单选题
Most students are usually introduced to the study of history by way of a fat textbook and be-come quickly immersed in a vast sea of names, dates, events, and statistics. The students" skills are then tested by examinations that require them to show how much of the data they remember. From this experience a number of conclusions seem obvious: the study of history is the study of "facts" about the past; the more "facts" you know, the better you are as a student of history. But in this way students may become confused upon discovering that historians often disagree sharply. They discover that historians dealing with the same event may come to quite different conclusions about it.
Obviously, there is no easy solution to this problem. Historians disagree because each histo-rian views the past from a particular perspective. Once students grasp this, they have taken the first step toward being able to evaluate the work of various historians. But before they can take this first step, students must consider a problem they have more or less taken for granted. They must ask themselves what history really is.
The word history has several meanings. In its broadest sense, it denotes the whole of the hu-man past. More restricted is the notion that history is the recorded past, that is, that part of hu-man life which has left some sort of record such as folk tales, artifacts, or written documents. Fi-nally, history may be defined as that which historians write about the past.
单选题
What is the meaning of the word "fat" in Line 1?