Horticultural societies are best described as which?

• A. They are gardeners
• B. They rely on irrigation
• C. They rely on large-scale industrial agriculture
• D. They practice nomadic pastoralism

Answer: (A)

Horticultural societies are defined by cultivating crops in small garden plots using human labor and simple tools, often with shifting cultivation and rainfall-fed farming. This makes them essentially gardeners—tarming and tending crops in gardens rather than running large, irrigation-based or machine-driven farming. They’re not built on large-scale industrial agriculture or heavy irrigation, and they’re not centered on herding animals, which is what nomadic pastoralism describes. So tending gardens best captures the core activity of horticultural groups.