121. Read the following passage, then answer the question below.

The name 'Silk Road' suggests a single highway along which caravans carried silk from China to Rome. The reality was more complicated. The term itself was coined only in 1877, by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen. The routes formed a shifting network of tracks across Central Asia, and few merchants traveled their whole length. Goods typically changed hands many times, passing through the markets of oases such as Samarkand, so that a bolt of silk might have been bought and sold a dozen times before reaching its final buyer.

Nor was silk the most important commodity. Horses, spices, glass, and metals traveled along the same routes, but more consequential were ideas and techniques. Buddhism spread from India into China along the routes in the first centuries of the Common Era, and the craft of papermaking moved westward, reaching the Islamic world by the eighth century. Historians believe that the plague of the fourteenth century also followed these paths.

Some historians now caution against exaggeration in the other direction. They argue that long-distance trade was small in volume compared with local exchange, since most people along the routes lived by farming and herding and rarely saw foreign goods. The importance of the roads, they say, lay less in the quantity of goods than in the contacts they made possible. Because merchants from different cultures had to trust one another across languages, they developed shared practices such as contracts, credit arrangements, and interpreters. These habits outlasted any particular empire. In this view, the Silk Road is better understood as a long conversation among peoples than as a trade artery, a perspective that has made the study of the region as much about religion, language, and technology as about commerce.

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