Question

Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England. Pig farmers keep their flitches of bacon back in storage until they can get a better price for them later in the winter. Such tactics are made even more profitable by the unhappy fact that harvests can fail, causing local—and sometimes national—food shortages. Large towns are less vulnerable, being part of an international market that sees preserved foods traded long-distance; but much of the countryside is dependent on fresh food. After a poor harvest, prices for all commodities—not just grain—rise dramatically and the poor are unable to make ends meet. Which detail from the excerpt best supports the inference that food was more consistently available in larger towns? Pig farmers keep their flitches of bacon back in storage until they can get a better price for them later in the winter. Such tactics are made even more profitable by the unhappy fact that harvests can fail, causing local—and sometimes national—food shortages. Large towns are less vulnerable, being part of an international market that sees preserved foods traded long-distance; but much of the countryside is dependent on fresh food. After a poor harvest, prices for all commodities—not just grain—rise dramatically and the poor are unable to make ends meet.

Answer 1

Large towns are less vulnerable, being part of an international market that sees preserved foods traded long-distance; but much of the countryside is dependent on fresh food.

Step-by-step explanation:

Answer 2

The detail from the excerpt that best supports the claim that food was more consistently available in larger towns is that large towns are less vulnerable, being part of an international market that sees preserved foods traded long-distance; but much of the countryside is dependent on fresh food because, as seen, bigger towns had the advantage over the countryside of making trades with other global markets that bring into these towns conserved food, which at the same time impaired food trades with rural towns as an aftereffect since they were dependant of rather fresh food.