阅读理解。 To take the apple as a forbidden

题目：

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