily on coiling — aprocess in which a continuous coil of stiff material is held in the desired shape with tightwrapping of flexible strands. Only the Pomo people used both processes with equal ease andfrequency. In addition, they made use of four distinct variations on the basic twining process,often employing more than one of them in a single article.

　　Although a wide variety of materials was available, the Pomo people used only a few. Thewarp was always made of willow, and the most commonly used weft was sedge root, a woodyfiber that could easily be separated into strands no thicker than a thread. For color, the Pomopeople used the bark of redbud for their twined work and dyed bullrush root for black in coiledwork. Though other materials were sometimes used, these four were the staples in their finestbasketry.

　　If the basketry materials used by the Pomo people were limited, the designs were amazinglyvaried. Every Pomo basketmaker knew how to produce from fifteen to twenty distinct patternsthat could be combined in a number of different ways.

　　1. What best distinguished Pomo baskets

　　from baskets of other groups?

　　(A) The range of sizes, shapes, and designs

　　(B) The unusual geometric

　　(C) The absence of decoration

　　(D) The rare materials used

　　2. The word fashion in line 2 is closest in meaning to

　　(A) maintain

　　(B) organize

　　(C) trade

　　(D) create

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