Passage 3
Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following passage:
Coffee is a powerful drink. On a personal level, it helps keep us awake and active. (80) On a much general level, it has helped shape our history and continues to shape our culture.
Coffee plants grow wild in parts of Africa and were probably used by travelling tribes ( 部落) for thousands of years , but it wasn't until the 1400s that people figured out they could roast its seeds.
"Then it really took off,"said historian Mark Pendergrast-author of Uncommon Grounds: the History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. By the 1500s, the drink had spread to coffeehouses across the Arab world Within another 150 years，it took Europe by storm."It actually had a major impact on the rise of business, " Pendergrast says. Coffeehouses became a spot not just to enjoy a cup but to exchange ideas.
The insurance industry was founded hundreds of years ago in one of London's 2,000 coffeehouses. Literature, newspapers and even the works of great composers like Bach and Beethoven were also inspired in coffeehouses.
It is often said that after the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists (殖民者 attacked British tea ships and threw large boxes of tea into the harbor, Americans everywhere switched over to drinking coffee."There's a lot of truth to the story, I found," Pendergrast says. He mentions a letter John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, in which the Founding Father declares his love of tea but says he will have to learn to accept coffee instead, because drinking tea had become unpatriotic (不爱国的)。
For all the upsides coffee has brought the modem world, it also brought its fair share of downsides, too. Europeans carried coffee with them as they colonized various parts of the world, and this frequently meant they made people into slaves in order to grow it.
