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  3. The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic turbulence but also of impressive social cohesion

The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic turbulence but also of impressive social cohesion

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问题     The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic turbulence but also of impressive social cohesion. Marriage rates were high. Community groups connected people across class. In the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at 40 percent and rising.
    As early as the 1970s, three large theories had emerged to explain the weakening of the social fabric. Liberals assembled around an economically determinist theory. The loss of good working-class jobs undermined communities and led to the social deterioration. Libertarians assembled around a government-centric theory. Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying. Neo-conservatives had a more culturally deterministic theory. They argued that the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms led to social disruption.
    Over the past 25 years, though, a new body of research has emerged. This research tends to support a few common themes. First, no matter how social disorganization got started, once it starts, it takes on a momentum of its own. People who grow up in disrupted communities are more likely to lead disrupted lives as adults, magnifying disorder from one generation to the next. Second, it’s not true that people in disorganized neighborhoods have bad values. Their goals are not different from everybody else’s. It’s that they lack the social capital to enact those values. Third, while individuals are to be held responsible for their behavior, social context is more powerful than we thought. If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too. The recent research details how disruption breeds disruption.
    Over the past two weeks, Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart has restarted the social disruption debate. But, judging by ihe firestorm, you would have no idea that the sociological and psychological research of the past 25 years even existed. Murray neglects this research in his book. Meanwhile, his left-wing critics in the blogosphere have reverted to crude 1970s economic determinism; It’s all the fault of lost jobs. This economic determinism would be bad enough if it was just making public debate dumber. But the amputation of sociologic, psychological and cognitive considerations makes good policy impossible.
    The American social fabric is now so exhausted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them. It’s not enough just to have economic growth policies. The country also needs to rebuild orderly communities. This requires bourgeois paternalism: Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so. Social repair requires sociological thinking. The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975.
The research over the past 25 years tends to justify the saying that______.
选项 A、nature is more important than nurture
B、one takes on the attributes of one’s associates
C、habit shapes character; character decides destiny
D、a community is like a ships everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm
答案B
解析 根据题干关键词定位到第三段。近25年来的研究强调了社会环境(communities／neighborhoods／social context)对人的行为的影响；研究认为，在混乱的社区中长大的人成年后更有可能过着混乱的生活；如果我们在三分之一的人辍学的社区中长大，我们自己可能会更糟糕。只有[B]选项表现了环境的影响，为正确项。
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