Archeological excavation of Market Street Chinatown, a nineteenth-century Chinese American community in San Jose,
California, provided the ﬁrst evidence that Asian food products were imported to the United States in the 1800s: bones from
a freshwater ﬁsh species native to Southeast Asia. Jinshanzhuang—Hong Kong–based import/export ﬁrms—likely
coordinated the ﬁsh’s transport from Chinese-operated ﬁsheries in Vietnam and Malaysia to North American markets. This
route reveals the (often overlooked) multinational dimensions of the trade networks linking Chinese diaspora communities.
It explains why efforts to determine the country of origin of the items mentioned in the previous sentence remain
inconclusive.
It provides information that helps support a claim about a discovery’s signiﬁcance that is presented in the following
sentence.
It traces the steps that were taken to locate and recover the objects that are described in the previous sentence.
It outlines a hypothesis that additional evidence discussed in the following sentence casts some doubt on.
Choice B is the best answer. The underlined sentence provides information about import/export ﬁrms, showing how Chinese
communities across the world were connected by trade routes.
Choice A is incorrect. The underlined sentence never suggests that the countries of origin of the ﬁsh are in question—in fact,
it tells us exactly where they came from. Choice C is incorrect. The passage never describes the steps taken to discover the
ﬁsh bones described in the previous sentence. Choice D is incorrect. The underlined sentence doesn’t outline a hypothesis
but instead provides evidence. And the following sentence agrees with the underlined sentence, so we could eliminate this
choice just for saying that the following sentence "casts some doubt on" the underlined one—partly wrong is all wrong.