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IT Placement Practice Test 1

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Question : 2
Total: 40
The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question. In the distant past, large, safe and prosperous societies were not a Western peculiarity. We can see this just by looking at a map. From the mid-1st millennium B.C. onwards, a band of rather similar empires grew up across the Old World from the Mediterranean to China. All were large, peaceful, stable and prosperous. Across the oceans, smaller but still formidable states also ruled parts of Central America and the Andes. At their height, the greatest of these empires the Roman in the West, the Han in what we now call China, and the Mauryan in modern India and Pakistan each covered about 1.5 - 2 million square miles, governed thirty to sixty million people, and beat (most of) its swords into ploughshares. In each empire, rates of violent death declined sharply, and people put their ploughshares to good use, prospering in a golden age of relative peace and plenty. On the whole, we know less about the Han and Mauryan Empires than about Rome, and less still about states in the New World. In the Americas, the shortage of evidence is so acute that specialists cannot even agree on the region where powerfulstates first appeared. Some archaeologists see the Olmec culture in what is now Mexico (ca. 1200 B.C.) and Chavín de Huantar in what is now Peru (ca. 1000 B.C.) as the pioneers. Mainstream opinion, however, holds that it was only a thousand years later, in the age of the Moche culture in Peru and the city-states of Monte Albán and Teotihuacán in Mexico, that America's first functioning governments put in an appearance, imposing their will over thousands of square miles and with populations probably running up into a few million. They built great monuments, oversaw elaborate trade networks, and presided over rising standards of living, but remained preliterate. That is bad news for historians. Even when archaeology reaches the highest standards possible, there are limits to what it can tell us. Perhaps the human sacrifices excavated at Teotihuacán show that this was a more violent society than the Old World's ancient empires, but since Romans did flock to watch gladiators hack each other to pieces (plenty of their dismembered bodies have been dug up), perhaps not. The sixty bodies found buried in a royal tomb of the Andean kingdom of Wari around A.D. 800 long after Old World empires had given up such practices might also point to higher levels of violence in the New World than in the Old, but when we get right down to it, the evidence is just not good enough for systematic comparisons. What we really need is a historian from these New World states who would tell us what was going on. Yet the fact that we do not have one, and almost certainly never will, is revealing in itself. There seems to be a general rule that the stronger a powerful society becomes, the more evidence it leaves for historians and archaeologists, because great governments need to build a lot of things and write down even more. The absence of writing probably means that New World societies were not governing at the kind of level that made writing indispensable which probably also means that they never got anywhere close to the Romans.
What does the phrase 'beat swords into ploughshares' mean in the context of this passage?
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