The origin of the place name “Mendocino,” which today belongs to a cou

The origin of the place name “Mendocino,” which today belongs to a county and a city in northern California, is rather murky. We can find a geographic feature named “Cape Mendocino” as early as 1587 on the maps of Ortelius. After his return from an expedition in 1602, Father Antonio de la Ascensión wrote, “There may be some curious person who may wish to know why this cape or point of land came to be named ‘Mendocino.” The reason is that when Don Antonio de Mendoza was viceroy of New Spain in 1542, he sent two ships to the Philippines. When they returned, the first land they saw was this Cape Mendocino, to which they gave the name in honor and remembrance of the viceroy.”

This story endured and was repeated in a somewhat garbled fashion more than two centuries later by Duflot de Mofras. While no substantive evidence for the story has ever been found, this account has also never been conclusively disproved. Since the name apparently does not appear on maps until 1587, it is possible (and more plausible) that the cape was named for Lorenzo Suárez de Mendoza, viceroy of New Spain from 1580 to 1583. If one of the two viceroys was thus honored, the place name was created by the relatively rare method of using the adjective form of the personal name, a derivation comparable to that of Smithsonian or Wagnerian. In Argentina, a Mendocino is a person from the city of Mendoza. It is also not impossible that some European cartographer arbitrarily placed the name on the map. “Mendocino” is the oldest name of a cape that has survived the various phases of real and imaginary California geography, with the same spelling and in the same general location.

(1) The passage implies that

(A) Don Antonio de Mendoza and Lorenzo Suárez de Mendoza were both born in Argentina.
(B) Like “Mendocino,” “Smithsonian” and “Wagnerian” are also place names.
(C) In the sixteenth century, place names were always created by returning explorers who wanted to honor their leaders.
(D) Father Antonio de la Ascensión was the first to write an account of how Cape Mendocino got its name
(E) It was less likely in the sixteenth century that a place would be named after a ruler several decades in the past instead of a ruler from the more immediate past.



(2) Which of the following is most likely to come next were the passage to continue?

(A) Duflot de Mofras was a nineteenth-century French diplomat and explorer who spent four years exploring the western coast of North America.
(B) The study of place names is called toponymy, a word derived from the Greek for “place” and “name.”
(C) However, the name was not definitively identified with a cape at latitude 40° 27’ north until Malaspina placed it on his map in 1791.
(D) Simply selecting a name at random to apply to a certain geographic feature was a common practice among European cartographers during the sixteenth century.
(E) Today, the city and county of Mendocino are popular tourist destinations, known for their dramatic sea views and idiosyncratic local culture.



(3) Which of the following best describes the function of the second paragraph?

(A) It provides evidence that demonstrates that an explanation given in the first paragraph may not be the only possible explanation.
(B) It shows how the premises given in the first paragraph lead to a conclusion.
(C) It brings together historical data that suggest a single answer to a question posed in the first paragraph
(D) It debunks the myth established in the first paragraph, replacing it with an accurate representation.
(E) It repeats different versions of the same story told in the first paragraph.



(4) According to the passage, the word “Mendocino”

(A) may have been invented by Ortelius in 1587
(B) came about as a result of a misunderstanding on the part of Duflot de Mofras
(C) was first heard by European explorers in the Philippines
(D) has a grammatical relationship to the names of two viceroys
(E) was first used by cartographers in 1542