Below is an excerpt from a Humanities passage discussing the history of cartography:
While it is tempting to view the elaborate sea monsters and mythological beasts adorning early modern maps as mere whimsical decoration or a naive surrender to superstition, these illustrations served a more rigorous cognitive function. In cartography’s transitional era, blank spaces on a map were not merely neutral voids; they represented existential anxiety and destabilized the authority of the mapmaker. By populating these terrae incognitae with standardized chimeras, cartographers did not simply fill space; they categorized the boundaries of human knowledge. The monsters were visual placeholders for specific categories of environmental hazards—such as unpredictable currents, shoals, or magnetic anomalies—translated into a symbolic language familiar to contemporary mariners. Thus, what modern eyes dismiss as flights of fancy was, in fact, an early, structured attempt to systematize the unknown, establishing a taxonomy of expectation that transformed terrifying uncertainty into readable, navigationally useful signs.
Which of the following statements best summarizes the main idea of this paragraph (lines 28–46)?
- AThe transition of cartography from an art form based on folklore to a precise science was driven by advancements in empirical navigation.
- BEarly modern cartographers decorated empty spaces primarily as whimsical, artistic embellishments to appeal to contemporary aesthetic tastes.
- The illustrations of beasts functioned as a systematic, symbolic method to classify hazards and define the limits of geographical knowledge.Answer
- DMapmakers used sea monsters to provide mariners with the precise locations of physical hazards like magnetic anomalies and shallow reef systems.